INDIGENOUS CONTINENT

A vigorous, provocative study of Native American history by one of its most accomplished practitioners.

Finnish historian Hämäläinen, professor of American history at Oxford, is a noted student of Native American systems of governance and commerce. In this follow-up to Lakota America, the author focuses on the long war between Indigenous peoples and alliances with the European colonial powers. “By 1776,” he writes, “various European colonial powers together claimed nearly all of the continent for themselves, but Indigenous peoples and powers controlled it.” That changed following the Revolutionary War, when Americans began to spill over the Appalachians, spreading the American empire at the expense of empires maintained by such various peoples as the Comanche, Lakota, and Shoshone. Hämäläinen uses the idea of Indigenous empires advisedly. With solid archaeological support, he ventures that the great Ancestral Puebloan stone building called Pueblo Bonito could very well have been built by slave labor, while at Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, the “commercial hinterland extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf coast and the Appalachians,” constituting a vast, complex trade network. Against railroads and repeating rifles, such empires tumbled; against miscomprehension and assumption, peace was out of the question from the very beginning. The table was barely cleared at the first Thanksgiving when the newly arrived Puritans “thought that the sachem”—the hereditary leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy—“could be reduced to a subject of the king of England.” It didn’t help that these Native empires were often pitted against each other until reservations and small corners of the continent were all that was left—those and the Canadian subarctic, which long after “endured as an Indigenous world.” Even then, however, “it was not an Indigenous paradise; the contest for furs, guns, and merchandise fueled chronic animosities, collisions, and open wars.” Throughout, the author resurrects important yet often obscured history, creating a masterful narrative that demands close consideration.

An essential work of Indigenous studies that calls for rethinking North American history generally.