The defeat of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry at the hands of the Sioux and Cheyennes at Little Bighorn in 1876 was not at all a matter of bad luck on the part of the general and his troops, but rather the logical and expected result of the Native Americans being better strategists. , were familiar with the terrain and tactically outmatched the American soldiers. And it was not at all the only time in which the so-called redskins proved to be very capable of defeating the whites and imposing their own military dynamics from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. In a very interesting and stimulating new history of the Indian Wars, Indigenous continent, the relentless struggle for North America (Desperta Ferro, 2024), the prestigious researcher Pekka Hämäläinen, doctor in History from the University of Helsinki and considered one of the world’s great specialists in Native Americans, questions the inevitability of colonial expansion and shows how close these were to natives on several occasions to inflict a definitive defeat on the European colonial powers and the United States, and even to expel them from North America.
In the revolutionary account of Hämäläinen (Helsinki, 57 years old), professor at Oxford, specialist in the Lakota and author of one of the best books ever written about the Comanches (The Comanche EmpirePeninsula, 2018), the Indian nations ceased to be the usual passive victims subject to an inexorable and irreversible destiny to become powerful agents that dominated the continent for centuries after the arrival of the colonizers and represented a very serious threat to their plans for conquest.
The continent, Hämäläinen points out, was in the hands of the indigenous people for much longer than we usually think, who had political entities with extraordinary warlike capacity such as the Iroquois League (whose power, he remembers, lasted from the 16th to the 19th century, “which makes this nation the oldest and gives it a more central historical role than the United States”) or the Comanche and Sioux equestrian “empires” (as he calls them), comparable, he says, to other dangerous nations of horseback nomads such as the mongols. On a date like 1776 (when the independence of the United States was proclaimed), the scholar tells this newspaper, “the Europeans could claim most of the continent, but the natives as a whole controlled it.” The expert affirms that instead of talking about a “colonial America” we should talk about an “indigenous America” that became colonial “only slowly and unevenly,” and that “remained overwhelmingly indigenous until well into the 19th century.” . Countless native nations, he claims, “fought fiercely to keep their territories intact and their cultures unscathed” and “came to thwart the imperialist pretensions of France, Spain, Great Britain and the Netherlands, and later the United States.”
The scholar’s narrative follows the Indian Wars in a documented and very exciting way and contrasts sharply with the somber and sad traditional story of classics such as Bury my heart at Wounded Knee (1970), by Dee Brown, the book that established the idea in the popular consciousness—clinched in 1990 by the film Dancing with Wolves— that the fight against the whites was an ineluctable and linear march towards the disaster of societies condemned since the first settlers set foot in North America. On the contrary, Hämäläinen shows how the colonizers often moved on the margins of powerful Indian tribes and confederations, retreating on many occasions, bordering on disaster. And how the natives did not wait at all with melancholy (the elegiac noble red man of The last Mohican by Fenimore Cooper) and feeling of disaster, failure and loss the invading advance, but well muscled, full of vitality, resources and the tomahawk well disposed. Hämäläinen portrays them as “strong, creative and resilient” historical actors, not at all one-dimensional troupes as they have been shown in a traditional story “entrenched in our culture and our mentality.”
Along with the word empires, which draws so much attention in relation to the North American Indians who are popularly associated more with gangs, the researcher chooses to call the Indian warriors “soldiers” (which equates them militarily with white combatants) and uses indigenous terms for the leaders and authorities of Indian nations instead of the typical “chiefs.” It is also surprising that in several cases he uses the names that these nations prefer to use instead of the more common ones given to them by the whites or their enemies (Wyandots instead of Hurons, Meskwakis for Foxes, Muscogis and non-Creeks; fortunately he leaves Iroquois and not Haudenosaunee ). Among the terminological innovations, he also refers to “biracial people” as mestizo.
In his account of the “overwhelming and persistent indigenous power in North America,” Hämäläinen, after a few chapters in which he explains the past of the societies that faced European colonization and which highlights their special “horizontal and consensual” concept of leadership , reviews the first conflicts with the Spanish, French and English, and the way in which the pilgrims of the Mayflower They were allowed because they were useful in the Wampanoags’ strategy against their Indian enemies. The historical Uncas and his manipulation of the Connecticut settlers to achieve primacy over the Pequots appears. The central role of women in the politics of the League of Five Nations, which so surprised the French (other Indian women, the Cherokees, could even go into battle), and the “overwhelming military superiority of the Iroquois.” The Mohawk, Hämäläinen emphasizes, “had gone beyond containing the Europeans. Now they demanded obedience.”
New England was nearly destroyed in 1675. And all colonial projects on the continent seemed to falter or expire entirely between that date and 1690 during what he calls an indigenous “backlash.” King Philip’s War (Metacom) forced the defense of New York. The cruelty with which the whites were used, the scholar emphasizes, was a sign of weakness and it is no coincidence that the terror they felt was expressed in a psychosis of demons and witches: Salem was only 80 kilometers from the Indian border in 1692. In the southwest, the rebellion of the Pueblo Indians broke out in 1680. Colonialism receded throughout North America at the end of the 17th century. In 1763 came the Pontiac War. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the threat came especially from the Comanche and Lakota equestrian empires, whose Seven Fires were the most powerful indigenous power on the continent after the weakening of the Iroquois and Cherokee in the Seven Years’ War. And Hämäläinen remembers that the Sioux and their allies defeated the United States in two wars, first in Red Cloud (1866) and then in the campaign that ended at Little Bighorn. The Sioux, the scholar highlights, “the Lakota empire,” served as an involuntary protective shield for a multitude of smaller indigenous nations, keeping the United States at bay for decades.
The chronicle of the powerful indigenous resistance is very long and includes the Seminoles of Osceola in Florida or the Sauk of Black Hawk west of Lake Michigan. Kiowas, Apaches, Nez Perces… Fires everywhere. The United States was only able to finally extinguish them, after “four centuries of indigenous power,” by applying a genocidal policy. The Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), he establishes, was a sign of American weakness and fear, of a country exhausted after more than 1,600 official military clashes against the natives. “There is a direct link between indigenous success and the sense of vulnerability – and the magnitude of revenge – of Americans.”
Could the history of North America be different? “As historians we can only point out the possible forks in the road, but in 1776, it was certainly possible to imagine a future on the continent in which native peoples controlled it, although the important thing, of course, is to think about how people in the past he made decisions accordingly.” For Hämäläinen, the military technology of the whites was not as definitive as it is believed. “It was important, without a doubt, but it must be taken into account that there was not a single moment in the past of North America in which that technology was not also available to the natives or even transferred by them to others. Success in war often lies less in technology per se and more on social, cultural and strategic issues of access to technology and what is done with it. We would make a mistake if we conceived the continent’s military history as a battle between Europeans with modern military technology against indigenous peoples without it. Much more important is the scale at which communities can access and effectively deploy that technology.”
Among the most exciting pages of indigenous continent there is the chapter on the acquisition and mastery of the horse by Comanches and Sioux. “Thank you. It was an exciting turning point and I have always enjoyed writing about it. Fortunately for me, European authors of the time were obsessed with native equestrian peoples and wrote about the subject in great detail. “My ability to describe the phenomenon is largely based on theirs.” The use of the term “empires” for Indians may sound shocking. “Empires have shown different forms throughout history, the last thing I wanted to do is suggest an equivalence between empires like the Comanche or the Sioux with the current United States. If there is a similarity it is with other empires of horsemen, and that is the center of the project we launched in Oxford a few years ago. One of the books that came out of there was Marie Favereau’s seminal The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard, 2021)” —a splendid book of which there is a translation in Spanish, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Book Attic, 2024)—.
What do you think of Bury my heart at Wounded Knee? “It was an extraordinarily popular book that arrived in the early 1970s at the time of the anti-Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement, when people were disillusioned with stories of frontier progress and were hungry for new narratives that will shed light on the violence and inhumanity of Western expansion. “We are in another moment in which historians are giving another centrality to the natives in the context of the history of the continent.”
As for movies, “I can’t remember any that don’t present problems, but I reserve my particular dislike for Dancing with Wolvesfull of historical errors and with a protagonist who is a very intelligent white man who guides the Native American characters. Black Robe [Manto negro, 1991, a partir de la magnífica novela de Brian Moore sobre un jesuita tratando de evangelizar a los hurones en Canadá] which premiered the same year, is less known but better and more historically correct.”
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