by Pekka Hämäläinen. Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History
by Ned Blackhawk. Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes. Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
The fate of Hernando de Soto was paradigmatic. He sailed to the New World in 1514 and made his fortune in the Spanish campaigns against the Inca. By 1534 he was lieutenant governor of Cuzco, where he took an Incan noblewoman for his mistress and lived in the spectacular palace of the emperor Huayna Cápac. But his expedition of 1540 from present-day Louisiana to the Carolinas amounted to a series of disastrous confrontations with Native groups. He ended his days trying to pass as a god before a local chief, only to be exposed when he failed to dry up the Mississippi, into which his corpse was unceremoniously tossed by his men after he died of a fever. They scrambled back to Mexico City with the horses they had not slaughtered for food.
The most foreboding development for Native peoples in North America was the cohesion of a unified settler state in the wake of the American Revolution. Far more than Black slavery, the Native question was central to the reordering of political loyalties on the eastern seaboard. From the vantage of the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 proclamation, George III made major concessions to Indian tribes and declared the Appalachian mountain range to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the French and Indian War with an ill-planned attack on French forces in Jumonville Glen and who aimed to make his fortune selling land to settlers moving west, this entente was intolerable. Washington himself was at least willing to enforce a settlement line in order to prevent improvident squatters from occupying alienated land, but his more republican peers in the ‘Founding’ generation believed that the point of being an American was having access to cheap land. Any attempt to shut off the supply was met with strategic violence. When the crown sent the Pennsylvania trader and land speculator (and Washington rival) George Croghan into Ohio Country with a pack train of goods, including enough white linen shirts to clothe half the male Indian population, in an attempt to start realising its vision of imperial-Native co-prosperity, it was attacked in 1765 by a gang of American settlers (‘the Black Boys’) dressed up as Indians with charcoaled faces, who destroyed all 30,000 pounds of goods – three times the amount the Tea Partiers, also dressed as Natives, dumped into Boston harbour eight years later.
After the revolution broke out, most tribes treated the conflict as a British civil war. But the results were often dire for them: the Shawnee and the Delaware were pushed west of the Mississippi; the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, split between British and American-aligned factions, moved up to Canada and as far away as present-day Wisconsin, while the Seneca and Mohawks stayed in the east; the Creeks lost great tracts of territory in Georgia. The annexation and confiscation of Indian lands – and the control that the nascent US state would have over areas not already claimed by settlers – was expected to be one of the great boons of the revolution, allowing the state to build up its treasury by selling the land to its citizens. Yet the new federal government took a position similar to that of the empire it had overthrown: wary of the instability that resulted from a population fixed on moving west, it searched for a modus vivendi with the Indigenous peoples. The authors of the constitution considered the inclusion of an Indigenous local government led by the Delawares and with its own representatives in Congress as the 14th state of the union. In 1807, the United States forbade its citizens from surveying lands beyond the federal boundary, or even marking trees to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political victories, and the state later used much of its ‘land bank’ for developments such as railroads and universities, while most yeomen farmers ended up as renters rather than owners. Despite this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.
Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from Arkansas, published his bestselling book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), during the Vietnam War. Brown depicted the Indigenous peoples of the continent as heroically resisting an imperial onslaught beyond their control and fixed in the public imagination the notion of Indians as the noble victims of a slow-motion extinction. Though professional historians pointed out the book’s many factual errors and criticised its flattening of all violence in the West into ‘Indian Wars’, its unwitting embrace of the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian’ and its emotional manipulation of readers, Bury My Heart set the tone for nearly half a century of historiography. From Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America (1975) to Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide (2016), the subject of this scholarly outpouring has been the destruction of Native peoples at the hands of the British and US empires and their proxies. More recently, in works such as Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide (2019), there is increasingly bald acknowledgment that, more than the military or vigilantes or even disease, the organising force behind the destruction was the capitalist economy itself.
But recent road maps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonised mindset for a progressivist one. The symptoms manifest in different, competing ways. Some work overcompensates for Native agency in the face of the European onslaught to the point that it neglects wider historical forces. There are studies by legal historians – Indigenous originalists in all but name – who, however correctly they emphasise the disciplinary power of the law over Native peoples, have so thoroughly internalised constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalised by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society. There is also a nominally left-wing Native scholarship that recognises the unique force of certain Native groups in environmental and anti-capital movements in North America, but resists historicising Native experience itself. Instead, it holds to romantic notions about peoples who are still privy to uncontaminated, non-Western consciousness, immune to the profit motive, and if left to their own devices would build societies, administer land and protect water in ways that modern states fail to emulate at their peril. These three versions of Native history are all the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.
Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent, the third book in his celebrated trilogy about Native American ‘empires’ – following Comanche Empire (2008) and Lakota America (2019) – attempts to flip Brown’s script. Hämäläinen gives no quarter to the claim that Native populations in North America were easy prey for Europeans. In his account, the continent was still up for grabs and the Native peoples were capable of inflicting severe, potentially irrevocable losses on the young United States. His evidence includes Native archaeological and material sources such as the Lakota ‘Winter Counts’ – buffalo hides on which they depicted the decisive event of a given year. (...)
The balance of forces in the early decades of the new nation was far from clear. In 1791, General St Clair’s US army was defeated on the banks of the Ohio River by the Northwestern Confederacy; a thousand American troops were killed or wounded. In the periodisation laid out in Richard White’s Middle Ground (1991), the irreversible decline of Indigenous peoples only set in at the end of the War of 1812, when ‘they could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence declined with the fur trade.’ This is where Hämäläinen makes his provocative claim: ‘Indigenous power in North America,’ he argues, ‘reached its apogee in the mid to late 19th century.’ (...)
Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent, the third book in his celebrated trilogy about Native American ‘empires’ – following Comanche Empire (2008) and Lakota America (2019) – attempts to flip Brown’s script. Hämäläinen gives no quarter to the claim that Native populations in North America were easy prey for Europeans. In his account, the continent was still up for grabs and the Native peoples were capable of inflicting severe, potentially irrevocable losses on the young United States. His evidence includes Native archaeological and material sources such as the Lakota ‘Winter Counts’ – buffalo hides on which they depicted the decisive event of a given year. (...)
The balance of forces in the early decades of the new nation was far from clear. In 1791, General St Clair’s US army was defeated on the banks of the Ohio River by the Northwestern Confederacy; a thousand American troops were killed or wounded. In the periodisation laid out in Richard White’s Middle Ground (1991), the irreversible decline of Indigenous peoples only set in at the end of the War of 1812, when ‘they could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence declined with the fur trade.’ This is where Hämäläinen makes his provocative claim: ‘Indigenous power in North America,’ he argues, ‘reached its apogee in the mid to late 19th century.’ (...)
None of this would have been possible without horses. The domesticated horse originated in North America four million years ago, but had been extinct there for 10,000 years. Hernán Cortés and the Spanish brought the horse back to the Americas in the 1500s, and over the next two centuries they spread across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered around it. ‘We all admired him,’ Saahkómaapi told Thompson. ‘He put us in mind of a stag that had lost his horns; and we did not know what name to give him. But as he was a slave to man, like the dog, which carried our things; he was named the Big Dog.’
The people who most successfully mastered the power of the big dog were the Comanche of the Southern Plains. Like the Lakota, they were relative newcomers in their region, which incorporated parts of what are today Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Kansas. In the early 1700s, the Comanches started buying Spanish horses from the more sedentary Pueblo people, whom they quickly displaced as the major power in the southwest. When they forged an alliance with another horse people, the Utes, the result was a mounted army that raided Spanish settlements. The Comanche also operated a booming slave trade in subject Native peoples and other captives, as well as profiting from an enormous hunting range for buffalo. Hämäläinen writes that
The people who most successfully mastered the power of the big dog were the Comanche of the Southern Plains. Like the Lakota, they were relative newcomers in their region, which incorporated parts of what are today Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Kansas. In the early 1700s, the Comanches started buying Spanish horses from the more sedentary Pueblo people, whom they quickly displaced as the major power in the southwest. When they forged an alliance with another horse people, the Utes, the result was a mounted army that raided Spanish settlements. The Comanche also operated a booming slave trade in subject Native peoples and other captives, as well as profiting from an enormous hunting range for buffalo. Hämäläinen writes that
for the Comanches the sun was ‘the primary cause of all living things’, and horses brought them closer to it, redefining what was possible: the biomass of the continental grasslands may have been a thousand times greater than that of the region’s animals. The Comanches plugged themselves into a seemingly inexhaustible energy stream of grass, flesh, and sunlight.The Lakota, too, secured a vast hunting range, annexing swathes of the Northern Plains. Their relations with the empire to their east – the United States – was initially a trading one, in which the Lakota were by no means the inferior party. Hämäläinen gives the example of the fur tycoon John Jacob Astor building his supply chain right up to the Lakota’s doorstep so that they did not have to inconvenience themselves delivering furs and hides. By the 1860s, the Lakota, in a loose alliance with the Comanches, held sway over a territory larger than Western Europe.
Indigenous Continent is determined to downplay the usual culprits of Native decline: disease brought by Europeans certainly devastated Native populations, but some, especially horse peoples who lived in less dense clusters, were not greatly affected. Every technological innovation the Europeans brought with them – the mounted horse, the gun, the kettle – was acquired and adopted by Natives. In his headlong rush to overturn the Dee Brown story, Hämäläinen ends up reproducing some of its most dubious elements. The focus on military confrontations between the ‘fledgling United States’ and Native ‘armies’ is one of the chief misprisions. The destruction of Native peoples was a result of commercial imperatives as much as political ones. Between 1820 and 1889, for example, the number of buffalo – a major source of Lakota power – declined by 99.99 per cent, from 28 million to 1091. Anglo-European demand for buffalo leather to use in factory machine belts set off a killing spree in the 1870s. The 1848 Gold Rush lured hundreds of thousands of settlers to California through Indian territory, upsetting agricultural patterns and diminishing food supplies. The market went ahead of the cavalry. When Crazy Horse and George Armstrong Custer confronted each other at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it was reported to be 44°C in the shade, and Evan Connell noted in Son of the Morning Star that ‘a shrewd Yankee merchant on the Yellowstone turned a neat profit selling straw hats for 25 cents.’ Hämäläinen continually emphasises the amount of land area still under Native control, but as the historian Daniel Immerwahr pointed out (his critical review of Indigenous Continent has been cobbled together as praise on the back cover), this is like the Republican Party claiming mass popular support because much of the map is coloured red, no matter how sparsely populated the area in question. The usefulness of calling the Comanche an empire becomes less clear when one considers that at the height of their power they numbered forty thousand people – the population at the time of Cincinnati. (...)
By the mid-19th century, many Native nations found themselves in the position of powerless rentiers, living under what Emilie Connolly calls ‘fiduciary colonialism’. Washington had devised a system of annual annuities instead of one-off buyouts of land, but much of the money was invested in state and federal bonds, effectively making Natives passive investors in their own dispossession. In 1887, the Dawes Act was passed, allowing the US government to subdivide Indian land – previously commonly held – into private allotments of 160 acres apiece: the idea was to break Native patterns of land tenure and force Indians into the capitalist order. The new ‘owners’ would either have to make their portions profitable or sell up to settlers. Though some tribes were initially exempt, the extension of the act in 1898 and the abolition of tribal governments led to the loss of around two-thirds of Native American land over the next thirty years.
by Thomas Meaney, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Getty via
