American · b. 1970
Ned Blackhawk is an American historian of Native America. He is a citizen of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada. He is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches Native American and Indigenous history. His first book, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006), traced how Native nations and colonial powers shaped the Great Basin and the wider West. It won several awards. He later co-edited The Essential Franz Boas and wrote The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History (2023), which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has served on the editorial boards of major historical journals and as president of the American Studies Association's Native scholarship community. His work argues that Native peoples were central to the formation of the United States, and it has influenced how historians and general readers approach early American, Western and Indigenous history.