Undoing Manifest Destiny
Undoing Manifest Destiny, L. Daniel Hawk. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514008645) 2026.
Summary: Through vignettes from Ohio history, questions narratives used to justify injustices against Native peoples.
“I live on the ancestral Lands of the Miami and Hopewell peoples. This Land was ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.” This is the land acknowledgement I’ve appended for some years to my email signature. In this treaty the Indigenous peoples of Ohio ceded roughly three fourths of what is now Ohio to the United States, retaining the land of the northwest quadrant for their own use. The treaty was never enforced and settlers encroached on this remaining land.
Like the author of this book, I’ve lived all my life in the state of Ohio. The name of the state and most of its rivers and many counties derive from indigenous names. My wife has a collection of arrowheads found in her backyard, not far from a tribal gathering area on the east side of Youngstown. We live a couple hours from the site of the massacre of Moravian Christian Native people at Gnadenhutten. In the quadrant reserved for Indigenous peoples, particularly the Wyandottes, they were eventually expell...