In The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 novel by Ray Bradbury, humans have settled Mars—not the airless rock we know from science, but a mythic place, complete with an Arizona-like climate, pink skies, and breathable air. The settlers are middle class Americans, as Bradbury chose to understand them in 1950: good-natured unassuming folks who want nothing more than a modest house and a garage with a car. There had been native Martians when the settlers arrived, but they were wispy, insubstantial beings, and they more or less dwindled away over the course of the book. No human dispossessed or committed any violence against the Martians, but by the end of the book there were only ghost Martians, along with a few scattered artifacts and ruins.
Even as a kid I understood the parallels with the settlement of the western United States—or at least the sanitized version of that process. We had tamed and settled a continent, and now we were ready to start colonizing space: the next frontier—as per Star Trek, the final frontier. What was central to this myth was the assumption that we had taken what was free for the taking. If you were planted in front of a TV in the 1960s, like I was (when you weren’t reading Ray Bradbury), Indians were as notional as Bradbury’s Martians.
But we knew there had to be more to the story. Like many of my peers, I’ve always been fascinated by Native Americans, and about their interactions with Europeans. Spanish, French, and English invaders and settlers all went about occupying the new hemisphere in different ways: the Spanish conquered, the French traded (and tried to convert), and the English plowed their way westward. But always, and especially in the case of the English (as they morphed into Americans), the standard histories and stories assumed something called “manifest destiny”: the imperative of pushing the Indians out of the way. Ours was the superior civilization, and the weak always vanquish the strong. How could we share the continent with Indians as partners when they had no organized governments, no towns or cities, no industries or currencies to oppose to our well-defined culture?
Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent is history-from-the-other-side that attempts to scrape off centuries of prejudice and presumption from the history of North America. What we think we know, even after decades of revisionism, is still contaminated by ignorance and chauvinism.
The Indians understood exactly what was at stake. They were not easily or quickly vanquished. As late as the 1870s, 380 years after Columbus and just 150 years before today, there were viable Indian nations—the Lakotas in the northern plains and the Cheyenne in the southern plains—who maintained a working economy and sufficient military capability to keep Europeans at bay. But centuries of realignment, negotiation, and adaptation finally failed these nations as railroads, the telegraph, and successive waves of settlers broke the resistance once and for all. What’s hard for us to understand is that this result was obvious to absolutely nobody until it happened. Once it did happen, the preceding 380 years were recast as prologue, part of an inevitable process. Nobody in 1650, 1750, or even 1850 made any such assumption.
Hämäläinen emphasizes the word Indigenous, with a capital I, to assert the potency of native societies as they confronted the various European empires. Here is an early example, describing events in the American southwest in the 17th century:
Spain had a momentous head start in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, but North American Indians had brought Spanish expansion to a halt: in the late sixteenth century, there were no significant Spanish settlements on the continent—only petty plunder regimes. North America was still essentially Indigenous. The contrast to the stunning Spanish successes in Middle and South American was striking: how could relatively small Native groups defy Spanish colonialism in the north when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and Maya Empires had fallen so easily? The answer was right in front of the Spanish—the decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas—but they kept missing it because the Indigenous nations were so different from Europe’s hierarchical societies. They also missed a fundamental fact of Indigenous warfare: fighting on their homelands, the Indians did not need to win battles and wars; they just needed not to lose them.
Hämäläinen’s concedes nothing to assumptions of European superiority.
From the 16th century to the latter part of the 18th century, there were never just two sides to any conflict. The English and the French, and to a lesser extent the Spanish, were at least as concerned with vanquishing each other as with vanquishing Indians, and they negotiated and traded with Indian nations to create necessary alliances. This is how the Indians were able to obtain the guns and other tools they needed to remain viable.
Spanish and French strategists had envisioned their colonies as imperial launchpads that would facilitate further expansion, but that goal proved elusive for both empires. Colonists could do very little in North America without Native support and consent—a constraint that drove them to radically recalibrate their ambitions. The early-eighteenth-century lower midcontinent became a world of flexible alliances, malleable identities, and imperial failures. Colonies founded as imperial power centers morphed into Indigenous resource domains. As in the pays d’en haut decades earlier, imperial ambitions were diverging from reality in the lower Mississippi Valley.
The Indians, in turn, allied or warred with each other as their priorities dictated. The Iroquois, based in what is now upstate New York but with dominion over an empire stretching from Quebec in the north to Illinois in the West and the Carolinas in the South, were particularly formidable. The Iroquois established their confederacy of five tribes in the decades just before the appearance of the Europeans and remained a power until the late 1700s—quite a run. (I’ve been fascinated by the Iroquois ever since my seventh-grade class spent a semester learning about them from a book titled The Great Tree and the Longhouse. The nuns seemed to relish the gory details of Jesuit martyrdom.)
The X factor was disease—a topic often backgrounded in triumphalist narratives. Throughout Indigenous Continent are passages describing how one tribe or another would lose 50 or 80 percent of its population due to a smallpox epidemic. Colonists suffered too, but there was an inexhaustible supply of new immigrants to restock their settlements.
The Iroquois met mass death by waging “mourning” wars on neighboring tribes:
The Iroquois had driven thousands of people into the west, gaining a vast domain in their wake. It was the first large-scale western expansion in early American history. But this did not put an end to the warfare, which only seemed to escalate as the Iroquois’s enemies dispersed. The explanation was at once simple and unique: the Iroquois needed people more than they needed territory. They needed captives to replenish disease-ravaged populations, mend fractured lineages, alleviate pain through vengeance, and restore the spiritual vitality of their communities.
When Iroquois warriors returned with captives, the clan mothers would sort them:
Those chosen for literal adoption went through a “quickening” ceremony in which they received the name and social role of a deceased Iroquois. These people—known as we-hait-wat-sha—or “a body cut into parts and scattered around”—were adopted into clans, became full-fledged members of the Iroquois League, and were obliged to defend it in battle, even against former kin. The ritual adoptees [a second category] were slotted into Iroquois families as “uncles” or “nephews.” Their faces were painted red and black, and they were allowed to give a feast and recite their war honors before being executed. Condemned captives were tied to a stake, and their new relatives took turns to “caress” them with firebrands. Women cut up the corpses and boiled the pieces in kettles so that the Iroquois could absorb the prisoners’ spiritual power. The Iroquois aimed to dismantle “their nationality,” to prop up their own.
I found myself rooting for and admiring the Iroquois despite the astonishing violence that they perpetrated. If you’ve never read much history, you might think we live in violent times, but in fact what we would call genocide was business as usual for most of human history. The Iroquois, like most Indian nations, were moral people who played by a certain set of rules. But torture and death were part of their world, and if we insist on imposing our standards on them, or on any historical group sufficiently different from us, we become blind to what their lives were like. It was never senseless violence. It was … appropriate violence? Appropriate for them, anyway.
Slavery was another component of life in early North America. But as originally practiced, it was not based on racism. In the 17th century there was all sorts of variations: Indians enslaving other Indians, whites enslaving Indians, Indians enslaving Africans, Africans enslaving other Africans. It was an economic strategy: people were a resource. In a not untypical passage, we read how the Comanches raided down into Mexico for the specific purpose of capturing people to tend their horses:
The horse herds of the four allies had exceeded Comancheria’s carrying capacity, forcing a difficult choice: either reduce their herds or expand again. The Comanches did not seek war, but they could not accept smaller herds; the Comanches’ individual and collective power hinged on horse wealth. The Comanches turned south and went to war with Mexico for horses, grass, and captives. Raiding, already a major enterprise, was about to become an industry. The Comanches carried scores of Mexican captives into Comancheria to tend to their growing horse herds. Slavery became a substantial institution within the Comanche world, but it was not rigidly structured or managed. A large number of slaves were eventually adopted into Comanche households. They were called kwuhupus, “my captives.”
That sounds like a practical strategy; it almost sounds charming. No doubt it was generally not very charming for the kwuhupus, but nor was it tainted with hatred or racism. It’s interesting to consider the progression of events in North America: first slavery without racism, then slavery with racism, and finally racism without slavery.
No event so devastated the prospects for Indian nations in North America as much as the American Revolution—or rather the outcome of that war. After 1776, it was no longer possible for the Indians to play one empire off against another. The Americans were not restrained by any grand strategy, or by a monarch in Europe who could set limits on what was permissible. Over time, the Americans grew ever more confident of their strength, and ever less willing to negotiate or share the land they coveted. Thus began the years of Indian “removals,” of treaties torn up before the ink dried, and ultimately of mass slaughter.
The last-ditch effort of the Indians was to become as much like the invaders as possible:
Facing a program of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, the southern Indians knew that retreating from U.S. aggression spelled dispossession and defeat. Americans recognized only one kind of civilization—their own—which meant that the Indians needed to embrace a version of that civilization if they were to survive as independent nations. The result was not only newspapers and plantations, but revised racial thinking. The Cherokee leader Guwisguwi already lived in a two-story home, had an estate of several orchards, and owned nineteen Black slaves and a ferry.
But it was all for naught:
The Cherokees were ready to engage in nation-to-nation talks with the U.S. representatives but their cause proved futile. The Georgia assembly demanded that John Quincy Adams remove the Cherokees, and when he refused, the assembly denied Cherokee sovereignty.
These days, public gatherings in Seattle, where I live, are often preceded by a statement like the following:
We acknowledge that we are on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Nisqually people, or “Squally-Absch.” Squally-Absch means “People of the River, People of the Grass.” Nisqually people have inhabited and stewarded these lands Since Time Immemorial.
These declarations tend to make me uncomfortable, not because they aren’t true, but because they change nothing. If alien settlers ever do arrive from outer space, we shouldn’t expect to be treated any better than we treated the Indians. They might be willing to acknowledge that we were here first, though.
