Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (The Lamar Series in Western History)

Tacitly just a history book about the Lakota tribe, this book delves deep into daily tribal life, economics and trade, diplomacy and war strategy. Pekka Hamalainen states at the beginning why the Lakota are such an interesting people to study:They emerge as superbly flexible people who went through a series of geneses from pedestrian foragers to sedentary farmers to equestrian hunters to nomadic pastoralists, each a precarious attempt to carve out a safe place in a world where European newcomers had become a permanent presence. They come to life as fiercely proud people who easily embraced outsiders, turning their domain into a vibrant ethnic jumble. Perhaps most strikingly, they emerge as supreme warriors who routinely eschewed violence, relying on diplomacy, persuasion, and sheer charm to secure what they needed—only to revert to naked force if necessary. When the overconfident Custer rode into the Bighorn Valley on that June day, they had already faced a thousand imperial challenges. They knew exactly what to do with him.And:That is where, supposedly, all the pivotal imperial rivalries over North America took place, France vying for supremacy with England on the eastern seaboard; Spaniards, Comanches, Mexicans, and Americans jostling for position in the Southwest; and Russians pushing down the Pacific Coast in search of pelts and challenging Spain’s claims to California. The interior world was a sideshow, too marginal to stir potent imperial passions, too vast and vicious for proper colonies. It was Thomas Jefferson’s imagined Louisiana whose settlement would take a thousand generations.This book is essential for understanding American history. How about the congruence of these seemingly different cultures?Neither Lakotas nor Americans compromised their core convictions about themselves and the world. Convinced of the essential rightness of their respective beliefs and principles, they created a yawning mental crevasse where two expansionist powers could fit. They valued, desired, sought, and fought for different things and often talked past one another, which, ironically, made them compatible. It was only when nature itself failed to sustain both that coexistence became impossible.Lakotas used every possible tool in their efforts to keep what they held most sacred. When dealing with the French, they could be happy to submit to a paternalistic relationship. With the relatively weak Spanish, they could take a more privileged position. And with the British, they could be violent:They killed one of the traders, cut his heart out, and ate it, and they boiled and ate Memeskia in front of his relatives. The attack was a sensation, and it sent British traders fleeing from the Ohio Country in panic, leaving behind a firmer French-Indian allianceAmazingly, the Lakota co-opted the Europeans strengths by somehow becoming great shooters and horseman (interestingly the arrival of the "magic dogs" was a million year exodus for the now domesticated horse that was made extinct during the Pleistocene). Their decentralization also allowed them to outlast smallpox long enough for the Americans to strategically offer up a vaccine. Disease comes up many times in this story. British General Cornwallis was forced to surrender at Yorktown due to his African Americans succumbing to malaria and France's New World Empire was abandoned with their troops suffering from yellow fever.The United States become the local hegemon post the War of 1812 (known by the Dakota's as “Pahinshashawacikiya,” “when the Redhead begged for Our help.”) and the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. The Lakota would go own to dominate their Paha Sapa, lush in vegetation and a desired spot for Bison herds. The US, after Eastern domination of Indian lands, would find a much tougher opponent. The successful Union generals now in power would use coercion, annuities, threats, betrayal, environmental destruction and war leading up to famously unsuccessful military campaigns ("Warriors shouted that the wašíčus should have brought more Indians to do their fighting for them). Ultimately the destruction of bison heard and the massacre at Wounded Knee (“a people’s dream died there”) were the final steps in Lakota submission.To dispel the notion of unintelligent savage, it is amazing to hear the diversity of quotes about Lakotas. All of them with a grain of truth as they used every tool they had available to them:-A German traveler was struck by the mental shift. In St. Louis he had heard the Sioux being denounced as “the treacherous enemies of all white,” but a journey upriver revealed a different image: “the more loyal of the aborigines under the care of the American government.”-Clark denounced them as “the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri.”-U.S. agents denigrated Lakotas as irredeemable savages “determined to exterminate” their neighboring tribes.- Lieutenant James Gorrell wrote, “Certainly the greatest nation of Indians ever yet found.” “They can shoot the wildest and largest beasts in the woods, at seventy or one hundred yards distance,”-Red Cloud fit the bill. The New York Times heralded him as “a perfect Hercules,” “a man of brains, a good ruler, an eloquent speaker, and able general and fair diplomat,” “undoubtedly the most celebrated warrior living on the American Continent,” who commanded ten thousand people and two thousand warriors.-“A powerful and warlike people, proud, haughty, and defiant; will average six feet in height, strong muscular frames, and very good horsemen.” They were, he warned, “capable of doing much harm.”Truly a fascinating history told by a great story teller.

Best overview of Lakota and surrounding Native Americans from 1500s to 1900s. Really covers their culture, their political efforts with US government and much else. Very readable and informative!

Having read “Comanche Empire” I knew I had to read this book. .My general impression is that the Comanche ruleover vast land masses was triggered by incessant violence, horsemanship, and raiding, to establish wealth anddominance until the loss of buffalo, widespread disease, and, finally, organized plans of extermination by Texanswiped the tribe away. Unlike the lack of any central authority over Comanche people, the fascinating history of theLakota people reflects a massive number of members constantly building a ferocious image as quick to violence as alever to bolster its decades of success in holding off the inevitable end of its hunting culture and as stewards of land.Leaders like Red Cloud in particular are featured as shrewd in manipulating government officials, no less U.S.Presidents, in stalling off numerous deceits, broken promises, and corrupt maneuvers to end the vast power andmilitary threat that the Lakota nation had amassed over centuries, not just decades..My constant criticism is really a backhanded compliment..The author has provided such exhaustive detail that onemust imagine he included every inch of his research, to leave nothing out..The saving grace to me is his writing skill,which presents the material so graphically and cogently that the temptation to skim never really gets going very far.Over and over, as reading, I asked myself how did he find the time to tell so much? To our good fortune, he somehow did so

Highly recommend Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Lakota” which brings to life the multidimensional Sioux - Lakota Indians, a major historical actor who impacted the destiny of several regional and global powers.Also recommend Peter Cozzens book “The Earth Is Weeping.”50 years ago, Mr. Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” fashioned the contemporary Indian narrative casting the Indians victims of European and American imperialism - the Howard Zinn version of history. Unfortunately for writers like Brown and Zinn, history is not always black or white; there is often much nuance and subtle context which is easily lost to narrative and agenda. Hämäläinen does a great job calling “balls and strikes” evenhandedly for both teams.Hämäläinen’s book provides a fascinating journey following the Lakota from marginal players during the French - Indian era (Lakota were on the receiving end of Iroquois power) to Great Plains hegemon by the American Civil War. Like the American push to the Pacific, the Lakota rise to empire was messy and often violent - many tribes that stood in the Lakota’s way were vanquished, absorbed, or enslaved. History is often ironic.Despite some minor stumbles, Hämäläinen’s Lakota remains solid until the end. The ghost of Dee Brown unfortunately surfaces in the Epilogue and a powerful sovereign is cast as victims in 20th century America...for me, the book ends on an disappointing sour note.Minus the Epilogue, the book would have received 4.5 Stars - yes, the Epilogue was that bad.A final thought: The book prompts many questions that are tough to answer. The most obvious (that applies to all contemporary powers): how should the United States have done different during its push west? This books is a combination of Friedman’s “Lexus and Olive Tree” and Huntington “Clash of Civilizations” both operating in the background. The history of man is one of conqueror and conquered; winner and looser which is ongoing and continues today.Despite the ending, I highly recommend Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Lakota”.

Book received on time and in the condition described. Can't ask for anything more.

As an amateur but we might say 'vocational' historian of the Lakota people, I can't but marvel at the depth and breadth of the research that underpins this magnificent book. But its entire thrust, in treating the conflict between these two so-called 'nations' - Amerika and the Lakota Nation - as if there was some kind of parity between them qua 'nations', vastly underplays throughout the fact that one of these 'nations' was indigenous, the other a motley assemblage of desperate and ruthless invaders on a continent where they had no shred of a right to be. In giving the Lakota the stature they merit as a nation, and pitting them against 'America' as another nation, as if the two had the same moral and ethical status the book becomes, I'm afraid, just another bit of riffing on the colonialist melody. By starting the book with the motley invaders already nearly 300 years into their genocidal horror show in 1776, the overwhelming moral and ethical problem of one nation, and one only, is effectively swept under the carpet.

The conventional image of Native Americans- even when articulated by highly sympathetic recent movies like "Dances with Wolves"- is of nomadic, horse-using buffalo hunters. In other words, the Lakota Sioux in their mid-19th century pomp are treated as normative (as Hamalainen pointed out in his previous study of the Comanches, the said film was based on a novel set among the latter people but relocated northwards to fit audience expectations) . One of Hamalainen's great services in this fascinating book is to point out that even the Lakota had only been full-on mounted nomads for little more than half a century before their dramatic triumph on the Little Big Horn. He traces their history from their origins (or at least their earliest appearance in written records in seventeenth century French accounts) as hunter-gatherers to the south west of the Great Lakes, though successive geographical shifts and reinventions of their way of life up to their moment of glory, bringing the story down to the present day.The Lakota emerge as supreme opportunists with a quite amazing ability to shift their shape to fit the changing environment around them- and to dominate their neighbours. Right up the eve of their fateful clash with the US in the 1870's they were an expanding power, thriving on trade routes across North America (in some respects they were better armed than the cash-strapped US soldiers who had to fight them). For a long time there was no particular reason for the two expanding American imperial powers- the Lakota and the USA- to come into conflict (indeed for much of the first half of the 19th century they were effectively allied, with US vaccinations sometimes enabling the Lakota to avoid the smallpox that devastated their neighbours). Even when the clash came, the Lakota were well placed to win it, facing post-Civil War US administrations unwilling to invest huge sums of money in Indian Wars and pressured by a vocal pro-Indian lobby in the eastern states which the Lakota proved well able to play to.Hamalainen tells the story brilliantly. If there was a option to dock him half a star, I'd be tempted to do so. At times he has a slightly rose tinted view of his subjects, who were capable of being every bit as ruthless and exploitative in their dealings with their neighbours (including white ones) as any European or Euro-American colonialist. It's also clear that Lakota society in its mounted buffalo hunting prime was undergoing rapid social and economic stratification which cut against the assumed egalitarian ethos of the nation (and which came out in increasingly heavy work burdens on less favoured women). Karl Marx would have been fascinated to observe what looks remarkably like an example of class formation in action. Hamalainen also slides round the question of how far the rather enviable material position the Lakota held by around 1860, based on large scale trade in buffalo robes to feed markets in the USA and Canada, was actually sustainable in the long run once the hunters were mounted and had access to repeating rifles- it's clear that buffalo herds were in steep decline in at least some parts of the grasslands by that date and that some of the tortuous diplomacy of US/Lakota relations was driven by the latter's desire to push into areas which hadn't been hunted out. A minor gripe is also that, while we are given a glossary of terms in Lakota Sioux expressed in what is obviously the alphabet created for that language in its written form, there's no guide on how one sets about pronouncing the unfamiliar characters.There are however quibbles rather than serious reservations; this is a fascinating book which sets a slice of American history in an unfamiliar and revealing frame.

Goede geschiedschrijving met ook oog voor het economische aspect. Maar ook geen blinde verheerlijking. Een eerlijk verhaal.

Great info and well written

It is with a sigh of relief to read this inclusive text researched and written by an Indigenous author. Thank you for this book.