The conventional story of European colonization of America goes like this: the new world was new only to Europeans and, according to a French savant, was named after a manly but shady Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, because Asia and Europe had already been named after women. Columbus got here a couple of years ahead of Vespucci and returned to Europe brimming with stories of untold riches. The European empires staked their claims, fought with one another, and commenced a colonial conquest, followed by “settlers” to complete the job. The implications of claiming of Hispaniola in 1492 ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. For four centuries European and American empires collected territory, souls, and slaves by destroying and dispossessing hundreds of Indigenous societies. The natives fought back but were overcome by superior technology and alien germs. The Indians were doomed; the Europeans had a rendezvous with destiny.. Book cover Indigenous continent .The author of Indigenous Continent (2022) told a much different and far more interesting story. Pekka Hämäläinen is a Finn by birth and Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford. His Comanche Empire (2009) and Lakota America (2019) are proof that he knows what he is talking about. He argued in rich detail that colonial expansion was not inevitable, and that America remained overwhelmingly Indigenous until near the end of the nineteenth century. A century earlier Europeans may have drawn up colour-coded maps, but they did not control the territory those maps ostensibly referred to. Hämäläinen’s story is largely unknown because the newcomers judged the natives in European terms, which meant applying civil and military bureaucratic norms and state control. The Indigenous peoples, however, grounded their political power in kinship, not citizenship..For several hundred years Indians prevented and destroyed European projects by war, diplomacy, and non-cooperation. To see these novelties, we must abandon the pretentions of progressive history that sustained the dominant historical narrative. For instance, the annihilation of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (or Greasy Grass), a day’s drive south from Calgary, was not a fluke of bad generalship and superior Native intel. From the Lakota perspective, Custer’s Last Stand was the culmination of a long history of continental Indian military power. For several hundred years Indians had fought for their territory against the claims of France, Spain, Britain, the Dutch, and eventually the Americans. Hämäläinen argued that this was one of the longest conflicts in human history and, at the same time, it was one accompanied by a search for mutual understanding that has not yet concluded. That perspective at least is not news to Canadians..Hämäläinen’s showed that the Indian wars, which are a staple of university history courses, were considered a last resort by the Indians. Most of the time they made the Europeans useful by incorporating them into their alliances, settlements, and trading and kinship networks. Until recently, in Canadian history, this perspective governed the accounts of relations between the Hudson’s Bay Company and First Nations. Only after the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the Territories from the Imperial Crown to the Canadian Crown did the history of contact between Europeans and First Nations, including Metis, become part of the triumphalist narrative that Indigenous Continent challenged. It also challenged the myths of both noble and barbaric Indians and apportions responsibility to the many forms of colonialism, from ethnic cleansing and genocide to mutual respect through trade and commerce. All this variation was played out in the context of an astonishing European potential to destroy nations and civilizations and an equally astonishing capacity of Indigenous peoples and confederacies to resist..At one point, Hämäläinen called his book a biography of power in North America. Certainly power, by which he meant the ability of communities to control space, resources, and perceptions, was central to North American history. This made the centuries-long struggle similar, at least in principle and scale, to the steppe empires of central Asia and the resistance they engendered from China in the east to the Arabs, Russians, and Europeans in the west. Most interesting of all, the great celebrations of the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and even Confederation, were ripples in a paddling pool compared to the real struggle for continental power..Many of the details carry their own fascination. For example, following the seventeenth-century Pueblo rebellion against the Spanish, the horse was returned to its home range after an absence of countless millennia. Called by the Lakota the sacred dog, by the Blackfoot the elk dog, by the Comanches the magic dog, the horse frontier moved rapidly from New Mexico along native trade routes through Colorado to the Great Plains. By the 1730s the horse had led to a profound economic, military, and geopolitical revolution. For the Blackfoot, to give a local example, the appearance of the horse between the knees of their traditional enemies, the Shoshone, overturned the deep attachment of the Blackfoot to the land, to cultural traditions, tools, weapons, prayers, and gods. Now the equestrian nomads could move, hunt, trade, kill, evade, and protect themselves as never before. They were a fast and efficient cavalry and conflict led to much greater damage and higher stakes than could the small pedestrian war parties..Moreover, horses reversed the power dynamics between Indigenous people and the colonists. Previously the only domestic animal, the dog, harnessed energy indirectly by consuming human-supplied herbivores; now horses could directly exploit the greatest resource of the plains, grass. Horses, to use a Comanche expression, brought humans closer to the sun, the source of all living things. It took time to breed substantial herds, but once undertaken the world looked much different — as it still does today for anyone who rides..On the northern plains, the great beneficiaries, especially after acquiring European guns, were the Blackfoot and the Lakota; in the southwest, the Comanche. All three created extensive empires or confederacies..By explaining how the British Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Lewis and Clark expedition looked to the Natives, Hämäläinen provided a fresh perspective on these familiar events and documents. By the late eighteenth century, the Americans, having learned from British imperial practices, started making “treaties” that were ignored as often as not by both sides. In the decades prior to the Civil War, the U.S. Army conducted search and destroy operations in the Mississippi and Illinois territories and in the South that had terrible consequences for the local Nations but also strengthened the Lakota and Comanche to the west. During the California gold rush the Americans had to negotiate their way to the Pacific, much as Canadians did a couple of generations later. Eventually, it took the railway and the massacre of buffalo to end the de facto sovereignty of these two major indigenous empires, along with the smaller but still significant Blackfoot Confederacy..At times Hämäläinen provides a romantic picture of First Nation resistance to the Canadian and American governments. Nevertheless, he has written a splendid introduction to Indigenous perspectives on what has become our common history..Barry Cooper teaches political science at the University of Calgary.
