\n
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, <\/em>by Pekka H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen. Liveright. 576 pages.\u00a0$40.<\/p>\nIn the 1630s, the powerful Pequot Confederacy of southern New England found itself beset by enemies. English settlers had recently arrived and were joining with the Pequots\u2019 Indigenous rivals. Soon, tensions over the fur and wampum trade led to war. The fighting reached a climax when the British and their allies besieged a Pequot fort and set it aflame, hunting down those who fled. It was among the bloodiest massacres in North American history, one that experts have described as genocidal. At least three hundred Pequots, including noncombatants, died that day (credible estimates reach seven hundred). The few left alive\u2014the war and massacre had killed perhaps as many as two thirds of the Pequots\u2014were scattered, many sold into slavery. \u201cA nation had disappeared from the family of man,\u201d wrote the nineteenth-century historian George Bancroft.<\/p>\n
Yet the Pequots persisted and, eventually, rallied. Today, you can learn their story at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, a gleaming $225 million edifice\u2014roughly the same size as the Tate Modern in London\u2014that the Pequots built. It looks onto Foxwoods Resort Casino, which the Pequots also own. Foxwoods made the Pequots the richest tribe in the country for a time, and by 1998 many members were earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year from it. \u201cThey are rich and powerful,\u201d a lawyer for the Pequots explained; they \u201ccan do what they\u00a0like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Powerful Native Americans doing what they like isn\u2019t the standard story. Indians (the term is widely though decreasingly used by Native peoples) fill the pages of most American histories, but usually only in the early parts. By the twentieth century, they tend to shuffle off the stage, having lost their lands and lives. Indigenous peoples once lived here, now they don\u2019t\u2014so goes the myth of the \u201cvanishing\u00a0Indian.\u201d<\/p>\n
That myth always rang false, but never more than now. The federal government recognizes 574 tribal nations, and reservations collectively cover an area the size of Idaho. Since 1960, the population identifying as Native American has multiplied almost twentyfold from about half a million to ten million. It nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020 alone. The recent growth stems not from rising birth rates or life expectancies but from an increased desire among those with Native ancestry\u2014and sometimes without it\u2014to claim this identity. Although Native peoples still face the worst poverty rate in the country, energy sales and gaming have brought conspicuous prosperity to some. There is, the Ojibwe writer David Treuer has observed, \u201ca sense that we are surging.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Indigenous peoples have grown more numerous and visible, academics have attacked the \u201cvanishing Indian\u201d narrative. Since the Seventies, historians, including Native scholars, have shown much greater interest in seeing the past through Indigenous eyes. For some, this means exposing the violence of Native dispossession, showing that Native Americans didn\u2019t obligingly ride off into the sunset. But for other scholars, and especially recently, it means challenging the victim narrative and stressing Native\u00a0power.<\/p>\n
A central figure in this school is Pekka H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen, a Finn with a doctorate from the University of Helsinki. His first book, The Comanche Empire,<\/em> published in 2008, maintained that, rather than being subjugated themselves, Comanches built a violent empire, led by \u201cprotocapitalists,\u201d that subjugated Europeans on the mid-nineteenth-century southern plains. It was fresh, powerfully argued work\u2014\u201cone of the finest pieces of scholarship that I have read in years,\u201d wrote the reviewer for the leading journal in early American history\u2014and its many awards included the vaunted Bancroft Prize. It also secured H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen the Rhodes professorship in American history at Oxford University, making him arguably the highest-placed historian of Native\u00a0America.<\/p>\nH\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen\u2019s next book, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power<\/em> (2019), painted a similar portrait of the Lakotas. Now comes Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America,<\/em> his grand overview of Native history from the fifteenth century onward. It is a provocative book, taking H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen\u2019s previous arguments and raising their volume. Yes, Europeans established North American colonies, H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen writes, but their \u201coutlandish imperial claims\u201d were often mere cartographic fictions. Well into the nineteenth century, the continent remained \u201coverwhelmingly Indigenous.\u201d And it did so because Native peoples, rather than being docile innocents, were formidable fighters who for centuries held the world\u2019s most powerful empires at\u00a0bay.<\/p>\nIndigenous Continent<\/em> raises a pressing question: How best to tell the story of oppressed peoples? By chronicling the hardships they\u2019ve faced? Or by highlighting their triumphs over adversity?<\/p>\nIn writing African-American history, it was once common to foreground revolts, resistance, cultural achievements, and hard-won victories, as in Taylor Branch\u2019s prize-winning three-volume history of the civil-rights movement. Such themes still resonate, but the trend today is toward grim accounts of unyielding oppression. The New York Times<\/em>\u2019s 1619 Project described enduring continuities between the days of slavery and the present. Emancipation, in the eyes of the influential theorist Saidiya Hartman, wasn\u2019t \u201cliberation\u201d but merely a \u201ctransition\u201d from one type of subjugation to another. Hartman\u2019s former student Frank B. Wilderson III, a founder of the Afropessimism school of thought, puts it more starkly. \u201cBlackness cannot exist as other than Slaveness,\u201d he writes. Anti-black racism runs so deep, Wilderson insists, that to imagine black people free would be to imagine \u201cthe end of the\u00a0world.\u201d<\/p>\nYou can find similar outlooks on Native history. \u201cNorth America is a crime scene,\u201d argues Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples\u2019 History of the United States,<\/em> a popular recent overview. \u201cSomehow, even \u2018genocide\u2019 seems an inadequate description for what happened.\u201d Genocide is now a familiar charge in reference to Native Americans. Another is \u201csettler colonialism,\u201d an especially totalizing form of empire that seeks not to rule subjugated populations from afar but to \u201cpermanently and completely replace Natives with a settler population,\u201d as the Lakota scholar Nick Estes writes in Our History Is the <\/em>Future.<\/em> \u201cIndigenous elimination\u201d is \u201cthe <\/em>organizing principle\u201d of the United States, a country that, Estes maintains, possesses a \u201cdeath culture.\u201d<\/p>\nSuch bleak views are understandable, given all that Native peoples have endured. First came the European diseases, which started their work even before the colonizers\u2019 settlements took root. (When the Pilgrims met Squanto in 1621, his community had already been wiped out by diseases from European ships plying the North American coast.) Then came the killing\u2014centuries of it\u2014sometimes as war and sometimes as outright massacre. The United States government alone counted 1,642 military engagements against Indigenous adversaries. By the time those conflicts ended at the turn of the twentieth century, the Native population of what is now the contiguous United States had dropped from perhaps five million at European contact (estimates vary widely) to under two hundred and fifty thousand.<\/p>\n
Deny any of this and you\u2019re whitewashing. Yet focusing solely on death and despair might not be right, either. Accounts of the settler-colonial steamroller play into the colonizers\u2019 sense that conquest was inevitable, coming perilously close to replicating the vanishing Indian myth. And they leave little room for the richness of Native societies. \u201cI want\u2014I need\u2014to see Indian life as more than a legacy of loss and pain,\u201d Treuer writes. Indians can\u2019t just be \u201cghosts that haunt the American mind,\u201d defined by all that\u2019s been taken from\u00a0them.<\/p>\n
In recent histories, they\u2019re not. At a time when stories of stark oppression are on the rise, Native American history has largely gone the other direction. So while, in public, talk of genocide and settler colonialism is common, in history departments, the trend is toward exploring Indigenous autonomy and control. Some historians are wary of the widespread application of the \u201csettler colonialism\u201d concept, given how ineffective early European attempts to displace Native societies were. \u201cSettler colonialism may be at most a minor theme for continental North America\u201d until the middle of the nineteenth century, the historian Jeffrey Ostler\u00a0writes.<\/p>\n
H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen refers to settler colonialism only a handful of times in his three books. His abiding interest is instead in Europeans\u2019 inability to colonize North America. In his first two books, he explored notable peaks of Native power, as many recent histories do. But now, with Indigenous Continent,<\/em> he stitches them into a sustained counterpoint to the conquest narrative. Five hundred years of North American history appear in his telling not as the story of colonization, but of a fierce and unsettled continent, bristling with possibility.<\/p>\nNot all of the Americas held out against conquest. South of the Rio Grande, the Spanish encountered large Indigenous empires: the Maya, the Incas, and the Aztecs. These proved \u201cremarkably easy\u201d to vanquish, H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen writes. Native civilizations \u201cfell like dominoes\u201d because once Spanish conquistadors used their \u201ctechnological edge\u201d to subdue Indigenous rulers, those rulers\u2019 vast territories and extensive tributary networks fell in line. Hierarchical structures made the largest American empires easy\u00a0prey.<\/p>\n
But things were different farther north. In the land currently covered by the United States, colonizers encountered \u201cdangerously decentralized\u201d societies. The \u201cgenius of their political systems\u201d was that they didn\u2019t have hierarchies for Europeans to seize. \u201cToo many of the Native Americans were nomads and hard to pin down.\u201d Rather than winning a few battles or co-opting a few leaders, colonizers would have to take North America acre by\u00a0acre.<\/p>\n
It can seem, reading conventional histories, as if they did so easily: settlers arrived with guns, coughed a few times, and made short work of any remaining Indians they encountered. However, \u201cNative power\u201d historians like H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen have noted that this familiar narrative only works if you skip lightly over early centuries and ignore most of the continent. Get time and space in proper perspective, and things look different.<\/p>\n
The map certainly does. Most histories of North America deal solely with the locales where Europeans lived. So, early American history is \u201ccolonial history\u201d\u2014never mind that little of North America was \u201ccolonial\u201d then\u2014and starts with Jamestown and Massachusetts. The Great Plains enter the picture only in the late nineteenth century, with the coming of transcontinental railroads. By spatially conflating American history with settler history, such histories push the places where Indigenous peoples lived to the blurry background.<\/p>\n
\u201cNative power\u201d historians rightly insist that American history must deal with the full map\u2014starting by replacing \u201ccolonial history\u201d with \u201ccontinental history,\u201d as Michael Witgen puts it. So, for example, what happened in 1776? That was when colonists on the eastern seaboard sought to end their subordination to the British monarchy. But for much of the continent, such developments meant little. H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen is more interested in another event of the time: the founding of the modern Lakota nation at present-day South Dakota\u2019s Black Hills, which the Lakotas, bearing guns and riding horses, seized and claimed as their sacred homeland. This, he writes, was \u201cone of the most consequential moments in North American history,\u201d marking the inauguration of a massive land\u00a0empire.<\/p>\n
Did Europeans even know of it? On published maps, the Black Hills were a European possession, owned by the Spanish and the French until they passed via the Louisiana Purchase to the United States. On the ground, however, this was risible\u2014there were no Europeans to be found. When Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the territory he\u2019d recently bought, they were \u201cnavigating an Indigenous world that they understood only dimly,\u201d H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen writes, and in their na\u00efve stumbling nearly got themselves killed by Lakotas. H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen and other historians use Lakota winter counts, pictographs drawn annually onto buffalo hides (and sometimes paper), to reconstruct the politics of the Native interior. They have to, as pen-wielding settlers were far away and often clueless about major historical developments on the continent they claimed to\u00a0own.<\/p>\n
Traditional histories don\u2019t have a place for Lakotas on their maps, nor do they make room for Indigenous peoples on their timelines. Although Europeans have been a continuous presence in the Americas since the fifteenth century, most American history fast-forwards through the early centuries, treating the era before 1776 as\u00a0prelude.<\/p>\n
Again, the effect is to minimize Indigenous power, as those were the centuries when settlers were bunched up on the edges of North America and Native peoples had the run of the vast interior. Play back the tape at normal speed, and you see how long Europeans were confined to narrow areas and how halting their expansion\u00a0was.<\/p>\n
By H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen\u2019s clock, it took some four hundred years from Christopher Columbus\u2019s arrival before any colonizing power \u201csubjugated a critical mass of Native Americans\u201d in North America. That power was the United States, extensive in its reach yet late in its arrival. The country still hasn\u2019t existed for even half the time that Europeans have been on the continent. \u201cOn an Indigenous timescale,\u201d notes H\u00e4m\u00e4l\u00e4inen, \u201cthe United States is a mere\u00a0speck.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n