Review: <i>Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America</i>, by Pekka Hämäläinen

A distinguished professor at Oxford University, Pekka Hämäläinen has devoted his career to casting Native peoples as persistent and powerful in North America despite the Euro-American invasion that followed Columbus. In his first and most important book, The Comanche Empire (2008), Hämäläinen demonstrates how an Indigenous confederation dominated the southern Great Plains, fending off Spanish and American efforts to colonize the region. More recently, Hämäläinen’s Lakota America tells a similar story of Native power on the northern Great Plains through the nineteenth century. His latest book, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, applies that perspective to a continent over five hundred years: “Time and again, and across centuries, Indians blocked and destroyed colonial projects, forcing Euro-Americans to accept Native ways, Native sovereignty, and Native dominance. This is what the historical record shows when American history is detached from mainstream historical narratives that privilege European ambitions, European perspectives, and European sources” (x).Indigenous Continent belongs to a wave of books, each claiming to offer an unprecedented focus on the Native story as the true history of North America, a novel perspective that busts the myth of European colonial domination. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz published such a book eight years ago, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (winner of the 2015 American Book Award). Do these authors read one another?Despite the vow to transcend colonialism and its preoccupation with Euro-American initiative, Indigenous Continent focuses relentlessly on the future United States. Truncating North America, the book treats Mexico and almost all of Canada only in passing, dismissed as irrelevant or contradictory to Hämäläinen’s preferred story. During the early centuries of the last millennium, he argues, Native peoples rejected exploitative ruling hierarchies in favor of “more collective and egalitarian social arrangements” characterized by “consensus and…participatory political systems” (19, 23). Because Mesoamerican regimes, including the Aztecs, do not fit that model, they are cast out of his North American paradise, defined as “the world’s most egalitarian continent at the time” (23).Meanwhile, early modern Europeans doubled down on hierarchy to construct militant programs of expansion for global domination: “an imperial mindset—a toxic blend of ambition and arrogance, all fueled by fear” (83). Despite the promised escape from American mythology, the book recycles the usual moral polarity cherished by Americans: good guys versus bad guys. This former staple of Hollywood westerns (and current fixation of American conservatives) persists here, but this time with Natives as good and Europeans as the villains.Hämäläinen’s morality play traps him in recurrent contradictions as he casts colonization both as a juggernaut of genocide and as easily flummoxed by Indigenous resistance. Natives appear as the victims of widespread massacres and enslavement and as masterful “soldiers” (Hämäläinen prefers that term to “warriors”) who win almost every battle. Occasionally, he depicts the invaders as “ripping through unexposed Indigenous populations with lethal efficiency. Military imperialism coupled with biological imperialism caused the first Native American population catastrophe” (31). This sounds very much like the European power that Hämäläinen promised to discredit.But before and after every episode of slaughter, Indigenous Continent reiterates some variant of the following: “More than a century of colonialism had merely scratched the surface of the Indigenous continent” (94). Assessing the colonies in 1676, Hämäläinen asserts, “Nowhere were Europeans able to dictate to the Native Americans” (145). Yet, a few pages later, he reveals that New Englanders had used tricky deeds, deadly microbes, and military power to dispossess most of their region’s Natives: “There were hundreds of Indian slaves in New England, living in fear of being sold, raped, killed, or sent somewhere faraway” (152). They seem subject to the dictation of their masters.Devoting scant attention to Natives who lost colonial wars, Hämäläinen instead focuses on just three Native confederations: Haudenosaunees (or Iroquois, as he calls them) and his old favorites, Comanches and Lakotas. Although they were exceptions among the many Native nations, these three Indigenous “empires” (another Europeanism that Hämäläinen applies to some Native groups) receive pride of place because, for several generations, they could defeat and manipulate the invaders. But those confederacies also traded with the invaders for weapons used to crush and absorb weaker Native nations on their peripheries. In another recycling of an old European trope, the truest and noblest Indians are warriors/soldiers.Peaceful trade and diplomacy recede in a fundamentally military history of relentless confrontation. Women and children appear only in passing and usually as mere victims of invader violence. Once an Indian nation does succumb to the invasion, Hämäläinen quickly shifts westward to refocus on a still defiant Native empire. In 1800, when the Haudenosaunees lost military clout, they vanish from Indigenous Continent, which thereafter features Comanches and Lakotas, cast as the enduring champions of all Native Americans.Such a partial history slights the many smaller Native nations of the Great Plains, including Hidatsas, Mandans, Shoshones, Pawnees, and Absacora (Crow). They resisted the expansionist Native empires as their greatest foes, allying instead with the United States to provide critical help to the ultimate American triumph. But Hämäläinen insists that the two powerful Native empires represented all Indigenous peoples, allegedly united against the invaders.As a consequence, Indigenous Continent does not offer a comprehensive history of the Native experience of colonial invasion. By slighting Natives who allied with the invaders or who suffered dispossession, Hämäläinen treats the most powerful Indigenous confederations as the only Indians who really mattered. As stand-ins for all Natives, they sustain a story of relentless and successful resistance defined as war. For example, California’s Indians receive only half of one paragraph, which concludes, “In 1846, there had been 150,000 California Indians; in 1860, only 35,000 remained” (432). Those 150,000 people exceeded the combined number of Haudenosaunees, Lakotas, and Comanches by more than two to one. But California’s Natives lacked the weapons and confederacy to resist the slaughter, enslavement, and restriction inflicted on them, so Hämäläinen virtually ignores them.Despite winning almost every battle recounted in this book, Native peoples had shrunk, by 1865, to a twentieth of their precontact numbers. Meanwhile, the invaders swelled to a great majority and took almost everything that they coveted during the nineteenth century (including California). How and why that happened Hämäläinen will not tell us. Instead, Indigenous Continent ends as it began: “The four-hundred-year struggle to keep the continent Indigenous had stretched colonists from the European powers, and then the United States, to the breaking point again and again” (459). True enough before 1800, but not thereafter, when the United States rapidly expanded to dominate the continent.Creating an industrialized society and military, Americans outnumbered Native peoples by about sixty to one by 1865 and had densely settled the East, South, Midwest, Pacific Coast, and the mining districts of the interior West. Armed Native resistance persisted only in half of the Great Plains and parts of the Rocky Mountains and arid Southwest. But Hämäläinen prefers a fantasy: “Indigenous power in North America reached its apogee in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century, which at first glance appears counterintuitive” (460). Yes, it does. In the end, military resistance abruptly vanishes from the book as the author notes that by 1900 “the number of remaining Indians was 250,000—a terrifyingly low figure that reveals the enormity of U.S. genocidal campaigns” (461). How did Americans ultimately win the war if Natives won almost all the battles?We should, as Hämäläinen shows, recognize the prolonged and resourceful defense of Indigenous sovereignty waged over five centuries. Natives did retain most of the continent through the eighteenth century. But we should not miscast the nineteenth century as more of the same. Indeed, we can best appreciate the heroic persistence and shrewd adaptability of Natives by noting how they endured despite losing most of the wars fought after 1800. Our histories should respect and include all Indigenous people, not just those who won battles. During the nineteenth century, most Natives abandoned warfare and apparently submitted to the United States, but they persisted in subtle and peaceful efforts to preserve sovereignty by selectively adopting cultural elements from the dominant society. During the early twentieth century, many Native nations sought formal education in some American ways and appealed to the judicial systems of their oppressors.Hämäläinen aptly concludes, “The four hundred years of colonialism that followed Columbus’s arrival failed to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty in North America” (462). But war was not the only, or even (ultimately) the primary, path to that survival. We can learn much from California’s many Native nations who have survived (and now thrive) despite losing their nineteenth-century battles.

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