Why am I passionate about this?
Neil's 3 favorite reads in 2023
Plus, Neil's 6-year-old's favorite books.
Why did Neil love this book?
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.
2 authors picked Indigenous Continent as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
American history and self-understanding have long depended on the notion of a "colonial America", an era that-according to prevailing accounts-laid the foundation for the modern United States. In Indigenous Continent, the acclaimed historian Pekka Hamalainen shatters this Eurocentric narrative by retelling the four centuries between first contacts and the peak of Native power from Indigenous points of view. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth, the American Revolution and other well-worn episodes on the conventional timeline, Hamalainen depicts a sovereign world of distinctive Native nations whose members, far from simple victims of colonial aggression, controlled the continent well into the…