Hamalainen, Pekka. Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. New York: Liveright, 2022.
One of the first books I read for my Global Early Modernity seminar in graduate school was Pekka Hamalainen’s The Comanche Empire. I approached it with more than a healthy amount of skepticism; how could any responsible historian classify that nomadic Native American culture as an empire? By the time I had finished, however, I was more than convinced, and the ensuing seminar discussion with Dr. Hamalainen (which I somewhat shamelessly monopolized) resulted in one of my favorite papers I’ve ever written. Picking up Pekka’s new general history of North American indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and conquest was thus a no-brainer. Yet here, ironically, I would have the opposite experience: going in with high expectations, I found myself leaving Indigenous Continent underwhelmed and skeptical of the value of many of Hamalainen’s approach.
Indigenous Continent begins, however, with a laudable re-framing of the North American continent’s most recent five hundred years. While European and American histories generally treat native peoples as doomed to extinction at worst or marginal foils for the forces of colonization at best, Hamalainen demonstrates how long indigenous power actually dominated the bulk of the continent, forcing Europeans to accommodate confederacies and empires such as the Pueblo, Iroquois, Comanche, and Lakota. A key element of this narrative is the frank–and long overdue–reappraisal of North America’s historical geography. Hamalainen consistently exposes the empty claims of European politicians and mapmakers, demonstrating that accurate maps of North America should reflect not the grand delusions of negotiators an ocean away but the reality of power on the ground in the New World where Native Americans, not Europeans, held a near-monopoly on the use of force. Indeed, even the extension of forts and other outposts are persuasively transformed from instruments of supposed imperial control to indigenous resource nodes: the presence of just one fort in a people’s territory could swing the balance of technology in their favor over all surrounding rivals. This elevation of native agency can be seen even in the smallest of details, and in fact might shine brightest there–the idea that stories of El Dorado came about because native peoples knew about Europeans’ thirst for gold and tried to send them to their deaths in the desert, for example, is terrifically pragmatic, not to mention hilarious.
Beyond this solid core, however, Indigenous Continent spins more and more out of control the further its narrative proceeds. After each phase of his history, Hamalainen feels compelled to reiterate how North America remains mostly an indigenous continent and how successful native resistance has been. Yet by focusing mostly on the positive results of indigenous agency, Hamalainen never clearly demonstrates when certain crucial negative milestones are passed or windows for a certain type of resistance have closed. European seaboard colonies go from being wholly at the mercy of native powers to functional immunity in their coastal cores to penetrating the Appalachians and pushing indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi all in the face of this “effective,” “victorious” native resistance. If anything, the reasons for this loss of ground are apparently debilitating disease outbreaks and the advent of industrial transportation and communication in the mid nineteenth century–two very unoriginal conclusions from someone I consider to be a generally very ingenuitive historian. Indigenous Continent somewhat fittingly ends in the 1880s with the twilight of indigenous agency on a major political scale, yet like clockwork Hamalainen’s conclusion makes the dubious claim that 21st-century North America remains an indigenous continent thanks to, of course, continuing and continuously successful native resistance. Ironically, the region where this might be most true is never more than tangentially referenced by Indigenous Continent: New Spain/Mexico and Central America is explicitly excluded from North America in Hamalainen’s narrative–not for understandable reasons of scope and the different nature of its indigenous societies, but because Hamalainen seemingly believes them to not be a part of the North American continent!
If one can look past these baffling statements, though, Indigenous Continent remains a solid introductory history of the colonization of North America. Indeed, I think Hamalainen’s overall professional goal of convincing Europeans to look at native societies more seriously as mature, complex states in their own rights was well served for me, though perhaps not in the way he intended. The more occasions in which native peoples played opposing powers off against each other, renegotiated previous agreements from positions of strength, and try to communicate their own principles of governance or ownership to oblivious colonists, the more I saw mirrors of Europeans’ own division of indigenous peoples, breaking of treaties, and attempts to enforce their own values. For this historian of empires, Indigenous Continent only further emphasizes how the European colonization of the Americas was really little different than millennia of previous imperialism, and for all the hubris and unwillingness to understand other cultures shown by Europeans, native peoples seem to have been equally hamstrung by their inability to grasp the true genocidal nature of the threat they faced and respond appropriately.