Indigenous Continent

Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.

They dominated far longer than they were dominated, and, a new book contends, shaped the United States in profound ways.

How best to tell the story of oppressed peoples? By chronicling the hardships they’ve faced? Or by highlighting their triumphs over adversity?

Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.