Traditional histories don’t have a place for Lakotas on their maps, nor do they make room for Indigenous peoples on their timelines. Although Europeans have been a continuous presence in the Americas since the fifteenth century, most American history fast-forwards through the early centuries, treating the era before 1776 as prelude.
Again, the effect is to minimize Indigenous power, as those were the centuries when settlers were bunched up on the edges of North America and Native peoples had the run of the vast interior. Play back the tape at normal speed, and you see how long Europeans were confined to narrow areas and how halting their expansion was.
By Hämäläinen’s clock, it took some four hundred years from Christopher Columbus’s arrival before any colonizing power “subjugated a critical mass of Native Americans” in North America. That power was the United States, extensive in its reach yet late in its arrival. The country still hasn’t existed for even half the time that Europeans have been on the continent. “On an Indigenous timescale,” notes Hämäläinen, “the United States is a mere speck.”
In considering the whole map and the whole timeline, Hämäläinen is doing similar work to other historians of Native America. In other ways, however, he goes further. Hämäläinen is particularly interested in terminology. Too often, conventional vocabulary has conspired to quietly diminish Indigenous politics. Descriptions of people living in tribes, dwelling in villages, following the guidance of chiefs, and sending forth braves to fight seem quaintly out of step. Hämäläinen uses different language. Indigenous people, in his writing, belong to nations, live in towns, are governed by officials, and fight with armies and soldiers. Controversially, Hämäläinen describes the largest Indigenous groups as empires bent on hegemony. In Indigenous Continent he uses the twentieth-century term “superpower.”
Not all agree. “This is post-modern cultural relativism at its worst,” Estes has written of Hämäläinen’s Lakota America. Jameson Sweet, a Lakota and Dakota historian, rejects the idea that the Lakotas constituted an empire and sees them, rather, as “a desperate people trying to survive and adapt to a turbulent world brought on by settler colonialism.” In casting Native societies as imperialists, Hämäläinen arguably relieves Europeans of culpability—what was their sin, other than succeeding where their Indigenous rivals failed?
Such criticisms, which have come especially from Lakota historians, have not fazed Hämäläinen. Indigenous Continent presents an amped-up version of his earlier work’s argument, Tarantino-like in its taste for Indigenous power and violence. Native people are indomitable badasses: cunning, tactically brilliant, and terrifying to their enemies. Europeans, by contrast, mostly appear as hapless blunderers.