Reviewed: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous
Power
by Pekka Hämäläinen
Yale University Press, 530 pp., $35.00; $22.00 (paper)
A recent history centers
the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of
the formation of the United States.
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Oglala Lakota Chief Red
Cloud in a formal portrait arranged by William Blackmore,
whose hand is visible at right. (photo by Alexander Gardner/
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
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In the spring of 1870 Congress was in the process of debating the
Indian Appropriations Bill. While the bill's main purpose was to
renew or enhance funding for Native peoples and communities, it
contained a rider that finally formally ended what is known as the
treaty period of federal Indian policy: no longer would Indian tribes
be treated as independent nations. Rather, Native people would be
treated as individuals, and they would henceforth be considered
"wards" of the state. Native Americans weren't considered, and certainly
were not treated as, citizens (of the United States or any other
nation). Instead, the rhetorical categories of the "Great White
Father" and his pitiful "Red Children" were codified into law. But
this had been merely one of many possible futures, as Pekka Hämäläinena
Finnish scholar of American Indian historymakes clear in Lakota
America, his profound history of the Lakota people.
Watching from the gallery of the Senate during deliberations about
the bill was the Oglala Lakota war chief Red Cloud. Red Cloud had,
several years earlier, led a coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne, and
Arapaho bands in a series of battles against the United States and
won. In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, he had secured for his
people a huge homeland: called the Great Sioux Reservation, it was
48,000 square miles and included not only the Black Hills for the
Lakota, stretching from western South Dakota to Wyoming, but also
"unceded" lands in North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana,
where "no white person or persons" was allowed to settle. This treaty
effectively pushed the US out of the upper Great Plains, seriously
jeopardizing the very idea of a transcontinental America.
There is no record of what Red Cloud thought as he watched the
debate in 1870. There is no way to know if he understood the nature
of the discussion, just as there is no way to know, truly, how keen
and competent and brilliant he was, how much history he had at his
command, and how that history informed his future decisions. But
it would be foolish to underestimate Red Cloud or, by extension,
the confederation of bands that called themselves the Lakota. Blinded
by Eurocentrism and myths about "savages," the US military had recently
paid a steep price for being dismissive of the Lakota Empire that
controlled the heart of the heartland. The Lakota had been interacting
with foreignersboth Native and Europeanin their lands
for centuries, and with Americans for nearly a hundred years. Though
the Americans' expressions of power waffled between almost orgiastic
bloodletting and republican idealism and restraint, the Lakota understood
well that the state wanted their lands and that profit was the motive
behind much, if not all, of the Americans' conduct.
This is a passing moment in Hämäläinen's book, but
it perfectly captures the strangeness of our shared but largely
unknown and unexplored history: Red Cloud, one of the victorious
leaders of a vibrant, violent, and relatively young Indian empire,
watching the workings of imperial America, just as young and vibrant
and violent. What Hämäläinen sets out to share with
us is not merely a story of the rise and fall of the Lakota or,
conversely, a story of the rise of American fortune and the erosion
of its stated ideals. He situates the Lakota in relation to other
tribes, to the United States, and to France, Britain, and Spain.
The story he tells is of two countries, one Lakota and one American:
In 1776 two nations were born in North America. One was conceived
in Philadelphia, the other in the Black Hills of South Dakota,
and they were separated by more than seventeen hundred miles.
Exactly a century later those two nations would clash violently
along the Little Bighorn River in what is today southern Montana.
Like Romulus and Remus of Roman mythology, these twinsseparately
and together, in concord and strifehelped create our modern
nation.
Growing up, as I did, as an Ojibwe on the Leech Lake Reservation
in north-central Minnesota, we viewed the Lakota to our west as
a tribe of legend. We were taught that they were fierce and uncompromising
and would rather die than be diminished. They ate dogs. They had
the coolest ceremonies. They walked or rode on picturesque buttes.
They hunted bison. We, on the other hand, negotiated and orated
more than we fought, lived in swamps, harvested wild rice, and snared
rabbits. The Lakota, we were told, had been and remained our mortal
enemies. This despite the fact that I knew many mixed Ojibwe-Lakota
people and just as many Lakota who had settled and lived in northern
Minnesota. And they were just as American and Nativeand complicatedly
and confusedly bothas I was.
White America had its fantasies and stereotypes of the Lakota and
we had our own, which were equally disconnected from reality. But
central to both of our conceptions of the Lakota was the idea that
they were defined in opposition to American state power. The Lakota,
after all, had handed the republic its most stunning defeats, including
the battles that resulted in the Treaty of Fort Laramie and the
eradication of Custer's command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn
in 1876. They had also suffered from America's most savage excesses:
the exploitation of gold in the Black Hills in the 1870s; the massacre
of 250 men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in
1890. What was harder for us to see were the ways in which America
grew up in relation to the Lakota, among other Native tribes.
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An indigenous woman leading
protesters against President Trump's executive order fast-tracking
the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, Los Angeles,
February 2017 (photo by Mark Ralston/ AFP/ Getty Images)
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This is precisely what Hämäläinen tries to show
in Lakota America. He argues that not only has the importance
of the Lakota to the formation of the United States been overlooked,
but so has the importance of their contested territory: the North
American interior. An "immense swath of land stretching from the
Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian Shield
to the edges of the American South," as Hämäläinen
describes it, the interior has "long been a blind spot in American
historical consciousness." Thomas Jefferson, far more interested
in vying for American dominance on the coasts, believed that the
land obtained in the Louisiana Purchase nearly by accident was so
wild that it would take "a thousand generations" to settle.
The history of America has largely been understood as beginning
in the east and moving west (or "westing"), until the frontier was
officially closed in 1890. In this configuration, Indians, like
the land, are simply there: difficult and dangerous but ultimately
tamed. Hämäläinen shows through careful and detailed
research how the US military and the Lakota were both actors navigating
a complex matrix of relationships in the area. "Jefferson's myopia
will no longer do," he tells us:
The great interior, the setting of this book, was a dynamic,
cosmopolitan, and intensely contested world. Dozens of Indian
nations and four colonial powers sought to rule parts or all
of it, producing a shifting constellation of expansions, conquests,
retreats, and collapses.
Hämäläinen does an admirable job of disproving the
notion that the Lakota were an unchanging people, mounted warriors
of the plain living in a state of constant surprise and confusion
at the presence of whites. In the seventeenth century, the Lakota
and the six other allied tribes collectively referred to as the
Sioux were largely woodland dwellers, clinging to and drawing life
from the riverine highways of the western Great Lakes region: the
St. Croix, Mississippi, Minnesota, and Red River valleys. In the
1680s, the Sioux, living in a beaver-rich area, became a crucial
partner in the fur trade with the French, and they grew in wealth
and military strength, extending their reach as far east as Montreal,
where they traveled regularly on trade and diplomatic missions.
But as a result of increasing hostility with other tribes jostling
for position in relation to the French and British, by the 1700s
the Sioux had begun looking west, pushing beyond the Red River of
the North (the western border of present-day Minnesota). They employed
their time-honored survival strategy: following the resource-rich
rivers. However, this put them into conflict with other tribes living
in waterfront villages in the region, among them the Cheyenne, Mandan,
Hidatsa, and Arikara.
Without the necessary experience to fight on horseback, and with
few guns after the contraction of the French trade after 1700, the
Sioux often faced disadvantages in battle, but had enough victories
to hang on in the area. In this period, what could be called Lakota
political identity began to form, as the need to remain anchored
in river valleys consistently brought allied groups into contact,
allowing meetings to take place and fostering a sense of unity.
But a distinct Lakota political and cultural identity didn't really
coalesce until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Lakota began
to pull away from the larger body of the Sioux as a result of persistent
westward expansion. They became a plains tribe, reaching as far
as the Missouri River in the Dakotas, aided by the horses and guns
they had accumulated through raiding and shifting trade alliances.
Only then was the Lakota Nation truly born.
Mounted, mobile, armed, and experienced from nearly two centuries
of conflict and negotiation with European powers and other tribes,
the Lakota were a formidable force. At times in the past they had
been an impediment to colonial expansion, foiling French dreams
of reaching the Pacific and creating a continental empire, but they
now became a conduit for it as they displaced and decimated other
tribes and worked tirelessly to make advantageous trade relationships
with the French and the British.
This period, from the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth
century, constituted the glory years for the Lakota. Their numbers
swelled, their territory grew, and they became the foremost force
to be reckoned with in the West. By the time of Lewis and Clark's
expedition in 1804, the Lakota were completely in control of the
upper Missouri, the first leg of Lewis and Clark's journey and considered
the most important as the gateway to the far West. A month after
the expedition departed, on the occasion of an Osage delegation's
visit to Washington, D.C., Jefferson wrote that Americans had to
practice careful diplomacy with the Osage and the Sioux "because
in their quarter we are miserably weak." This turned out to be impossible,
since Lewis and Clark had next to no knowledge about the Lakota
or the complicated politics of the region; they compensated by packing
a vast supply of presents and equipping their boats with mounted
guns and a swiveling cannon.
The Lakota, by contrast, knew Americans, what they were like, and
what could be expected from representatives of the American republic.
They had been trading with the British and French for centuries
and with isolated American fur buyers for decades. Also, as diplomats
and power brokers they had gleaned information from their allies
(and enemies) to the south and east and possessed remarkably detailed
knowledge of American history and behavior. In Hämäläinen's
telling, the scenes of first contact between the Corps of Discovery
and the Lakotas are both hilarious and chilling: the Americans were
confused without a skilled interpreter, outnumbered, and immediately
stirred up intratribal tensions by recognizing one Lakota leader
over another. The situation Lewis and Clark presumed to control
devolved swiftly into an armed standoff, but the Lakota deescalated,
choosing not to wipe out the entire corpseven though they
likely could havein the hope of integrating them into their
trade network. This was Lakota politics, not Lewis and Clark's luck.
The next period of Lakota history is the one most people know if
they know any Indian history at all: the Plains Wars from roughly
1850 to 1890. This is when the modern era in America is thought
to have begun, when the frontier was closed and the reservation
system put firmly in place. Hämäläinen devotes a
good deal of space to relating the history of the expansion and,
ultimately, contraction of the Lakota Empire during this time. Again
and again a theme emerges: when the Lakota faced other tribes and
various European powers at the same time, they flourished. When
they faced the emerging American republic, they suffered. No longer
able to play Europeans off one another and suddenly surrounded,
they began a long period of hardship, warfare, and decline.
Hämäläinen then lays out, in broad strokes, Lakota
history from 1890 to the present. But this, frankly, gets short
shrift, and feels more dutiful than inspired. It was on Lakota land
and with mainly Lakota people that the United States found itself
again in armed conflict with an indigenous forceat Wounded
Knee in 1973, roughly a hundred years after the Battle of the Little
Bighornbut the incident receives scant pages in the book.
The Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017 are described
with equal brevity.
The book's strength is in the early material, and Lakota America
joins a number of other histories that are, collectively, forcing
us to reimagineor get to know for the first timethe
early days of empire. Michael McDonnell's Masters of Empire
(2015) does the same kind of work for the Algonquian Empire that
formed near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and effectively controlled
trade in the new world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
McDonnell convincingly shows that the center of power in early North
America was not, in fact, New York or anywhere in the east but rather
the aqueous crossroads of Sault Ste. Marie. Andrés Reséndez
creates a whole new perspective on slavery, disease, and empire
in the New World in his stunning book The Other Slavery (2016),
arguing that the enslavement of Native people in North America started
earlier and lasted longer than the enslavement of African-Americans,
and is essential to understanding the changing fortunes of Native
peoples. Native scholar Michael Witgen tackles the idea of empire
in early America even more forcefully in An Infinity of Nations
(2012), and in Violence Over the Land (2006), Ned Blackhawk
looks at the relationship between violence and empire in the Great
Basin.
These books and others are part of a growing body of single-tribe
histories. It would be strange if French history was only understood
or explored in relation to the British. So, too, in North America,
it should be strange to think of tribes only in relation to European
empires and, subsequently, to the United States. Histories like
Lakota America are a vital corrective, though it has occasional
lapses: Hämäläinen claims that in order to understand
Indian history it is necessary to understand that tribes often developed
more directly in relation to other tribes than to Europeans, and
that, especially in the early days, the overriding concern of Indian
communities was not, in fact, white people. But he doesn't plumb
those Native relationships as much as I would have liked. The considerable
strength of Hämäläinen's effort has less to do with
the arc of the birth and life of Lakota America (unless we understand
that to be over in 1890, which would be a mistake) than with his
detailed, surprisingly original archival work, and how he integrates
"big-picture" moments in the history of North America:
In the eighteenth century, then, it seemed that there could
be four WestsBritish, French, American, and Spanishof
which the last appeared the most unlikely
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Lakotas needed the Spanish Empire to last. More than a century
of negotiating the chronically unstable imperial landscapes
of North America had taught them that empires were most useful
to them when they were at once prosperous and seriously threatenedfit
to operate but too frail to dictate.
To put the development of Indian empires in relation to European
empires (and even to think of tribes as evolving in relation to
colonialism rather than perishing in the face of it), to claim that
the "West" isn't enough and we need to think of "Wests" in the plural,
is groundbreaking. Among the most astonishing things Hämäläinen
asks us to consider are the ways in which what wewith hindsightthink
of as inevitable was merely circumstance. What if the Spanish had
been able to hold on to their northern domain instead of passing
it off to the French? And what if the French had been able to hold
on to it in turn? Instead, the French, weakened by the debacle (for
them) of the Haitian Revolution, ending in Haitian independence
in 1804, sold the whole of their Western American territory to Jefferson
for a pittance, as Hämäläinen describes:
When [James] Monroe arrived in Paris in early April 1803, he
learned that Napoleon had made a new offer: not just New Orleans
but all of Louisiana for $15 million, 530 million acres at three
cents per acre. It was an emergency measure. Fearing that Louisiana
might be grabbed by the British, who already had entered it
via the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys, Napoleon handed over
the province to the United States for virtually nothing. A deal
was struck, and Napoleon shifted his sights to Europe, North
Africa, and Asia.
Of course, it was not his to sellmuch of the land was under
firm Lakota control at the time. Such a visionof the connectedness
of things, especially between Native nations and empires and European
oneshas been sorely lacking in the historical literature,
and Hämäläinen (along with the writers I mentioned
earlier) fills the void. These moments in the book are eye-opening.
In a casual aside he mentions that the Louisiana Purchase suddenly
made the United States a truly multicultural society, because along
with the acreage came Native nations, Chinese communities, and Latinx
people.
America, as Hämäläinen tells us over and over, wasn't
fated to reach from sea to shining sea, and the tribes who ended
up within it weren't fated to suffer and decline. What if the United
States had treated Native tribes and combatants as it did the South
after the Civil War? What if, instead of trying to drive tribes
into the ground, the US had respected tribal rights and lives and
sought to heal the rifts that existed between Native America and
America proper? After all, the South did immeasurably more damage
than all the tribal warfare between 1776 and 1876. By the close
of the Civil War, more than 360,000 soldiers from the North had
been killed, and yet the South was welcomed back.
By comparison, after the Dakota, eastern relatives of the Lakota,
killed around five hundred settlers and soldiers in Minnesota in
1862, all treaties were abrogated and Dakota tribes in the area
dispossessed of nearly everything. Just as it is impossible to know
what was going through Red Cloud's head in 1870 in Washington, D.C.,
it is impossible to know what kind of country would have emerged
if the United States had acted in accordance with its ideals rather
than its imperial character. Good history isn't just a matter of
getting the past "right," getting the facts straight. It can, and
does, do more: it engages our curiosity and our imagination and
directs them not just at the past, but also at our present moment:
What possibilities do we miss by clinging to old or false notions?
Lakota America is good history.
Lakota America, however, doesn't quite deliver on all its
promises: principally that this is a history of Lakota America from
its earliest days into the twenty-first century. In the early chapters,
Hämäläinen shows clearly and convincingly that in
the turbulent reshuffling in the Great LakesFrance vying for
Algonquian allies, Ojibwe-Odawa-Potawatomi empires wrong-footing
the French and switching their alliance to the British, Lakota and
Dakota making peace with Algonquians in order to resist other tribes
and the Britishthe American Indians made strategic alliances,
adopted new technologies, and struggled to live in new ecosystems
to meet their changing needs, and in doing so were changed. The
book remains strong when dealing with material roughly up until
1876, but there isn't a whole lot of history on offer beyond that,
and in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history that is included,
I couldn't help but feel that Hämäläinen abandoned
his thesis about Lakota adaptability. This deficit in the written
record needs to be rectified.
Any narrative without a robust treatment of the last 150 years,
without considering what happened after the Battle of the Little
Bighorn and the ways in which Native peoples have been shaped by
and in turn shaped imperial America even after the reservation period
began in earnest in 1890, will end up more regressive than transgressive,
no matter how adamantly we claim that tribes were not static. The
trouble, which Hämäläinen seems to be aware of, is
that our histories seem unable to imagine what Lakota America is
precisely when its citizens stopped conforming to our myths of who
they are and what they mean: in 1890, after Wounded Knee and at
the beginning of the reservation period, nomadic, mounted, and armed
Lakota life ended and a new kind of life began.
It is one thing to note that Red Cloud was gazing down on the machinery
of disenfranchisement in 1870, but what was the Lakota response
to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, when most Indians became
American citizens, or to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934,
which brought "modern" government to sovereign Indian nations? I,
for one, am curious about what would happen if Hämäläinen
applied the rigor and the radicality of his vision of the early
days to the later, modern ones. He shows us again and again how
the Lakota made connections and alliances with other tribes, how
leadership evolved in relation to changing circumstances, how culture
and identity were political as well as personal tools, how Lakota
diplomacy was related to violent overthrow, how new technologies
like the horse and the gun shaped the culture and outlook of their
users, how geography shaped tribal vision. I wanted him to apply
this insight to more modern times when, undoubtedly, all of these
forces continued to matter.
Lakota America does deliver on its most important points,
illustrating how the United States, as a matter of policy, needed
to see the Lakota as savage, simple, and disorganized, and how the
myths have followed in step. When Secretary of War J. Donald Cameron
briefed President Grant on Custer's disastrous defeat by the Lakota
at Little Bighorn in 1876, he began by writing that the Lakota "have
for centuries been pushed westward by the advancing tide of civilization."
As Hämäläinen points out, "His was but one of many
acts of misrepresentation that, over generations, have diminished
the Lakota people as historical actors":
The secretary could have written about the Lakotas' vast capacity
to determine their own destiny, about their diplomatic and military
sophistication, about their foundational role in shaping the
course of American history, but he did not. The United States
was gearing up to crush the Lakotas as a sovereign nation, and
the president and the American people needed a different kind
of Lakotas: primitive, treacherous, weak, and controllable.
At the very moment the Americans awoke to the reality that there
was an unyielding, seemingly unconquerable Indigenous power
in their midst, they began a systematic erasing of the Lakotas
and their remarkable historythe creation of Lakota Americafrom
memory.
Hämäläinen's book emphasizes that to understand
American history it is vital to understand Lakotaand, by extension,
Native Americanhistory; that rather than existing in a state
of constant first contact marked by incomprehension and surprise,
Native nations and the American nation knew each other, grew up
and around and through each other; that contact between the Lakota
and European powers wasn't one-sided and didn't necessarily spell
doom for Indians. The Lakota nation expanded for centuries as a
result of European colonization. Native American history isn't a
sideshow any more than it is simply a litany of abuse at the hands
of European empires. Lakota America joins, and in many respects
leads, a growing body of work centered on single-tribe histories
through which we can see, for the first time, the wild making of
America.
David Treuer
David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern
Minnesota. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southern
California and the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction,
including, most recently, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.
(December 2020)
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