Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America Paperback by Pekka Hämäläinen

https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Continent-Contest-North-America/dp/1324094060/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=indigenous+continent&qid=1704578332&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr

If you have ever played Axis and Allies, you have a sense about how the European conquest of America went. Axis and Allies is based on World War II. The Axis players start with a big lead in manpower and material. The American player starts way behind. However, after a few years of game play, the American player's productivity catches up and the American player starts putting on as much manpower and material ever turn as the Axis players has on the board.
The game is over at that point.
There is a sense on the part of most people that Europeans were bullies once they arrived in North America. A holistic view of post-Columbian history puts the lie to this view. America was discovered by Europe around 1500 AD. The French, English, and Spanish began putting colonies on the edges of the Atlantic seaboard around 1600 AD. By 1800 AD – two centuries later – the European colonies were still within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic, notwithstanding European superiority in technology, science, economics, and organization. It was only in the mid to late 1800s that Western power went into hyperdrive and white settlers flooded into the larger portion of North America.
Pekka Hamalainen surveys the long history of the contest for North America. His book describes a pattern of European interaction with the indigenous population. Beginning with the earliest explorers, native tribes in North America were able to stop European incursions into their territory. Spanish explorers frequently found themselves directed into deserts or stopped cold by the superior power of the native tribe. This power was typically found in the larger population of the native tribes compared to the European interlopers, but it also was based on the tribe's knowledge of local conditions and its flexible political arrangements with other Indian nations.
English colonists found themselves checked for a long time by the Iroquois Confederation. The Six Nations were ablet to parley their strategic position near European settlements, playing off the French and English powers, to strengthen their position in relation to other tribes, which they crushed, enslaved, or drove off. Hamalainen asserts that Iroquois were the best armed indigenous power on the continent, who rendered French military power moot. The Five Nation hegemony broke down after the English had defeated the French in North America, thereby depriving the Iroquois of the strategy of playing both ends against the middle. The Iroquois also made the mistake of siding with the English when the Americans were developing into the regional power.
What finally did the Six Nations in was that they found themselves being picked apart in the same way that they had pitted the French against the English. Hamalainen points out that an epidemic played the dispositive role in the end of the Six Nations, but the Iroquois had survived prior epidemics. The difference was the changed political environment:
IN JANUARY 1777, IN the midst of the cataclysmic war, one of the most significant turning points in American history took place, throwing almost all war strategies into question. Abruptly and shockingly, the Six Nations ritually extinguished their central council fire for the first time in the history of the league. Suddenly, the Iroquois Empire was no more. A disease epidemic had broken out, and the Iroquois, suffering and dying, turned against each other. Shockingly, their confederacy split into incompatible factions: the Tuscaroras aligned with the fledgling United States; the Oneidas struggled to remain neutral but eventually clashed with the Mohawks and burned their towns. The Onondagas tried to remain neutral but eventually sided with the British. The Senecas, caught in the middle, suffered heavy losses. With the Six Nations debilitated by a civil war, unprecedented strategic options became available to Americans. (p. 312-313.)
The pattern of a local Indian nation utilizing its position to check white settler advances was repeated in new territories. Further to the west, the great Sioux Confederacy acted as the check on European expansion. In the southern Plains, the Comanche empire was the power broker for approximately a century. Comanche power was projected into northern Mexico where the Comanche plundered and took slaves.
Hamalainen's position appears to be Indian-centric. Readers may come out of this book thinking that their prejudices in favor of the oppressed Indians have been vindicated. Hamalainen's narrative makes a hash of the oppressed/oppressor narrative. The tribes that acted as a check on European expansion were often engaged in imperial practices like genocide, ethnic cleansing, slaving, and raiding for plunder. Hamalainen makes this observation about interactions with the Sioux:
The Sioux were strangers to the Lakes Indians, and their ceremonies and diplomatic protocols were drastically different. Ignored and excluded from commercial and diplomatic circles, the Sioux retaliated, attacking and killing Meskwakis, Odawas, and other Lakes peoples. “A general League” formed “against a common foe,” and when Sioux ambassadors visited the village of Chequamegon at Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay in 1670, Wyandots ritually boiled and ate them. (p. 132.)
Although Hamalainen's narrative emphasizes Indian autonomy, it also reveals that Indian success was premised on location to the Europeans. Successful tribes were in a “Goldilocks Zone.” If they were too close to Europeans, the density of European population with the magnifier of technology would lead to the destruction of Indian society. If the tribe was too far, they would be at the mercy of tribes who were able to intercept European technology, particularly European gun technology. The ideal position was to be in a location where the tribe could act as the middle-man between those Indians harvesting resources and the Europeans with the technology and goods. Hamalainen explains:
Fundamentally, it was a matter of distance and geography. North America had become divided in two: there was the narrow and patchy colonial belt on the coastal plains, where Europeans dominated, and there was the immense Indigenous interior, where Native territories extended deep into what, to Europeans, was a great unknown. The two Americas were almost complete opposites. In the interior, the Columbian Exchange often worked to the Indians' advantage. Deadly germs were brought inland by European traders, but their impact remained limited, whereas new military technology—guns, powder, metal, and horses—became available through colonial border markets and extensive Indigenous trade networks. In a transitional belt where the Indians were neither too close to European colonies to fall under their epidemiological shadow nor too far away to reap the benefits of their commerce, several geographically privileged Indigenous regimes rose to challenge colonial expansion on their own terms. This emerging belt was where great fortunes could be amassed, and where empires were won and lost. (p. 258.)
Ultimately, the ability of the Indians to remain in the Goldilock's Zone and to play off European factions came to an end in the late 19th century. By that time, white population swamped the Indian's local advantage in population. Europeans were able to project power throughout North America by railroad and telegraph. The dividends of the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed the advantages that Indians had in local knowledge.
This is a readable book. The survey format fills in a lot of details that are too often assumed. Although Hamalainen's bias is conventionally on the side of the oppressed Indians against the “white settler” oppressor, his scholastic integrity prevents this book from becoming another bit of moralizing.