Historians like to categorize time and space; they create historical “periods” (the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, etc.) and locate them in specific times and geographical places. Then, as the decades fly by, scholars begin to challenge these locations and time periods and broaden or problematize them. The Reconstruction period, like many periods in American history, has long been cast as one with solely white and Black historical actors: African Americans win their freedom from white slave owners and then, after a glorious decade or so of achievement and possibility, they are betrayed by their white allies. Or so the story went.
But as historians began to question just what (and where) was being “reconstructed,” people of other races, particularly Native people, entered the historiography. Daniel Littlefield, M. Thomas Bailey, Celia Naylor, Elliott West, Richard White, myself, and others have written works that explicitly connect not just the time period but the stakes (Black freedom, western expansion, the selective broadening of citizenship) to western Indian nations and Native political actors.Footnote 1
Kevin Bruyneel points to another way we can redefine the era of Reconstruction—by interpreting it as a period in which tribal sovereignty was simultaneously undermined and upheld. Is this possible? He shows that it is when we look at the breadth of experiences of Native people across North America and consider how the foundations of legislation and treaties created during this time period can be (and are already being) used to reify tribal jurisdiction in our time.Footnote 2
I cannot sum up the relevance of our writing this roundtable in the summer of 2020 better than Kevin has, so I will simply end by saying that a Third Reconstruction that encapsulates Black and Native self-determination is possible and hopefully, by the time you read this, you have witnessed it.
