‘Lakota America’ Puts the Tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse Front and Center
By Parul Sehgal
Oct. 22, 2019
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Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
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At first glance, “Lakota America” is every inch a sober, stately work of scholarship — and one long overdue. It is purportedly the first complete history of the Lakotas, the tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the regime that long dominated the American interior, thwarting Western expansion with charm, shrewd diplomacy and sheer might.
Look again, however, and you’ll catch something roiling beneath that professional composure: a lively truculence that gives this book its pulse, and its purpose. Pekka Hamalainen’s impressive history is also a quarrel with the field, with how history — especially the history of indigenous Americans — has been told and sold.
Hamalainen’s previous book, “The Comanche Empire” (2009), awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize, resurrected the lost stories of a prosperous and sophisticated people of the American Southwest. The new book also responds to the long legacy of erasing and suppressing the history of indigenous America, or reducing it to a backdrop. That distorted perspective lives on in the language we still use. The word “Sioux” refers to a coalition of seven allied and related nations, including the Lakotas, but the word itself is a French corruption of “Nadouessioux,” an Ojibwe word meaning “snake” — or enemy.
Hamalainen renders the Lakotas as full protagonists. This is an American story with their contribution, influence and version of events at the center — and to build that story, there is a rich, idiosyncratic archive to draw on. The Lakotas marked time with pictographs, called waniyetu iyawapi (“winter counts”), originally painted onto the hide of a buffalo. Each year was depicted by the image of a signal event: plentiful bison to hunt, war. When colonists brought the devastating smallpox virus to the Americas, decimating indigenous populations who had no immunity, the winter count documented a small face so covered with marks that only tiny eyes were visible.
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In retrospect, history often seems preordained; vulnerabilities seem garishly announced, outcomes a matter of course. Winter counts, however, illustrate sudden, pitiless twists of fortune. In writing “Lakota America,” Hamalainen seeks to do the same, to infuse a sense of chance and contingency in the narrative, to remain “alive to the ever-present possibility that events could have turned out differently.” He sows this feeling of uncertainty into the composition of the book, replacing a traditional arc with “a more unpredictable narrative structure that is full of triumphs, twists, reversals, victories, lulls and low points, big and small. If the book’s Lakotas — haughty and imperial at one moment, fearful and vulnerable the next, prudent and accommodating the third — seem strange and unfamiliar, this portrayal has succeeded.”
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Pekka Hamalainen, author of “Lakota America.”
Pekka Hamalainen, author of “Lakota America.”
All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness, but the Lakotas might have a special claim. Their political philosophy and social organizations were distinguished by a flexibility that allowed them to maneuver among rival colonial powers and hostile neighboring tribes. One of their mythical heroes is the shape-shifting spider-trickster figure Iktomi. The Lakotas’ malleability aided their countless transformations — from foragers to farmers to nomads to hunters on horseback, from an isolated society to the most dominant indigenous nation in the Americas, controlling territory across the Great Plains, and into the Rocky Mountains and Canada. “Lakota America” takes us from the 16th century to the present, with painstaking, carefully marshaled detail, but its real feat is in threading how the Lakota philosophy and vision of the world guided their reinventions and their dealings with colonial powers.
“Lakotas were fighting for survival,” Hamalainen writes, “but they were also fighting to keep alive a broader vision of America where coexistence through right thoughts and acts might be possible.” Theirs was a capacious notion of kinship, in which competitors and even enemies could be brought into the fold. (Lewis and Clark make a spectacularly bumbling appearance in the book as the perfect foils for the Lakotas, marked by an utter inability “to see, learn and adapt.” They were bewildered that Native Americans welcomed American trade but not their “paternal embrace.”)
Hamalainen has the novelist’s relish for the strange, pungent detail, and he conjures early America in swift strokes: fur-trading posts reeking with the scent of entrails; the 17th-century world of cross-cultural diplomacy that relied on semaphore, kisses and tears. In one dreamlike scene, he describes a frozen lake full of the preserved bodies of a thousand bison, “halted in mid-motion.” They had been trapped under a layer of ice and became “a huge natural refrigerator of meat” that sustained the Lakotas for a year.
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The Americans and Lakotas — two expansionist powers, as Hamalainen describes them — were occasional allies, oddly compatible for parts of their shared history. Colonial incursions were constant and inventive, however, and the railroad powered “a new kind of arrogance toward the continent’s indigenous peoples.” The sovereignty of the Lakotas depended on bison, and the American government embarked on a program of extermination. In a three-year period, hunting squads killed more than three million bison, close to 3,000 animals a day.
The challenge of writing this history, Hamalainen notes, was making iconic events and figures unfamiliar again, which is never more necessary than at the twilight of the Lakota empire. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Lakotas dealt the Americans a humiliating defeat, and the American Army responded with a campaign of terror, beginning with the Wounded Knee massacre, in which soldiers slaughtered hundreds of Indians. Missionaries and social reformers began their work in zeal; children were taken from families and sent to boarding schools whose explicit mission was to annihilate the Lakotas’ language, religion and culture. Nearly every aspect of Lakota life became subject to surveillance and control. The winter counts are few from these years, reflecting the trauma, the ravages of dispossession and suicide — “colonialism working exactly as intended.”
Hamalainen finds notes of optimism in recent years, however, in the protests around the Dakota Access pipeline, which attracted global attention, and the Lakotas’ unflagging efforts to recover the Black Hills. “Lakotas will endure because they are Iktomi’s people, supple, accommodating and absolutely certain of their essence even when becoming something new,” he writes. “They will always find a place in the world because they know how to be fully in it, adapting to its shape while remaking it, again and again, after their own image.”
It’s tempting to dismiss such a sentiment as unforgivably glib — and a disappointing moment in such an accomplished, and subtle, study. I did at first; how easy it is to appeal to resilience at a comfortable distance, I groused, as if the obligation to endure weren’t itself a brutal burden. When I went to poetry to ward off cliché, I was chastened. In Layli Long Soldier’s spellbinding “Whereas,” a finalist for the National Book Award in 2017, she investigates the wording of treaties and other government communications with Native Americans, noting the violence coiled in official language. In the midst of this muck of doublespeak and prevarication, her own words rise, anthemic. “I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “In this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother” — notice the double meaning of “must,” which describes both what she is forced to endure but also how she goads herself forward. “I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.”
Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.
Lakota America
A New History of Indigenous Power
By Pekka Hamalainen
Illustrated. 530 pages. Yale University Press. $35.
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lark benobi
Nov 14, 2019lark benobi rated it it was amazing
Shelves: male-identified-authors, 2019, history, nonfiction
Incredibly thorough, and yet riveting. This is classical history, in both tone and scholarship--if that means something to anyone but me. It exposes the biases of western/white-oriented narratives of this era and geographic region, but it does so while using the same tools of erudition, and scholarship, and measured-ness, and historical fact, as any history coming from an academic/scholarly tradition. It's a completely different tone from, say, a Zinn book, where I often feel like I'm being told how to feel about the facts, without being told the facts to begin with. It's not at all like Cheyenne Memories by John Stands In Timber, where the goal is to preserve a historical tradition that is/was an oral tradition. It's not a heart-wrencher like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, which is history written to be a call to action, or at least a call to atone for past wrongs.
Hämäläinen begins with a painstaking etymological discussion of the terms "Sioux" and "Lakota" and as he moves forward he continues to take the time to unthread these and other terms, exposing their hidden meanings and origins, so that we know what he's talking about every step of the way. It's a careful, deeply researched story, that at each stage continues to be thoughtful about language, where the 'facts' are presented, and 'historical truths' revealed, page after page, with an almost mathematical precision. (less)
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Moonkiszt
Sep 05, 2019Moonkiszt rated it it was amazing
Shelves: deserts-hot-places, historical-conflicts, re-readable, violence-to-communities, new-interesting-facts, densewordage, encroachment-displacement, historical-north-american, indigenous-peoples, o-pioneers
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
This is a text that needs to get in front of students in these United States! History from a completely different point of view, where wasicu (white) politics are incidental for hundreds of years, until they become the problem. History told from the mainly Lakota perspective, with Lakota broadly comprising a number of groups known collectively as the Seven Council Fires (Lakotas, Yanktons, Yanktonais, Mdewakantons, Sissetons, Wahpetons, and Wahpekutes) doesn't start on the plains - it starts North and East - around the Great Lakes. It didn't take long to realize that the history books I’ve read throughout my not so diverse education was limited and lacked a fullsomeness that I had never even considered. The people my books referred to as the Sioux, had as many different names for their various groups within groups as my own people did. Thankfully the author generously provides readers like me with helpful notes, and reference information in the end materials.
Indigenous language, dialect and written Lakotan is used throughout the book, which I found fascinating. It sent me on a side tour to find Lakota speakers to listen to and feel its music.
Throughout my life I thought I’d studied these events, but looking through the other side of the window was eye-opening and interesting. The writing is scholarly and full of details ("the rest of the story") not found in my history books. All of the usual suspects are here: Custer, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Sacagawea, Lewis & Clark, warriors known and unknown, on through the centuries to the current day struggles and victories.
This is a book to sit within, for studying and research and soaking. Drinking in the immensity of the two nations that were created in 1776, and the national efforts to co-exist, by hook or by crook - with blood spilt and sacrifice made. Not a light read, but a very satisfying one, 5 stars.
A Sincere Thanks to Pekka Hamalainen, Yale University Press and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review. (less)
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Carolyn McBride
Aug 29, 2019Carolyn McBride rated it really liked it
What a book!
Wonderfully well-researched with a huge scope, it would make a great textbook. It pales a little for a casual reader, however. For the "regular" enthusiast, it could be a little overwhelming.
I found it fascinating (less)
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Scriptor Ignotus
Oct 31, 2020Scriptor Ignotus rated it really liked it
Shelves: american-west, general-history
1776 was a definitive year for two great North American nations. A confederation of thirteen British colonies on the eastern seaboard, the western pole of the transatlantic British Empire, declared their independence from the mother country and turned their gaze toward the untapped bounties of the looming continental interior. The same year, the Lakota, the westernmost and preeminent people of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ—the “Seven Council Fires” of the Sioux nation—took possession of the Pahá Sápa—the Black Hills of South Dakota—and made the sacred refuge into the heartland of one of the two dominant indigenous empires on the continent. A century later, a warband of Lakota and Cheyenne braves under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse trapped and annihilated George Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a spectacular achievement that would be followed by swift and tragic reprisals. Much of that intervening century may be thought of as a history of two wests and two westering peoples, whose worlds often overlapped and transmuted one another.
The conquest of the Black Hills was the culmination of a long, fraught, and arduous journey of relocation and redefinition on the part of the Lakota. In the seventeenth century, the Sioux were a weak and marginalized people, huddled together off the western tip of Lake Superior, excluded from the flow of firearms and metal tools that trickled out to the Great Lakes basin from the French imperial city of Montreal. They weathered blistering wars of aggression waged by the Lakes Indians, who had access to firearms and were often united against them in an effort to prevent them from gaining access to French trade lines, and they survived the onslaught only due to the large population they sustained from the protein and carbohydrate-rich river valleys they inhabited. The westward exodus of the Lakota from the Mississippi River to the Missouri and its tributaries was a harrowing gamble; they were exposed on the open plains rather than sheltered in the riverine woodlands to which they were accustomed, and once they reached the Missouri they had to fight for a place along its banks against the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa peoples who already lived there.
But in the eighteenth century, the gamble yielded incredible success and positioned the Lakota to be the dominant power of the interior west. Once settled on the Missouri, the Lakota became one of the first nations to inhabit the confluence of the gun frontier—the French and Spanish firearms trade that traversed the Mississippi and Missouri—and the horse frontier—the growing population of wild horses that were migrating northward after an original dispersal from New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Like the Comanches to the south, the Lakota superseded their rivals by being quick to adopt a horse culture, which gave them a powerful military advantage over their pedestrian enemies, shortened the liminal spaces of the high plains, and turned the bison-heavy grasslands from a no-man’s-land that could be visited on hunting expeditions but not inhabited permanently into a heartland that could sustain a burgeoning nation.
The Americans derided the Lakota as the “pirates of the Missouri”, portraying them as highwaymen who used their numbers and equestrian mobility to extort both white traders and the indigenous tribes the Lakota had subjugated; but this is merely a testament to their shrewdness. They were careful to use their dominance of the region to extract concessions from American traders and prevent the formation of alliances between American frontiersmen and the native enemies of the Lakota, but without being so heavy-handed that the flow of trade stopped altogether. For most of the nineteenth century, the Lakota were the kingmakers of the west, leaving a substantial imprint on the shape taken by the peopling of the continent.
Little wonder, then, that the epochal final clash between the Lakota and American empires in the 1870s produced many of the most recognizable names of Native American history: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Black Elk, and American Horse among them.
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Christopher
Dec 20, 2019Christopher rated it it was amazing
Shelves: nonfiction
Hamalainen knocks it out of the park again. Though personally I still prefer his epic accounting of the indigenous power politics of the Comanche, this is every bit the work of important scholarship that that prior book was.
We see the Lakota story centered on native conceptions of power and change, from obscurity and rise to sudden and immediate fall. Seeing neither victims nor savages, we see instead the reality of indigenous empire, strategy, power and adaptation. A context lost not with the Lakotas but with tribes across this continent-and integral part of North (and South) American so commonly written out of our understanding today. (less)
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Tom
Dec 17, 2019Tom rated it it was amazing
This was quite interesting; it functions as both a history of the Lakota, and a history of the American West from a Lakota perspective.
Much of the early book deals with the Indian-French-Spanish-British-American power struggles in the west. Lots of interesting dynamics there, with authorized and unauthorized trade going various directions, with different native groups fighting over access to it and the technology it brought. There was some pretty mercenary behavior by the great powers, which couldn't really afford to keep all the natives happy all the time and so ended up cultivating specific client states, which were readily exchanged for others when circumstances so dictated.
Discusses the Lakota shift from a pre-contact-style hunter-gatherer lifestyle to being a nomadic horse-and-gunpowder civilization driven by external trade. Makes the interesting point that they sat at a convergence where two technological frontiers met: horses were spreading up the plains from the Spanish in the south, and guns were spreading west from the British and Americans, and the Lakota were sort of at the nexus where natives ended up with lots of both relatively early.
I learned the extent of Lakota control over the Missouri river basin in the early 1800s; they exploited their strategic position on the river by levying tribute (or extorting protection money, if you like) from traders trying to get to natives further upstream. Lewis and Clark make an interesting cameo and close escape in this regard.
Lakota interactions with other native groups are covered through their history; there was a fair amount of Lakota pushing other groups off of land, tyrannizing village-living natives, doing their own empire-building on the far margins of their land even while facing US pressure on the near side, and so forth. Author is obviously pretty enthusiastic about the Lakota, but still covers some less-than-flattering aspects of their history.
Of course the later part of the book covers Lakota interactions with the US government, at that point the other major power contesting the interior (although gunrunners from Canada were still a factor in the second half of the 19th century). Discusses the treaties, which were pretty messy--the sides were negotiating across too many cultural and linguistic barriers for good mutual understanding; the Lakota didn't really have a centralized political administration, despite U. S. efforts to wish one into being; and the U. S. didn't do a good job of honoring its commitments as administrations and public opinion changed through the years (how things change, how things stay the same).
The U. S. military interaction with them was a travesty, with intentional attacks on Lakota civilians. (The Lakota attacked civilians too, but you have to wish the U. S. could have better lived up to its ideals.) The book frames it as a conflict between empires, but the U. S. action also feels sort of like a counter-insurgency; it was hard to know who to fight, and even when the president had a policy of peace and accommodation, that couldn't really be pushed down the chain and made effective on the ground.
It's interesting to wonder how things could have gone differently. American numbers (millions vs. tens of thousands), economic incentives (gold, western settlement) and industrial power (railroads) were pretty overwhelming. On the other hand, the Lakota economic model seems to have consisted largely of hunting (it seems at unsustainable levels) for the fur trade to purchase guns, tools, and other manufactured goods; autarky wasn't really even an option in the 18th century, never mind the late 19th when conflict with the U.S. really came to a head. Even if everyone on each side had been practically angelic it is hard to see how this sort of an economic collision could have gone well. Interestingly, the book notes some history of the U. S. government at times discouraging miners from going on Lakota land (although that policy swung back and forth), but it seems neither the U. S. nor the Lakota were capable of effective border control; another framing for the conflict would be as a case of massive illegal immigration gone horribly wrong.
Yet another framing is as a transition from traditional property rights (this land is ours, collectively, because we have used it for a long time, or at least since kicking off the previous occupants) to a common law system (this land is divided up into sections, owned by individuals). The Lakota lacked clearly defined individual property rights in land, and indeed their buffalo-centric economic model couldn't really accommodate such. The U. S. tried to square the circle by exchanging treaty annuities for land, which could then be brought into the American economy on a common law basis. The Lakota could draw their treaty annuities at "agencies," and those who did so tended to become very dependent on the government.
I hadn't realized annuities had been policy, but obviously this was doomed to generate all kinds of corruption and have horrible moral effects on both the distributors and receivers of such payment, and it did. There was a dynamic where some Lakota drew payments while others stayed aloof or actively hostile, with lots of overlap and interplay between these groups. Inevitably there were confiscations of guns, forced re-education, and all sorts of paternalism in the endgame. Seems like the net result may have been worse than straightforward land theft, which might have at least allowed a greater measure of human dignity for the victims.
Again, hard to imagine how this sort of a property rights transition could have gone well, and it seems like most places in the world it has gone/is going poorly. One can argue the transition never should have happened, but then you're back to a border delineation & control issue, and that inevitably prompts irredentist questions about who the most original owners are. In any case it's a really messy set of issues, and the results for the Lakota were tragic.
Overall, very thought-provoking stuff, and the book is an impressive piece of writing and research. (less)
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David
Feb 22, 2021David added it
As a seconday History teacher who teaches Native Americans in Year 7, I liked to think that I knew a decent amount about the Indians of the Great Plains. However, this excellent book simply proves that I had barely scratched the surface!
An exhaustive study of the origins of the lakota in the eastern Woodlands, it traces their inexorable migration into the continental interior and their encounters with the French, the English and eventually- the newly-established United States. Even Lewis and Clark make an appearance!
There are in-depth investigations of key events, including the Fort Laramie Treaty and the Battle of the Little Bighorn and it's pleasing to note that the coverage of the latter is far from the usual Custer-centric reportage.
The book contains excellent and detailed summaries of key players including Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail, and I particularly enjoyed the explanation of the significance to Lakota culture and beliefs of 'White Buffalo calf woman's
Though at times this was a tough and academic read, the sheer depth of coverage made the long slog worthwhile and absorbing. Thoroughly recommended! (less)
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Moses
May 27, 2021Moses rated it it was ok
Shelves: 2021
Lakota America has many shining qualities but is ultimately deeply disappointing. Hemalainen starts by asking the question, “What if we see the Lakota not as eternal victims, but as the confident builders of their own Great Plains empire?” Yes, all well and good. But by the end of the book, it is clear that he is not ready to interrogate Lakota sources, to ask the hard questions. If Lakota empire-building, which included massacring Pawnees, Crows, and Aniishinabe is a value-neutral display of “indigenous power,” then why is US imperialism, complete with its own massacres, such a problem? Does it have anything to do with their skin color?
Hemalainen makes it abundantly clear that he accepts the Lakota story of the 20th century events, like the American Indian Movement, uncritically. That means he is a cultural storyteller, or worse, a propagandist. He is not displaying the critical judgment of a historian. Peter Cozzens’s book on the Indian wars is a great place to see this done right. (less)
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