Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

by Pekka Hämäläinen Narrated by Kaipo Schwab

Overview

There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus "discovers" a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing "New World" as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction.



In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals.



Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of "colonial America" is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an "Indigenous America" that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. Necessary listening for anyone who cares about America's past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Kaipo Schwab narrates this sweeping history of North America, which is focused primarily on the territory that would become the United States. It is told from the vantage point of Indigenous peoples, who first arrived in around 10,000 BCE. Its emphasis is on the time period beginning with the first Europeans’ “discovery” of the continent, and it continues through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Schwab has many pronunciation challenges. The names of the Indigenous nations, individuals, and places being spotlighted are many and varied. The European nations, primarily England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, sent traders and settlers and had their own names for most places. Schwab seems to handle each language easily, maintaining a steady pace throughout. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/08/2022

Oxford University scholar Hämäläinen (Lakota America) delivers a sweeping and persuasive corrective to the notion that “history itself is a linear process that moves irreversibly toward Indigenous destruction.” Reorienting the history of the Western Hemisphere away from “European ambitions, European perspectives, and European sources,” he focuses instead on the “overwhelming and persistent Indigenous power” that lasted in North America from 10000 BCE until the end of the 19th century. Throughout, Hämäläinen highlights the agency, resilience, diversity, and kinship of Indigenous peoples, detailing how the Comanche, the Lakota, the Mohawks, and other tribes formed alliances to forestall European conquest. Skillfully shifting across regions and time periods, Hämäläinen documents how Native nations expanded, contracted, and even relocated in response to opportunities or pressures, and employed a range of methods (diplomacy, trade, and war among them) to resist colonization. Revelations abound—from the rampant enslavement of Indigenous people by European settlers to the strategic advantages that smallpox and other diseases gave to some Native nations—as do immersive renderings of Native cultural traditions and incisive analyses of developments including Western tribes’ domestication of horses in the 1700s and the formation of Native American and British alliances after the Revolutionary War. This top-notch history casts the story of America in an astonishing new light. Illus. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Sept.)

Harper’s - Daniel Immerwahr

"In [Hämäläinen’s] first two books, he explored notable peaks of Native power, as many recent histories do. But now, with Indigenous Continent, he stitches them into a sustained counterpoint to the conquest narrative. Five hundred years of North American history appear in his telling not as the story of colonization, but of a fierce and unsettled continent, bristling with possibility . . . You cannot read Indigenous Continent and retain the belief that Native societies quickly and permanently collapsed. Hämäläinen’s book not only exposes settler boasts of continental conquest as self-serving fictions; it rejects the entire settler sense of what constitutes American history. It is stand-everything-on-its-head history, offering the thrills of a sharp perspectival flip."

New York Times Book Review

"The author, an Oxford historian, recasts the history of North America from a Native American perspective, making clear that Native tribes controlled the continent for millenniums (‘On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck’). One of the best books ever written on Native American history."

Paul Muldoon

"When [John] Donne exclaimed ‘O my America! My new-found-land’ to his latest girlfriend, he was oblivious to the long history of that territory so painstakingly mapped by Pekka Hämäläinen in Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America."

The New Yorker - David Treuer

"[M]agisterial . . . the pace and the scope of the book have a force of their own: Hämäläinen makes it clear that America’s past is crazily, energetically, tumultuously crowded with incident; that Indigenous power has affected everything about America . . . 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."

Emily Temple

"This is sure to be fascinating reading for anyone who grew up hearing that same old foundational myth of America—you know, that one that doesn’t exactly hang together."

David Keymer

"In this scrupulously researched survey of the past, a brilliant Finnish scholar presents a compelling picture. He shows that, at least through the 18th century and well into the 1800s, Indigenous peoples flourished by setting the agendas in their efforts to keep their land and resources and establishing the terms for the settlements that followed, even when they didn’t win their battles. This book recognizes that the strengths of Indigenous peoples came from a network of shifting, powerful kinship. . . . This is a book everyone could benefit from reading."

The American Scholar - Andrew Graybill

"[A] towering achievement. By gathering the experiences of multiple Native peoples—across an astounding expanse of time and space—Indigenous Continent explodes the view that American history unfolded inexorably according to European and American design."

Thomas E. Ricks

"[T]he single best book I have ever read on Native American history, as well as one of the most innovative narratives about the continent."

Christian Science Monitor

"[A] powerful, revelatory history."

Harper’s

A sustained counterpoint to the conquest narrative…It is stand-everything-on-its-head history, offering the thrills of a sharp perspectival flip.”

American Scholar

[A] towering achievement.”

Literary Hub

Sure to be fascinating reading for anyone who grew up hearing that same old foundational myth of America―you know, that one that doesn’t exactly hang together.”

Library Journal

★ 07/01/2022

The task Hämäläinen (history, Oxford Univ.; Lakota America) has undertaken is daunting: there isn't only one tribal history but around 500, which creates a pointillist web with multiple points of entry. In this scrupulously researched survey of the past, a brilliant Finnish scholar presents a compelling picture. He shows that, at least through the 18th century and well into the 1800s, Indigenous peoples flourished by setting the agendas in their efforts to keep their land and resources and establishing the terms for the settlements that followed, even when they didn't win their battles. This book recognizes that the strengths of Indigenous peoples came from a network of shifting, powerful kinship. VERDICT The level of detail occasionally overwhelms, but Hämäläinen is adept at explaining. This is a book everyone could benefit from reading.—David Keymer

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Kaipo Schwab narrates this sweeping history of North America, which is focused primarily on the territory that would become the United States. It is told from the vantage point of Indigenous peoples, who first arrived in around 10,000 BCE. Its emphasis is on the time period beginning with the first Europeans’ “discovery” of the continent, and it continues through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Schwab has many pronunciation challenges. The names of the Indigenous nations, individuals, and places being spotlighted are many and varied. The European nations, primarily England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, sent traders and settlers and had their own names for most places. Schwab seems to handle each language easily, maintaining a steady pace throughout. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-07-13
A vigorous, provocative study of Native American history by one of its most accomplished practitioners.

Finnish historian Hämäläinen, professor of American history at Oxford, is a noted student of Native American systems of governance and commerce. In this follow-up to Lakota America, the author focuses on the long war between Indigenous peoples and alliances with the European colonial powers. “By 1776,” he writes, “various European colonial powers together claimed nearly all of the continent for themselves, but Indigenous peoples and powers controlled it.” That changed following the Revolutionary War, when Americans began to spill over the Appalachians, spreading the American empire at the expense of empires maintained by such various peoples as the Comanche, Lakota, and Shoshone. Hämäläinen uses the idea of Indigenous empires advisedly. With solid archaeological support, he ventures that the great Ancestral Puebloan stone building called Pueblo Bonito could very well have been built by slave labor, while at Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, the “commercial hinterland extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf coast and the Appalachians,” constituting a vast, complex trade network. Against railroads and repeating rifles, such empires tumbled; against miscomprehension and assumption, peace was out of the question from the very beginning. The table was barely cleared at the first Thanksgiving when the newly arrived Puritans “thought that the sachem”—the hereditary leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy—“could be reduced to a subject of the king of England.” It didn’t help that these Native empires were often pitted against each other until reservations and small corners of the continent were all that was left—those and the Canadian subarctic, which long after “endured as an Indigenous world.” Even then, however, “it was not an Indigenous paradise; the contest for furs, guns, and merchandise fueled chronic animosities, collisions, and open wars.” Throughout, the author resurrects important yet often obscured history, creating a masterful narrative that demands close consideration.

An essential work of Indigenous studies that calls for rethinking North American history generally.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175967358
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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