We live today in a very divided and polarized world. You can take almost any characteristic used to define a group of people today and it is now being used to separate and divide. We do this sometimes out of pride, others, out of fear and desperation. We thus define our individuality, or our ‘people’, in a process of reduction, eliminating variation and possibility. This is who I am. This is my world, the world that matters. When we do this our world shrinks. That outside of it, becomes a threat and ‘threats’ proliferate. The causes of our problems are commonly reduced to ‘them’. Most of the divisions are, however inconsequential. Having been pried open we find ourselves separated by seemingly giant rifts, animosities greatly exaggerating the actual differences. Too many ‘leaders’, in bids to gain power themselves and cement their own advantage, beat the drums of division, gaining followers, customers and believers to their cause…which is often something very different than what they may publicly say. A world built on such differences is a precarious one, as groups strive for security by focusing on the differences rather than on the infinitely more common shared links which join us. This country was, in many ways, built on such differences.

“Indigenous Continent”, by Pekka Hamalainen, a Professor of American History at Oxford University, takes a critical look at early American history, giving us a ‘lens’ through which we can compare and contrast the history we’ve been taught in school, a white, European colonist perspective, with the other, the history told from the perspective of the indigenous peoples of North America. Why should we pay attention to what a Finn writing and teaching in England has to say about us? Perspective. A little ‘remove’, is often indispensable in one’s effort to gain a fuller and healthier understanding of one’s world. Hamalainen did not grow up indoctrinated in the American ethos. His upbringing was at a remove from ours. Our unquestioned givens were not his. He calls into question, indirectly, the lessons presented in standard high school textbooks, an interpretation critical of much of what we’ve been taught. He does this here, not by setting conflicting views against one another point by point, but by simply telling the story. 

Many will have problems with this. Some may liken it to the teaching of so called Critical Race Theory in schools, which they see as a ‘revisionist’ history and the use of race.  They see it as an ‘unfair’ shifting of ‘blame’ to white Americans. Black Americans, and their perspective, in the opponents view, should take a ‘back seat’. Opponents of so called, ‘wokeism’, want that ‘fuller’ version of American history reduced to the singular white story of struggle and success. A heroic story. They would exclude books that teach otherwise from libraries and banish such topics from curriculums. They cling to the belief that there is a hierarchy of race, that the ‘white’ race is superior and thus more deserving. That whatever ‘wrongs’ another has suffered were some how inevitable, deserving, that ‘corrections’ can only make the world worse. The ‘past’ is not our children’s fault. We should not burden our young people with the guilt of the past, guilt for actions that were consistent with ‘nature’. But if all we understand is a self-serving and pasteurized version of our history, minus the perspective of others, the ‘wrongs’ they suffered omitted, how can any of us make good decisions in our own lives? For ourselves or others? Our history, regarding the continent’s native peoples, is in many ways even more egregious than has been our ‘treatment’ of Blacks. We as a country, dominated, at least for now, by those of white European descent, have commonly used differences to reinforce our own political power and status while denying or ignoring others. We’ve gathered and held on to power by denying it to others, often violently.

I’ve read other books like Dee Brown’s, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”, and “Thunder In the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War”, by Daniel Sharfstein, among others on historical events concerning indigenous peoples. They are important books, but look at singular ‘events. The entirety of American history is a compilation of such singular events, played out many, many times as the Americans spread across the continent. They cannot be fully understood without a more comprehensive view

This book provides much of the missing context. It is a broad overview linking many of the historical antecedents covered in other books. It is helpful and necessary to make sense of our past, not just to avoid repeating past mistakes, but to acknowledge one’s responsibility to those maltreated and dispossessed.  History unfolds continuously. Denying it serves no helpful purpose. The guilt of our forebears need not be ours, but when we refuse to acknowledge it, avoiding questions of how ‘we’ got to this present day, we are in danger of continuing those unexamined wrongs, of repeating those same mistakes, inflicting great harm on others and ultimately upon ourselves. History presented from only a limited white perspective, of the ‘winners’, is insufficient. We must understand our historical tendency to dismiss ‘others’. We must see ourselves, warts and all, and understand that that need not be us.

This is a ‘difficult’ read in two senses: first, in its comprehensive attempt to tell a story that has largely been suppressed, in favor of the self-congratulatory telling of our history we proudly teach in high school history books, incomplete and shallow as that is, propped up and filled out by the cultural tools of television, movies and social media which have us riding off into the sunset in our white hats. We see ourselves as unquestioned winners. The second difficulty is that the ‘truth’ cannot be told in a single linear narrative. It is the story of hundreds of different groups of peoples living independent lives, whom although they share much, have distinct languages, cultures and social structures. They were not one, homogenous, people. Who they were, was shaped by where they lived, their origin stories, their social and political structures and the other peoples they shared their home ranges with. They were not centralized. Not homogenous. Only a few lived in larger, more fixed ‘cities’ in hierarchical societies and, because they were here for several thousands of years, these structures themselves changed over time, rising and disappearing for a variety of reasons. 

Hamalainen, begins by attempting to give the reader a sense of the breadth and variety of cultures here before the arrival of the European colonizers. He returns to this weaving in of unique elements of particular groups of peoples as he writes of more specific events within the larger history and how the many groups, with their unique blend of cultures, respond to the appearance and spread of the Europeans. There is some inevitable ‘jumping back and forth’ as he does this as events unfold, independently and often simultaneously, across the continent. The story becomes much more complex as Europeans begin to penetrate the continent from various landing points. There are the several European powers with their own intentions, limitations and strategies. Much of Western difficulties stem from the fact that European culture and traditions were much different than those of the many Indigenous groups. Europeans saw the differences as signs of inferiority and relatively few attempted to understand the world into which they were intruding. Refusal to understand, to recognize and respect the differences, lead to conflict from the beginning. The differences lead to violence and bloodshed.

This story could not be linear. There was no singular point of contact from which ‘change’ spread uniformly, no single response, no single strategy by the occupying Europeans as it played out for over 400 years. The indigenous peoples did not simply yield to the occupiers. They had a long history of diplomacy negotiating their lives with the various peoples of their regions. Eloquence, the capacity to rationally convince others of your position was highly valued. Kinship was also a major factor in determining relationships between groups. Peaceful outcomes, while often sought, were not always possible. There were some disputes, some peoples, with whom they simply could not, would not, yield to, and violence was not uncommon. The Europeans did not understand what to make of these people and simply treated them as one, savages, as less than human.

Indigenous peoples of North America were not ignorant, violent savages. Their social and political worlds were generally egalitarian, quite  sophisticated, their members active participants, unlike the hierarchical European world in which many struggled for survival, powerless to effect change and correct the direction of their lives. In Europe control was in the hands of the rich and powerful. Nor were they simple ‘noble’ savages. Theirs was a complex world of hundreds of indigenous groups. Each unique. While most indigenous peoples lived in very structured societies they were generally quite mobile moving across territories in seasonal patterns…of the land, not owners of it. Diplomacy was a requisite for survival as people lived on loosely defined lands requiring agreements with one’s neighbors. Democracy was a matter of daily life. Individuals could not be ordered about. Their participation required their agreement. Family and kinship ties were essential in establishing inviolable connections and obligations. In many groups leadership was matriarchal, or at the very least, women played central roles in daily life and decision making. This included marriages between tribal members and the colonists, an arrangement of which the colonists did not appreciate the full meaning of. Within native groups marriage was generally ‘flexible’, a reality which most missionaries and the conservative protestant colonists thought abhorrent. Women could not be locked into bad relationships. 

Property was often shared. Power was often measured by one’s ability to share with one’s people, not just limited to their families. Selfishness, as we understand it, didn’t exist. The obligations linking people were real and undisputed. The accumulation of personal wealth, was for the most part, discouraged, there was no ‘state’ to enforce the rules that protected ownership which Europeans enshrined. Wealth then, for them, did not provide its holder, power. Land could not be owned in the sense we have, the people were of it and as such inseparable. They had ‘rights’ to use the land, to ‘harvest’ what it could produce, but they did not own it and could not sell it. To develop/destroy its natural resources and capacities for one’s short term, personal benefit, was beyond consideration.

Leadership was more of a meritocracy, individuals with proven abilities and leadership qualities were recognized, only in a few cases was their one supreme leader. Power was granted to someone, not taken and was commonly revoked when the person was found to be unworthy of it or ineffective. Its ‘possession’ was fluid. Eloquence, one’s ability to inspire and convince, to reason, debate and win over, one’s capacity to understand, to remain rational and reasoned, to meet the ‘need’ of the moment, went toward an individual’s personal power. Responsibility was distributed. Decision making was consensual. Discussions were often long.  The good of the group was primary. At the same time an individual could not be compelled to do that which they disagreed. Personal freedom was paramount as was the good of one’s people. Differences were often set aside, after individuals agreed. So much was shared that this was not as difficult a limitation as we might think. Bands of the same people possessed a degree of independence, self-determination which might be yielded, temporarily, for the good of the whole. Once a situation was ‘resolved’ the traditional form was retaken, autonomy regained. While rights and liberties were not written and enforced by a governing body, autonomy, personal agency was paramount and it could not be yielded without agreement.

with colonization came trade, violence, disease and dispossession and, ultimately, the removal of Indigenous people from their land. Europeans were impatient, ignorant and intolerant of the differences. Violence was a common approach and of course, their violence set the tone for increasing violence. Violence, came in the form of skirmishes, battles, raids, revenge taking, and too often, punitive attacks by Europeans and colonists against individual indigenous villages or groups, often entirely innocent of the alleged ‘crimes’ perpetrated by others, crimes themselves which were responses to the colonists refusal to consider their own impacts on the daily lives of natives. These were often carried out by angry militia men who may have been emboldened by alcohol. Indigenous people lacked any legal standing, had no rights in our legal system.

For over 300 years colonists were largely limited to lands east of the Appalachians along the Atlantic coast, with a few tiny exceptions in the Florida country and near the mouth of the Mississippi. Native peoples held the power and controlled the interior and traffic on the rivers. While European kings and colonists claimed huge swaths of land on paper, likely as not, they had never seen it before. Traders and missionaries scattered very thinly along the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes with a few along the Mississippi and Ohio where they operated out of trading posts conducting the fur trade with native hunters, while missionaries busied themselves with the saving of souls, souls which weren’t ‘lost’. The European presence was strictly limited by the controlling indigenous people. Military presence was almost nil. They could do almost nothing without the cooperation of the regions indigenous people. European governments had more than they could deal with back in Europe. For the missionaries this more than a few times ended violently.

Traders, strived to adapt and were valued for the goods they made available to the indigenous. The French, having neither the resources nor the intent to colonize, exercised considerable diplomatic efforts to maintain their limited control, but it was the natives who were calling the shots. The English, intent on colonizing, found themselves far more frequently in conflict, but they lacked the government and military to do so. The Spanish discovered in North America that they had ‘bit off’ much more than they could chew. They struggled to hang on and limit their European competitors. Often as not the Europeans served the larger indigenous confederacies and were relatively content doing so as it enabled them to still maintain their claims to the land as weak as they were. Wherever they were the Europeans soon found how tentative their claims were.

While indigenous people lived in place,  they actively rejected the idea of owning land, as they did the accumulation of personal wealth and the use of ‘money’ in trade. If anything the land ‘owned’ them. The Europeans and colonists made continuous attempts to gain ownership of more lands and they sought out those who would deal with them. Many times Confederacies of tribes and the tribes themselves forbade individuals from making any land agreements with either the Europeans or the colonists. It was not theirs to offer.

Trade, amongst the tribes was a way to establish bonds between different groups, it served a political and diplomatic purpose. Trade with the Europeans quickly became an issue of survival as conflicts exacerbated due to the europeans presence and pressures they presented, the disruptions to traditional ways of life, violence, disease and the massive losses of life suffered by indigenous peoples. Trade brought modern European weaponry. It helped establish and firm up relationships and became a way to pit the Europeans against each other. Indigenous peoples found themselves continuously reevaluating their situation, trying to stabilize their relationship with their land. That link was essential. They could not conceive of themselves separate from the land. For the indigenous peoples their land was literally sacred. It bore them. Upon it they directly depended and they took from it with gratitude and worked to appease the spirits native in it, who shared their gifts with them.

The Europeans and colonists came looking for wealth and ‘freedom’ taking by ‘right’ and might. (Diseases, smallpox, measles, flue, cholera and others played a major role, periodically decimating native peoples, waves of death taking 20-50% and more of their population at a time.) They found both the place and its native people’s ‘foreign’, less than themselves, who were God’s chosen people. Most of the newcomers did not make an attempt to understand natives seeing little reason to try. Conservative Protestants came for the religious freedom they were denied in Europe taking the role of their own European persecutors here in America, demonizing natives. The irony of this reversal was lost on them. To others the natives, at best, were an impediment to their plan to gain wealth. We didn’t recognize the social and political relationships that indigenous peoples lived by. We blundered in. Found them alien, naive. Ignorant. Unchristian. Labeled them ‘lazy’ because they would not ‘work’ as the colonists did for money, for survival. For them daily survival was not the same kind of issue. As long as the tribe was healthy, all would be looked after. The newcomers considered native ways as wasteful, inefficient, how could they not pursue wealth? What was wrong with them? The colonists denied them legal, moral and social standing, abused them, punished them and claimed their lands. Understandably the natives often responded defensively. When they did so and conflict occurred the colonizers treated them punitively to an extreme. We entered into contracts and treaties with them which not even we recognized, if there was the possibility to get more and there always was. We applied our own practices, which we inherited from feudal, warring, Europe, and we created conflict all around us. Our sense of superiority continuously caused us to under value them and disrespect their ways, their values and politics. We did not dominate the continent because of our superiority. 

Over 400+ years we chose conflict. Peaceable coexistence, which many of the indigenous strived for, was never part of our survival strategy. We behaved as though they did not deserve this place and we, by right of God, did. In many ways,  especially while the European powers still vied for territory, we remained dependent upon them, often relying upon them for simple survival, for food, in a foreign land. The immigrant Europeans were often poorly equipped for survival here when they arrived, lured by the promise of riches. Many viewed  physical work as beneath them and subjugated others, putting them into various forms of forced service, often extremely punitive, enslaving those they saw as beneath them or forcing the powerless into long periods of indentured servitude. The indigenous were critical to our fledgling economies as suppliers of furs, often food, sometimes even capturing their enemies, other natives, and trading them to the colonists, who north and south depended upon on various forms of forced labor on the farms and plantations as well as for their incipient industries. 

It was not just Black Africans who were enslaved here. The practice of slavery began with the arrival of the Spanish and the enforced labor of native people in the Caribbean which was very cruel. Yes, some indigenous peoples did take slaves themselves, but in many cases, natives adopted captives into their communities and families, unlike the colonists. Yes, sometimes their captives were executed when taken in war, but when adopted into the community, and they committed to the group, they had the ‘rights’ and roles of the group. 

Through trade with French, English, Spanish, the Dutch and the newly minted American colonists, natives gained metal tools and guns often while intentionally pitting the European imperial powers and Americans against one another. For the indigenous it was a struggle for survival and a way of life while for the Europeans and colonists it was a pursuit of wealth.

The conflicts between various indigenous groups was exacerbated by our push for more land which almost always required the exclusion of native peoples, pushing one group into the lands of another. We worked to remove them from the lands we coveted as well as to rid the continent of the French, English and Spanish who allied with various groups over the years. Manifest Destiny became justification for expansion and we implemented it through war, the spread of disease, destructive treaties, the violence of militias seeking revenge for native attacks on colonists and settlers. The colonists and settlers themselves generally ignored the treaties made by the government taking treaty lands for themselves and then demanding the military defend them. It took on a momentum of its own, uncontrolled by our young government and at times was promoted by it. Need, greed, ignorance and indifference drove the white occupation.  The natives weren’t blind to our imported European conflicts and used them to gain what they wanted while we fought amongst ourselves. Even in our Revolutionary War, both sides courted the indigenous. Many of the soldiers on both sides were natives who fought for their own reasons, generally to weaken those who presented the largest threat at the time. They played us off against one another, seeking supplies while we allied ourselves with those who we thought would best serve us. The indigenous allies would not be commanded. They fought for their own reasons by their own rules. There was often a degree of duplicitousness on ‘our side’, sometimes a result of the disorganization which divided and split the colonists and the would be imperial powers. Ultimately all of this brought incredible pressures on the natives, their societies and confederacies they formed in response. Sometimes their old animosities and disputes worked against them as they turned against themselves to secure their futures. We changed the basic politics of the continent as we pushed natives ever further west, until we demanded the west coast as well and they became pinched in between.

Hamalainen, spends much of his book describing the native response to the invasion. This was not a simple triumph for the colonizers, but an active conflict that unfolded across the continent over several hundred years. The many tribes fluidly forming confederacies to oppose the colonizers as they repeatedly violated their own treaties while at the same time, age old animosities often intruded and tribes warred against each other. European occupation ramped up all of this as tribes moved to less contested lands, traded with Europeans for guns and ammunition and later, especially west of the Mississippi, acquired horses which had been released and were populating the West. The indigenous peoples immediately recognized the advantages they offered, quickly became adept at their care, developing their skills as horseman, transforming their way of life and their style of warfare. Through the 1870’s natives were still a dominate power across the West. 

The new Americans feared the natives with good reason, although they continually refused to acknowledge their role and responsibility for the situation. Additionally, citizens of the new country distrusted government, funding it reluctantly and minimally, so even when it wanted to Americans did not possess the capacity to win the war. Over this long period Americans never made much of an attempt to understand them, as they continued forcing their ways on the peoples who had been here for thousands of years. The Americans lost many battles in the several hundred year process of occupation and domination. The government imposed many treaties of convenience which they enforced or neglected as it served them, too weak or simply uncommitted when it came to honoring their own agreements. It was very common for the local settlers, miners and townspeople to ignore such treaties, if they even knew them, as they occupied ceded and reservation lands, then demanding Army action in their ‘defense’. Militias form in the absence of government response. US policy was often conflicting and its actions uncoordinated. Ideals, weak as they may have been, were set aside and extirpation became the de facto program. 

Throughout these centuries large confederations of tribes came together to oppose the Europeans and then the new Americans as they spread out. The natives, with far more intimate knowledge of the land, fought a war that served them, dodging, feinting, striking and retreating in ways that often kept the Americans unsettled and confused, while the Europeans and new Americans kept trying to engage them European style on the battlefield in winner take all confrontations. The fledgling government kept trying to negotiate treaties and sales with singular leaders that never existed. It was a 400 year long battle of attrition. We raised countless villages, killed many women and children, whom we viewed as less than human. We went anywhere we wanted when we saw an opportunity for wealth, ignoring our agreements. We laid thousands of miles of railroad tracks, across lands we had no right to, (We ‘bought’ land from the French, taken land from the Spanish, which neither had ever possessed, claiming it on paper, unbeknownst to the native people’s who lived there.) which disrupted the movement of Bison and greatly mobilized our Army; we placed bounties on their scalps, men, women and children; we destroyed their ‘gardens’, ironically, as we were claiming to be trying to ‘civilize’ them, turn them into farmers tying them to small pieces of land; slaughtered the bison on which the Plains peoples were dependent and even killed their horses so they could neither follow the remaining herds to feed themselves, nor engage in the guerrilla style of warfare where they could attack and harry us before quickly disappearing again. Our ‘conquest’ of the continent, was not an honorable one, and many today would expunge any and all record of that history replacing it with a sanitized one which extolls our strengths and virtues.

For much of this history the indigenous peoples dominated the country while colonists, then Americans, largely resided in their urban safe havens, the countryside belonging to Americans, only tentatively and in a limited legal sense, on paper, while flood after flood of settlers moved in, took what they could, retaliating against the natives when they responded. Many Americans saw no place for the natives nor wanted to make any effort to ‘civilize’ them. Giving them a reservation of their own was even too much. They simply wanted them gone. 

Some may get frustrated with how this book is written, but like the history itself, it cannot be told simply, linearly. Understanding always demands something of the ‘student’.