The defeat of General Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the hands of the Sioux and Cheyennes at the Little Bighorn in 1876 was not the result of the general or his troops’ bad luck, but rather the logical result of the Native Americans being better strategists, familiar with the terrain, and tactically superior to the American soldiers.
This was not the only time, from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century, when the so-called “redskins” (derogatory term) proved extremely capable of defeating whites and imposing their own military dynamics. In his fascinating history of the American Indian Wars, “A Continent of Natives: The Epic Battle for North America” (2022), Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen questions the inevitability of colonial expansionism. The researcher, who holds a PhD in History from the University of Helsinki and is considered one of the world’s experts on the conquest of North America, shows that on several occasions, the natives came close to inflicting a decisive defeat on European colonial powers and the United States. In fact, they came close to expelling these settlers from North America altogether.
In Hamelinen’s revolutionary account, the 57-year-old Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, North America’s indigenous tribes are no longer the usual passive victims, submitted to an inexorable and irreversible fate. Rather, in this book they are powerful agents who dominated the continent for centuries after the colonists’ arrival and posed a very real threat to their plans of conquest.
The siege of Fort Detroit during Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, as depicted in a painting by Frederic Remington.
Hamalainen points out that this continent was in the hands of the indigenous people for much longer than we usually think. The indigenous people had political organizations with extraordinary fighting abilities, such as the Iroquois League. Hamalainen points out that the power of the Iroquois League lasted from the 16th century to the 19th century, “which makes this country the oldest and more central in history than the United States.” Hamalainen also compares the horse-riding empires of the Comanches and Sioux with other powerful horse-riding nomadic tribes such as the Mongols.
In 1776, around the time of the declaration of American independence, the scholar told EL PAÍS, “Europeans claimed much of the continent, but on the whole the Native Americans were effectively in control.” Rather than talking about “colonial America,” the expert asserts, we should speak of “Native America,” which was colonized “slowly and unevenly.” In fact, the United States “remained overwhelmingly Native well into the 19th century.” He argues that countless Native American groups “fought fiercely to defend their territories and keep their cultures intact,” and “came to thwart the imperial ambitions of France, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, and later the United States.”
The Scholar’s story follows the Indian Wars in a meticulously documented and highly engaging way, in stark contrast to the somber, traditional structure of classics such as Dee Brown’s Bury Your Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). The book cemented in the public consciousness the idea, reinforced by the film Dances with Wolves (1990), that the struggle against the whites was an inevitable march to the destruction of Native American societies, doomed ever since the first settlers set foot on North America. But Hämäläinen shows that in reality, colonists often operated on the periphery of powerful Native American tribes and confederations, and often retreated, bringing their colonial projects to the brink of disaster. And the Native Americans were not sitting around with feelings of melancholy or doom, but rather they were strong, energetic, and equipped with the resources and weapons they needed to fight.
Throughout Indigenous Lands, Hämäläinen portrays indigenous peoples as “strong, creative and resilient” historical figures. In the book, Hämäläinen emphasizes that indigenous peoples were not the one-dimensional tribes they were portrayed to be in the traditional stories “rooted in our culture.” [Western] Our culture and our spirit.”
The kidnapping of Jemima Boone by the Shawnee, as depicted in a painting by Karl Ferdinand Wimmer.
While the term “empire” gets a lot of attention because Native Americans are often commonly associated with real gangs in North America, this researcher refers to Native American warriors as “soldiers” (the military equivalent of white fighters) and refers to tribal leaders and authorities by Native American terms rather than the standard usage of “chief.” It is also notable that in some cases, the researcher uses the names preferred by these nations rather than the more common names given to them by whites or their enemies, for example, Wyandot instead of Huron and Meskwaki instead of Fox.
Pekka Hämäläinen is a Finnish historian who specializes in the history of the conquest of North America.
After a few chapters explaining the society’s past in the face of European colonization and emphasizing their notion of “horizontal and consensual” leadership, Hämäläinen describes “the overwhelming and sustained power of the Native Americans in North America,” reflecting on early conflicts with the Spanish, French, and British, and mentioning how the Pilgrims from the Mayflower were allowed into the country because they were useful to the Wampanoag strategy against their Native enemies. The book also includes a look at the historical Anka people and how they manipulated the Connecticut settlers to gain an advantage over the Pequots. The central role of women in the politics of the Five Tribes Confederation, which was so surprising to the French (other Native American women, such as the Cherokees, even participated in combat), and the “overwhelming military superiority of the Iroquois.” Hämäläinen emphasizes that the Mohawk “did more than contain the Europeans…they demanded their submission.”
Vintage illustration of Seminoles attacking a fort.
New England was nearly destroyed in 1675, and all colonial projects on the continent seem to have stalled or ended completely between that date and 1690, a period that Hämäläinen calls the Native American “reaction.” King Philip’s War (1675-1676) forced New York onto the defensive. The scholar emphasizes that the cruelty perpetrated by whites was a sign of weakness. It is no coincidence that the fear they felt was expressed as a psychosis of demons and witches. In 1692, Salem was only 50 miles from the Native American border.
In the Southwest, the Pueblo Indian Rebellion broke out in 1680. The late 17th century saw a decline of colonialism across North America, with Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, and the 18th and 19th centuries saw growing threats, especially from the equestrian empires of the Comanches and Lakotas. After the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) weakened the Iroquois and Cherokees, their Council of Seven Fires became the most powerful Native American power on the continent.
Hämäläinen also points out that the Sioux and their allies defeated the United States in two wars, first at Red Cloud (1866) and then in a campaign that ended at Little Bighorn. He writes how the Lakota Empire (also known as the Teton Sioux) served as an unwitting protective shield for numerous small Native American nations, holding off U.S. militias and soldiers for decades.
There is a long history of powerful Native American resistance. Figures include Osceola, leader of the Seminole tribe of Florida, and Black Hawk, leader of the Sauk tribe west of Lake Michigan. The Kiowa and Apache are also mentioned. To be sure, there were fires of resistance everywhere. The United States was finally able to quell resistance by applying genocidal policies “after four centuries of Native American power.” Hämäläinen says the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee was a sign of settler weakness and fear. The United States was exhausted after more than 1,600 official armed conflicts with Native Americans. “There is a direct connection between Native American success, American vulnerability, and the intensity of vengeance.”
Sioux painting of the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Hector Juan
Could the history of North America have been different from how it had been taught? “As historians, we can only point out forks in the road… but in 1776 it was certainly possible to imagine the continent’s future. [Indigenous] The people controlled it.”
For Hämäläinen, the military technology of European settlers was not as superior as commonly believed: “It was undoubtedly important, but we must also take into account that there was never a moment in North American history when that technology was not also available to America.” [Indigenous people]”Wars are often won or lost not so much by the technology itself, but by social, cultural, and strategic questions about access to and use of that technology. It would be a mistake to see the military history of the continent as a battle between Europeans with modern military technology and indigenous peoples without it. Far more important is the scale at which communities can access and effectively deploy such technologies.”
A scene from “Dancing with Wolves” (1990).
One of the most fascinating pages in A Continent of the Indians is the chapter on the acquisition and control of the horse by the Comanches and Sioux: “It is a thrilling odyssey, and one that I have always enjoyed writing about. Fortunately for me, European writers of the period were fascinated by the horse-riding natives, and wrote in great detail about the subject. My ability to describe the phenomenon is largely based on theirs.”
At first glance, using the term “empire” to describe Indigenous peoples might seem surprising. “There have been many different kinds of empires throughout history. The last thing I wanted to do was equate empires like those of the Comanches or the Sioux with the United States today. If there are parallels, they are with other horseman empires. That’s at the heart of a project I launched at Oxford a few years ago. One of the books that came out of that is, [French historian] Marie Favreau’s masterpiece, “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (2021)”
When asked what he thought of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the Finnish historian said it was “an immensely popular book, published in the early 1970s, during the anti-Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement, at a time when people were disillusioned with the frontier settlement story and craved new stories that would highlight the violence and inhumanity of Western expansion.” [But we’re now] “At another moment,” he clarifies, “historians [centering Indigenous narratives] in the context of continental history.”
When it comes to films about indigenous North Americans, Hämäläinen is adamant: “I can’t think of any that don’t have problems, but two I particularly dislike are Dances with Wolves; it’s full of historical inaccuracies and the main character is a very intelligent white man who acts as a guide for the indigenous characters. Black Robe (1991, based on Brian Moore’s novel about Jesuits who try to convert the Huron people of Canada) is less well known but better and more historically accurate.”
Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.
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