The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Allotment refers to a US federal policy passed in 1887 under the Dawes Act that authorized the subdivision of tribal lands into plots belonging to individual tribe members, usually male heads of households. This policy was intended to undermine the communal nature of Indigenous landholding traditions and facilitate the dispossession of Native homelands. Blackhawk views allotment as part of a deluge of assimilationist ideology at the turn of the 20th century that contributed to cultural erasure and deprivation of resources for Native Americans on a massive scale.

In Nahuatl (Aztec) society, altepetls were highly localized polities based on ethnicity. Sometimes referred to as “city-states,” hundreds of altepetls comprised the Aztec Empire, all with their own cultures and political motivations. Blackhawk emphasizes distinctions between these local political units to illustrate that the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica, and indeed Indigenous people everywhere, are not monolithic. When Spanish colonists arrived in Nahuatl territory, they encountered a complex landscape of ethnic groups and leaders. European relations varied vastly between altepetls depending on their preexisting politics.

Assimilation (short for cultural assimilation) is the process by which minority groups conform to the practices and ideals of dominant cultures. Within the context of Rediscovery, assimilation specifically refers to a set of policies by the US federal government that aimed to erase Indigenous cultures across the country.