Pekka Hämäläinen. Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power.

Abstract

In Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hämäläinen presents an engrossing study of an Indigenous empire that controlled extensive territory in North America, commanded expansive trade networks, and frustrated the imperial designs of France, England, Spain, and the Unites States. Although the Lakota empire and the United States claimed overlapping territory, their westward expansions were not initially competitive, but instead the two nations cooperated, traded, and allied together to achieve their respective objectives. Even as the United States began to tighten its grip on the Great Plains during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Lakotas continued to expand their own dominion as they pursued what Hämäläinen calls “Buffalo Imperialism,” meaning the strategic conquest of hunting grounds (322). Federal officials perceived the Lakota empire imperfectly, assuming that the Natives were simply unsophisticated nomads who were destined to disappear. This neglect allowed the Lakotas to maintain their expansions and sustain military superiority over the US Army for much of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. The decline of buffalo herds in the mid-1870s, as well as the frontier army’s eventual victories, combined to unravel Lakota America as a sovereign entity on the plains.