And yet the limitations of Hämäläinen’s approach are striking, too. Despite his avowed aim to tell the story of North America from an Indigenous perspective, the main history he relates largely follows the white settlers in their movements. We get conflict zones in the Appalachians, south of the Great Lakes, in the Ohio River Valley, and, later, on the Great Plains, but in each instance Hämäläinen replicates the very thing he has said he was writing against: a fundamentally east-to-west story of European colonial expansion. Nor is the purview of “Indigenous Continent” exactly continental. Hämäläinen spends hardly any time in the Pacific Northwest or along the California coast. We learn little about the alliances and conflicts between tribal nations and the Spanish which flowed from north to south along the Rio Grande, from what is now Colorado to Mexico City. We learn little, for that matter, about the alliances and conflicts that the Iroquois and the Three Fires confederacies had with the British and the French in what is now Canada, extending all the way north to Hudson Bay. What we get is less an “Indigenous continent” than a Native United States.
The book is, at times, breathless in its exposition, and nuance is sometimes lost in the shuffle. So, too, are the attempts to include Indigenous concepts—linguistic, spiritual, cultural. Scholars will debate whether the formation and expansion of certain tribal nations are best understood in reference to European models of empire. And Hämäläinen’s eagerness to characterize the colonial slaughter of Indigenous people as evidence of fear and weakness wears thin as the tide turns, and the story of pitched battle gives way to one of systematic subjugation.
There is, of course, only so much that one book can do. As it is, the tremendous scope of “Indigenous Continent” exacts a narrative cost: often it reads like a monkish chronicle—a quick succession of names, dates, harvests, tragedies, schisms, rejoinings, subsequent sunderings, wins, losses. But, if Hämäläinen’s achievements are more circumscribed than his ambitions, it’s impossible not to honor both. I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand. It would have helped me see that there was indeed a larger story: that my civilization hadn’t been destroyed; that my tribe’s contribution to the past wasn’t merely to fade away in the face of history; that Native peoples—for better or for worse—made this country what it was, and have a role to play in what it now struggles to be.