Pekka Hämäläinen, "Indigenous Continent"

Pekka Hämäläinen is now one of the leading historians of Native North America. I loved both of his single-nation studies, The Commanche Empire and Lakota America, so I eagerly ordered a copy of Indigenous Continent (2022) as soon as I heard about it. Indigenous Continent tells the story of North American Indians from the establishment of the first settlements in Virginia and New France down to the final defeat of the Plains tribes in the 1890s. The central thesis is that Native nations worked for their own interests as best they could, including fighting against the European invasion, and that they were often successful.

Part of Hämäläinen's thesis is that the history of North America was very different from that of Mexico or Peru because there were no native empires for Europeans to conquer. With the Aztecs and Inca the Spanish pulled off what a modern military would call a decapitation, deposing the emperor and sliding into his spot, using the already-existing machinery of empire as the basis for their rule. But in North America power was dispersed among hundreds of tribes, and most of the powerful tribes were led by councils rather than single leaders. There was no head to lop off and no existing imperial system to coopt, leading to a very different history.

The first substantial section of Indigenous Contient covers the interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in the 1600s. The main argument of this section is that the early, tentative outposts like Quebec and Plymouth Bay only survived because Indians found them useful. They wanted to trade with Europeans, so they tolerated or even encouraged the estalishment of European towns and forts in their territory. Down to 1660 they could have destroyed those settlements any time they wanted to – Virginia is a possible exception, since it survived major Native assaults in 1622 and 1644 – but did not because they wanted European goods and got great benefit from trading directly with Europeans rather than through Indian middlemen. When those early settlements led to violence, that often meant wars between Indian nations over access to European trading posts.

The second section, covering roughly 1660 to 1756, emphasizes that in this period everyone in eastern North America was reacting to the Iroquois. It was the Haudenosaunee who were setting the political agenda, waging war from Wisconsin to New Orleans, destroying dozens of other tribes and dominating the rest, holding the fate of New France in their hands and probably that of New England as well. The Iroquois called what they were doing the "mourning wars." The idea was that every person lost in warfare had either to be avenged or replaced. So the bigger the wars got, and the more men were lost, the more wars had to be fought to avenge and replace the lost men. One result of this policy was whole "Iroquois" villages where nobody spoke Iroquois; every person was an adoptee recently brought into the confederacy. Hämäläinen has some great material on how frightening and baffling this all was to European observers, especially in New France, where officials wrote long reports bemoaning that the Iroquois had wrecked their plans, destroyed their allies, and might decide to attack Quebec at any moment.

In the 1776 to 1830 period Hämäläinen's focus then shifts south, to the "five civilized tribes" and the decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing that eventually forced most of them either west to Oklahoma or south into the Everglades. One important development of this period was that the Indian nations divided into factions. Some wanted to become more like the Europeans; this included the Cherokee and Choctaw leaders who had their own plantations, with African slaves. Others tried to reject European ways and hold tighter to their own traditions. The "Red Sticks", a faction of the Creek, fought against both European interlopers and their own leadership, which they thought was betraying their traditions and working too hard to conciliate white men.

The focus keeps moving west with the frontier. Hämäläinen reprises his own work on the Comanche and the Lakota in two excellent chapters. However, the rest of this section felt thin to me, with very little on California or the Great Basin. I thought the biggest hole was events in Indian Country (the future Oklahoma) about which Hämäläinen says next to nothing; I have always wondered what happened after the Trail of Tears, but I guess I will have to read that in some other book.

Indigenous Continent has gotten extravagant praise from reviewers, and it is certainly remarkable. I don't know of any other work that covers this much Native American history so well. I think, though, that it has an audience problem. If the goal is to supply an overall introduction to this history for people who don't know it, it has a flaw that is all too common in such works: too many names. Hämäläinen is the sort of careful historian who has to say exactly who did what, who will not use locutions like "Indian leaders said. . . ." There is also the political reality that modern Indians think the identity of their nations is an important fact; they hate to always be subsumed into some entity like "the Great Lakes tribes". So Hämäläinen names all the tribes over and over, and there are a lot of them. Sometimes I got lost in this thicket of names, and I have been studying pieces of this material for decades. I imagine that for people who do not have some familiarity with these tribes and tribal leaders, the deluge of names might prove overwhelming. I would be leery of assigning this book to undergraduates.

My other issue with Indigenous Continent has to do with its slant. I think it was great idea to try to narrate the history of the continent from the Native perspective. As I said at the start, Hämäläinen plays up the ways Indians defended their homes, and calls attention to their successes. Which were many; after all, this conquest took nearly 300 years, and Native nations still control large areas of the continent. Hämäläinen calls out several occasions when European leaders tried to overawe Native chiefs, only to be mocked for their weakness by chiefs who understood very well what the real score was. Hämäläinen also explains some of the contradictions and failures of British, French, Spanish and then American policy toward Indian nations. But he says very little about the contradictions and failures of Native policy toward Europeans and Americans, which were ultimately much more consequential. It may be that their situation was pretty much hopeless, at least once they had allowed Europeans to achieve their first footholds. But I don't think they managed their affairs perfectly, or were always as wise as Hämäläinen wants them to be. I understand that he had limited space and wanted to emphasize Native successes, but for such an enthusiastic narrative to end in such disaster was a bit jarring.

I would only recommend this book to people who really want to know this history. Because of the torrent of facts and names it is not always easy or especially fun to read. But it does relate the history of Native North America better than anything else I know.