A few generations after beginning their migration, the Lakota people became (to borrow a phrase of John Murrin’s) “beneficiaries of catastrophe.” Internecine warfare and the Plains smallpox epidemic of 1780-82 decimated Native communities in the middle Missouri Valley, creating a power vacuum that the Ochethi Sakowin (Seven Fires) could and did exploit. Moving westward with their Dakota kinfolk, the Lakotas reinvented themselves as bison-hunting nomads. Their better-armed Cree and Ojibwa adversaries muscled them out of the best beaver-hunting territory and excluded them from the vital French trading network. The Lakotas began the 18th century as a beleaguered, marginalized people of the western Great Lakes country. (2)Īs in his first book, Hämäläinen in Lakota America presents readers with a history of expansion, success, and magnanimity. In late 2019 Hämäläinen reinforced the Indigenous-power school of interpretation with a deeply researched and insightful monograph on the most famous of all Native North American nations: the western Ochethi Sakowin, or Lakotas. Professional authors who have joined Hämäläinen in his inversion of the Indigenous declension narrative have included Michael Witgen, Michael McDonnell, Matthew Bahar, and Ryan Hall. This 2008 study of the powerful equestrian polity that dominated the southern Plains and southwestern borderlands garnered a few critics, but its admirers and imitators proved far more numerous. The publication of Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire helped create a new narrative of Indigenous American history: a story of growth, wealth, and triumph. Histories of “Indigenous power” remained thin on the ground until the first decade of the 21st century. Particularly in their battles against the expanding United States, Native peoples - according to these accounts - faced lengthening odds and eventually could manage little more than bare survival. Ethnohistorians writing Native North American history in the later 20th century cast Indigenous Americans as heroic underdogs in a long, bitter struggle against Euro-American colonialism. The indefinite article in the subtitle of Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book tells, to those familiar with the author’s first monograph and its professional impact, its own story.
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