Pekka Hämäläinen, a professor of American history at Oxford University, seeks to write, or rather rewrite, the history of America north of Mexico. In the beginning he rejects the conventional story of Europeans colonizing a vast continent and Indigenous people vainly resisting but quickly succumbing to the onslaught of the Europeans powered by raw ambition, superior technology, and lethal microbes.
In this volume, Hämäläinen details “a four-centuries-long war,” in which “Indians won as often as not.” He challenges the theorem that colonial expansion was inevitable, which ignores the fact that the continent was overwhelmingly indigenous well into the 19th century. Textbook maps illustrated with large colored-coded blocks of American territory belonging to European nations, or later, American colonies, deny the reality on the ground. In fact, for much of this period these imperial claims were just that – claims. Native people still controlled most of the territory, and they resisted European expansion at every turn using trade and diplomacy as well as war.
The heart of this book details examples of indigenous resistance – from New England to California. In the period after 1776, there were more than 1,600 armed clashes between Euro-Americans and Natives. The first English colonists who founded Jamestown in 1607 barely survived an uneasy truce with the powerful Powhatan nation. In its first seven decades, the Virginia colonists were barely able to move from their coastal enclave. In New England, the English did only a little better. The Dutch and the French had more success, as they emphasized trade rather than colonization. Meanwhile, in the Southwest in 1680, the Pueblo people rose in revolt against the Spanish colonizers, occupied Santa Fe, and drove them from New Mexico with much loss of life. When the Spanish returned 12 years later, they established a more benign and coexisting relationship with the American Indians.
The strongest part of this revisionist history is the story of the “equestrian empires.” The author of well-regarded histories of the Comanche and the Lakota, Hämäläinen recounts a long series of battles fought from horseback on the Great Plains leading to General Custer’s annihilation on Little Bighorn in 1876. By the 1890s, the Indian population of the United States had been reduced by some 70 percent to about 250,000. Yet they survived, and today some 500 Native nations are seeing new growth, political power, and prosperity. This volume will be controversial, but it is an important part of the movement to look at American and Native history from new perspectives that will impact scholarship for years to come.
– by Mark Michel
