Indigenous Continent

I have written about indigenous peoples and about the idealized trajectory of American history.

But neither of these projects prepared me for the astonishing, mind-bending lens-reversal of Indigenous Continent, the story of “what happened here,” from the point of view of the first tribal-nations occupants through a narrative that gives the lie to Robert Frost’s “the land was ours before we were the land’s.” Scrupulously researched, not a polemic, Hamalainen’s text feels like a bracing corrective. 

It’s extremely rare that an author’s thesis is so powerful and compelling that it completely overturns how you view the past.

Such is the case in Pekka Hamalainen’s rich narrative history of North America, offered from the perspective of Native Americans. “The history of the overwhelming and persisting Indigenous power,” Hamalainen writes, “remains largely unknown, and it is the biggest blind spot in common understandings of the American past.”

Many of us were taught that the European conquest of North America was inevitable, but Hamalainen shows this wasn’t true. His discussion of the Five Nations in the 17th century is… show more.