Ned Blackhawk is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak tribe of the Western Shoshone and an historian currently on the faculty of Yale University. He has made significant contributions to the field of history with his award-winning research and publications.

In 2007, Ned received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for his first major book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empire in the Early American West (2006), which also garnered the Robert M. Utley Prize in the same year. His work has been recognized for its profound impact on the understanding of Native American history.

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association honored his book, Violence over the Land, with the Book of the Decade Award, acknowledging it as "one of the ten most influential books in Native American and Indigenous Studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century."