Pekka Hämäläinen has written a startling book. Building on his earlier histories of the Lakota and Comanche, Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent tells the entire saga of Native America, recasting it not as a story of dispossession and defeat, but resistance and – amazingly – resurgence. The story is counterintuitive, a story not simply of white genocide and plunder but also of Indian power and influence, a story of a complicated group of peoples who fought against Europeans for over 400 years, and fight on today.
Beginning his story in 11,000 BC, Hämäläinen traces Native Americans back to Asia, showing how large groups of people left for North America by traveling across land bridges and along kelp highways. Such people formed large, centralized civilizations in places like the Colorado Plateau and the Mississippi River Valley, fostering large-scale agriculture, developing political/religious elites, and constructing massive monuments.
Then came climate change.
A “global cooling period” hit North America in 1300, argues Hämäläinen, forever changing indigenous life. “The Little Ice Age ushered in a new world,” he argues, “where almost everything had to be smaller: harvests, markets, settlements, mounds, alliances, and ambitions.” (P. 19.) Native America’s move to smallness led to a bewildering number of “decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes,” regimes that foiled European conquest and complicated European settlement. (P. 51.)
The sheer number of these “egalitarian political regimes” proved staggering. In Florida alone, for example, indigenous people divided themselves into Calusas, Timucuas, Apalachees, Miccosukees, Yamasees, Guales, and – finally – Seminoles. In New England, there were Wabanakis, Wampanoags, Nausets, Patuxets, Pequots, Abenakis, Algonquins, and others. By bringing together the histories of so many different groups, Hämäläinen tells a fascinating story about Native America that only tangentially involves Europeans.
In fact, Europeans emerge in Hämäläinen’s story mainly as pests. They encroach on Native land, take Native food, and make people sick. Only occasionally do they perform a service, usually by providing Native Americans with weapons. For example, the Five Nations League “made peace with New France because they thought that the colony, beaten down as it was, could still be useful as a source of arms and goods.” (P. 114.) Meanwhile, the Lakota policed the Missouri River, “forcing traders to pay for upriver access with guns, powder, lead, and other goods, turning the Missouri Valley into a tribute-leading yielding machine.” (P. 355.)
Hämäläinen shows that Indian power grew from the very “smallness” of North America’s “decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes,” which served to slow European conquest. This became apparent early on to the Spanish, who subjugated large Indian civilizations in Central and South America but struggled to conquer the more disperse, disaggregated indigenous communities of North America. “[H]ow could relatively small Native groups defy Spanish colonialism in the north,” asks Hämäläinen, “when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and Maya Empires had fallen so easily?” The answer, he suggests, was that North America’s “decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas.” (P. 51.)
Gradually, however, Native dependence on European arms proved detrimental to indigenous people. For example, “the Indian Confederacy and other Ohio Country nations joined forces to protect their lands,” notes Hämäläinen, “and they desperately needed British guns, powder, and lead to prevail.” (P. 332.) Out West, the “pent-up demand for guns, powder, lead, and metal tools, fueled intense rivalries for trading privileges in the upper Missouri Valley, where several Indigenous nations had suffered for years with unreliable access to European technology and goods.” (P. 353.)
Though Hämäläinen focuses mainly on violence, his story puts the legal history of Native America into new perspective. Did, for example, indigenous Americans use Anglo law much like they used guns? Hämäläinen shows clearly that once Native Americans acquired European weaponry, they then used that weaponry to advance their own interests, often against Europeans. The same might have held true for Anglo American law. Once Native Americans learned the law, they then used that law against Europeans as well. To illustrate, take legal historian Stuart Banner’s book How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, which shows that white/Indian land transfers in North America began primarily as sales thanks to legal fictions like “Indian title.” Was this European conquest? Or was this Native Americans using European law? According to Hämäläinen, Native Americans desperately wanted European technology, and land proved one of the few things they could sell to get it. Considering that there were only five million indigenous people on the entire continent at first contact, this may have been a smart business strategy for Indians. Why not view it as such? If Hämäläinen is right, then Native Americans used Europeans. Not vice versa.
Gradually, of course, the federal government moved to discourage the direct sale of land by Indians to white settlers, moving instead to a treaty system by which Native Americans dealt directly with federal agents, as if they were foreign powers. According to Hämäläinen, “treaties became the United States’s most effective means to divest Native Americans of their land.” (P. 381.) That is the prevailing wisdom, to be sure. But if we adopt Hämäläinen’s own thesis and apply it to the legal history of white/Indian relations over time, a different conclusion arises. For example, Hämäläinen ends his book by showing that Native Americans retain over fifty million acres of federally protected land in the United States today, a number that breaks down to roughly 200 acres per person. Not the whole continent, certainly, but still more than most average Americans can claim.
And that was under the treaty system, not the land sale regime. Imagine, for a moment, that the federal government had never intervened and simply allowed private land sales between Native Americans and white settlers to continue. William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson suggest that precisely such a scenario played out in Spanish Florida before 1819, when the Panton, Leslie, & Forbes Company began to extend credit to Native Americans and accepted land as collateral. Native Americans became completely dependent on the firm’s goods, struggled to pay back their loans and ended up losing one million acres in the process.
Spain never went down the treaty road, but America did. And Native Americans may have been smart to play along, shifting from one legal strategy to another. As Hämäläinen puts it, “the continent is speckled with hundreds of native nations that preserve Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood. Each of them embodies the centuries-long Indigenous resistance to colonial violence and expansion.” (P. 461.)
Of course, some might argue that Hämäläinen paints too rosy a picture of Indian resistance, but comparing Indigenous Continent to Banner’s How the Indians Lost Their Land remains an interesting exercise. Both books focus on Native American agency, and both books complicate the popular narrative that Native Americans were simply victims of white genocide. Banner’s book is based largely on the nineteenth-century and is ultimately a legal story. But Hämäläinen goes back farther to a period when Native Americans used force, not law, to dictate terms. That period occupies seven out of eight sections of the book, providing detailed and at times disturbing accounts of the violent struggles between Native Americans and Europeans that filled the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Even the nineteenth century, argues Hämäläinen, witnessed Native American dominance, as evidenced by the Lakota and Comanche Empires.
Looked at in the longue durée, maybe Native Americans played their cards more effectively than we have previously thought. And maybe law was just another gun.
