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 expelled, traveling their own “trail of tears.”
I am a lifelong fan of Cleveland baseball. However, from the first time I saw the demeaning image of Chief Wahoo outside the old Municipal Stadium, I sensed something wasn’t right. I approved the name changed to the Guardians, so appropriate to the carved figures (“the Guardians”) on the Bob Hope Bridge approaching Progressive Field from the west. And I live in a city named after the “discoverer” of America, a city that removed a statue of him in recent years from in front of City Hall. October 12 is now Indigenous Peoples Day in our city.
L. Daniel Hawk descends from a German family that settled in the northwest Ohio town of Tiffin. An Old Testament professor at Ashland Seminary, he also has studied Ohio’s treatment of Indigenous people. Likewise, he explores the conquest narratives in Joshua and their use to support American settler narratives. He brings all this together in a rich exploration designed not to blame or shame but to encourage us to question those narratives. He writes particularly for those of us who, like him are descendants of White settlers.
Each chapter of the book begins with a vignette from Ohio history, a number which I’ve mentioned. He begins with a statue of the Indian Maid overlooking his home of Tiffin. He considers the settler narratives that justified dispelling the Seneca peoples. In succeeding chapters, he explores the use of the doctrine of discovery along with the creation mandate to seize land and efforts to extort, exterminate, expel, and erase indigenous peoples.
Then he explores five “tropes” used to construct native peoples, four of which are under the fifth, the Vanishing American. All of these help explain by White settlers are the rightful possessors of the land. The other tropes are the Ignoble Savage and the Noble Savage, and the Indigenous helper (e.g. Pocahontas) and the White Savage.
When Hawk turns to Joshua, he does not find many direct references to Joshua’s conquest in early colonial writing. However, he does find parallels in the theological justifications of violence, displacement and seizure of the land. He also notes the parallels of Indigenous helpers, Rahab in Joshua and Pocahontas and Sacagawea in the American context.
The concluding chapter offers hope and help for those deconstructing the American settler colonialist narrative. It can be hard and there may be pushback, as he notes our city experienced in removing the Columbus statue. Our state has doubled down against teaching students, even in college, “divisive” concepts. Sadly, they miss the truth that it is only by interrogating our narratives that we can begin to explore healing pathways. He concludes with one such example, in which his denomination restored a Wyandotte mission and burial ground to the living descendents of the Wyandotte nation, now living in Oklahoma, marked by exchanges of gifts and shared celebration. Instead of division, there was a new friendship.
What makes this such a compelling study is that Hawk models what he invites the reader to consider. He interrogates his own situation, his own history, working from there to set it in a larger national context. Rather than write a piece on national policy, he exemplifies the thoughtful and hard work Christian individuals and congregations might engage to undo the myths of national origin and destiny, including Christian overlays, by which our forebears perpetrated grave wrongs. Then, he points to ways we can pursue making things right in our sphere, as we connect with Indigenous peoples. Rather than suppress history or cause division, he points to awareness that can heal.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.