Indigenous Continent

Starred review from July 1, 2022

The task H�m�l�inen (history, Oxford Univ.; Lakota America) has undertaken is daunting: there isn't only one tribal history but around 500, which creates a pointillist web with multiple points of entry. In this scrupulously researched survey of the past, a brilliant Finnish scholar presents a compelling picture. He shows that, at least through the 18th century and well into the 1800s, Indigenous peoples flourished by setting the agendas in their efforts to keep their land and resources and establishing the terms for the settlements that followed, even when they didn't win their battles. This book recognizes that the strengths of Indigenous peoples came from a network of shifting, powerful kinship. VERDICT The level of detail occasionally overwhelms, but H�m�l�inen is adept at explaining. This is a book everyone could benefit from reading.--David Keymer

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Starred review from August 8, 2022
Oxford University scholar Hämäläinen (Lakota America) delivers a sweeping and persuasive corrective to the notion that “history itself is a linear process that moves irreversibly toward Indigenous destruction.” Reorienting the history of the Western Hemisphere away from “European ambitions, European perspectives, and European sources,” he focuses instead on the “overwhelming and persistent Indigenous power” that lasted in North America from 10000 BCE until the end of the 19th century. Throughout, Hämäläinen highlights the agency, resilience, diversity, and kinship of Indigenous peoples, detailing how the Comanche, the Lakota, the Mohawks, and other tribes formed alliances to forestall European conquest. Skillfully shifting across regions and time periods, Hämäläinen documents how Native nations expanded, contracted, and even relocated in response to opportunities or pressures, and employed a range of methods (diplomacy, trade, and war among them) to resist colonization. Revelations abound—from the rampant enslavement of Indigenous people by European settlers to the strategic advantages that smallpox and other diseases gave to some Native nations—as do immersive renderings of Native cultural traditions and incisive analyses of developments including Western tribes’ domestication of horses in the 1700s and the formation of Native American and British alliances after the Revolutionary War. This top-notch history casts the story of America in an astonishing new light. Illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House.

August 1, 2022
Native scholars like Dina Gilio-Whitaker and Ned Blackhawk have long worked to correct the version of American history that emphasizes anemic Indigenous resistance and the inevitability of white westward expansion. H�m�l�inen (The Comanche Empire, 2008; Lakota America, 2019) builds on their work in a magisterial chronicle of Native agency in the face of settler colonialism. For centuries after first contact, Indigenous nations employed a strategic blend of diplomacy, trade, and warfare to limit European and American influence, playing the colonial powers against each other to secure advantageous trade routes and treaties. In general, the most numerous losses of life among Native nations were attributable to encounters with European diseases rather than European military forces. Although the colonizing powers claimed ownership over an ever-growing swath of the continent, H�m�l�inen argues that they typically lacked the resources to enforce that ownership, leaving space for Indigenous nations to maintain and expand their own spheres of influence. Essential reading for fans of Beacon Press' ReVisioning History series and any reader seeking a more complete understanding of American history.

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Starred review from August 1, 2022
A vigorous, provocative study of Native American history by one of its most accomplished practitioners. Finnish historian H�m�l�inen, 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. H�m�l�inen 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.

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