Description: "This book argues that the current understanding of North America's past was created as a tool of nationalism, and that it required the misappropriation of Indigenous histories. In the United States and Mexico, the Indigenous past was repurposed as American history while at the same time used to erase and denigrate Native peoples, a legacy that continues when we repeat these narratives"--
Review Quotes: Original, compelling, and deeply researched, Before American History documents the ideological assembly and historical use of Indigenous cultural archives in the service of North American settler nationalism. Part intellectual history, part deep-dive historiography, part comparative literary and material study, Christen Mucher's interdisciplinary approach offers a powerful new lens to understand the historical basis, present urgency, and future implications of demands for recognition of Native American cultural sovereignty. An outstanding contribution to the recent hemispheric and temporal turns in American studies and Americanist literary studies, to North American history, Native American and Indigenous studies, the history of ideas, and museum studies.--Robert Lawrence Gunn, University of Texas at El Paso, author of Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands