By Allen D. Boyer
Indigenous Continent, by Oxford scholar Pekka Hämäläinen, is a masterly narrative that re-envisions how Indian nations long controlled the balance of power in North America. “Rather than a ‘colonial America,’” Hämäläinen writes, “we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial . . . . 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 book has the sweep of old-school diplomatic history, those studies in which France and Austria combine against Prussia while dynastic problems strain Anglo-Danish relations. But there is nothing old-school about Indigenous Continent, which reads the history of North America in terms of Indian ambitions and perspectives.
“The Stamp and Tea Acts, Boston Massacre, and creation of the U.S. Constitution figure only marginally in this history,” Hämäläinen writes. “Indians controlled most of North America, and often they did not know about the exploits of the Europeans beyond their borders. And if they did, they did not care. Instead, the Indigenous peoples were interested in the ambitions and experiences of other Indigenous peoples—the Iroquois, Cherokees, Lakotas, Comanches, Shawnees, and many others.”
The understated, enduring power of Indian nations lay in their ability “to control space and resources, to influence the actions and perceptions of others, to hold enemies at bay . . . and to initiate and resist change.” Similarly, it resided in social systems that Europeans often failed to understand. Hämäläinen argues that whereas European societies “invested power in the state and its bureaucracy . . . Native nations invested power in kinship.” This could be measured in lodges, camps, tribes, “networks of fictive kinship that could extend to numerous allied nations.”
Making treaties with European colonists only superficially made concessions to them. In fact, treaties gave tribes legitimacy and privilege. The Mohegans used the Treaty of Hartford (1638) to dispossess other Indian nations from Connecticut, while the Iroquois fiercely guarded access to the Dutch trading posts. “The role of Dutch traders was simply to make goods available—a task that the Mohawks monitored diligently.”
As the 17th century closed, Indian resistance erupted across the continent: in the rebellion of New Mexico’s pueblos; in the swamps and forests of New England, in what the English called King Philip’s War; in Virginia, where Nat Bacon’s rebels fought Susquehannocks who had themselves been pushed south by tribal wars. To the north, two colonial powers were wrongfooted by the Iroquois. The Indian confederacy traded claims to the Upper Susquehanna to the English governor of New York, buying an alliance against New France, and meantime sold land on the Delaware to newcomer William Penn, to buy Pennsylvania’s support against claims by New York.
Much of this book covers the simmering half-century of war that settled control of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes: the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s War, Lord Dunmore’s War, the Revolutionary War, St. Clair’s Defeat, Mad Anthony Wayne’s victories, and the wilderness campaigns that matched Tecumseh against William Henry Harrison. Trading rights lost importance; the issue became the conquest or cession of territory.
State power and kinship systems never meshed. Tragically, the two civilizations talked past each other. Revolutionary governments offered Indians a place in their legislatures—but that did not bring peace, not any more than the Shawnee did when they captured and adopted Daniel Boone.
Hämäläinen restores a sense of the control that Indian nations exercised in the West. From the 1770s, parleys between the Comanches and the Spanish (a modus vivendi punctuated, not disrupted, by raids and punitive expeditions) began a century in which the Comanches, with their vast horse herds and 1,000-man war hosts, dominated all other tribes on the Southwestern plains. In this new order, Hämäläinen writes, the Spanish became “the Comanches’ junior allies.”
It was not on his own initiative that John Jacob Astor sent traders up the Platte River into Wyoming; it was because the Lakotas had asked for local trading posts. The United States called a massive peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1851 precisely because its soldiers knew they could not win a war with the Plains tribes. The resulting treaty was not what President Millard Fillmore had sought.
“The Lakotas made it clear that they expected a 200-mile southward extension of their domain,” Hämäläinen writes. “In the northern Great Plains, colonial borders would bend around Lakota borders; Americans would have to remove the Pawnees to the south to make space for the Lakotas. The United States had sided with power.”
The story of American Indians’ influence on broader American history is being recast, by many historians. Hämäläinen does not venture to relate the Indian wars to the continuing character of American society, as Ned Blackhawk did in The Rediscovery of America. Nor does he linger on individual characters, as Colin Calloway did in The Indian World of George Washington. From the highest of vantage points, taking the grand perspective, Hämäläinen has written a great book.
Allen D. Boyer (ΦBK, Vanderbilt University) has recently published The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History, co-authored with Mark Nicholls. Vanderbilt University is home to the Alpha of Tennessee Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.