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

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 154–156 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.14 Book Review Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019) Jennifer Graber University of Texas, Austin, USA Lakota America is a sweeping history from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries. As with his earlier book on the Comanches, Hämäläinen shows how a powerful Native nation impacted the development of the American West. In this case, Lakotas quelled French and British colonial aspirations. Later, they created their own powerful empire whose growth paralleled and often thwarted US expansion. Hämäläinen’s explanation of Lakotas’ rise to power is novel. Rather than presume their “apparent invincibility” as horse-mounted, gun-toting warriors, he details the Native nation’s many migrations and permutations. He argues that Lakotas’ “stunning ability and willingness to change” facilitated survival and, for a time, dominance (9). As such, Lakota “shapeshifting” is central to American history. Hämäläinen situates the Lakota within the Očhéthi Šakówin or Seven Council Fires, popularly known as the Sioux. He details four shapeshifting episodes , each involving new places, lifeways, technologies, and relationships with Native neighbors and colonial powers. He considers these shifts in light of the trickster figure, Iktómi, who models a “capacity to adapt” in Lakota oral tradition (9). The book begins with Lakotas’ earliest experiences in what is now Minnesota where they were hardly powerful. Their prospects rose and fell depending on Jennifer Graber 155 access to colonial goods and their Native neighbors’ strength. As French-Native conflicts in the east wreaked havoc beyond the Great Lakes, Lakotas turned west. This move did not immediately take them to the high prairie, but rather to the Missouri River’s bottomlands. There, Lakotas maximized their large population and access to guns to secure resource-rich riverbed territory. Along the way, they dominated most Native peoples living along the Missouri. Their power grew, but they were hardly the juggernaut they would eventually become. They needed more resources to exert control over their riverbed neighbors. Again, Lakotas looked west. As Hämäläinen observes, they did so at the exact moment guns streamed in from the east and plentiful horses moved up from the south. At this highly fortunate convergence of resources, Lakotas moved onto the plains and made buffalo hunting central to their way of life. Soon, they had sufficient horses to mount every member of their populous nation. Lakotas were swift and mobile, ranging over unprecedented amounts of land. With massive horse herds to be fed, Lakotas shifted one last time. They settled in Pahá Sápa, or the Black Hills, for its rich and sheltered grasslands. Lakotas came to see these hills as the center of the world. The book’s second half tells the more familiar story of US efforts to move through Lakota lands, targeting them for overland trails, military forts, railroad lines, and gold mining. Lakota shapeshifting, including their ability to maximize resources available from Americans while moving nimbly enough to evade their control, kept them independent for longer than almost any other Native nation. Even as well-known American military characters such as Fetterman and Custer come into the story, Hämäläinen attends to internal Lakota dynamics and relations with Native neighbors. He maintains this focus through extensive use of winter counts, Lakotas’ visual form of history keeping. The book’s climax comes with the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn in which Lakotas defeated Custer. With this interpretative choice, Hämäläinen emphasizes a Native nation’s stunning victory over US Americans, who seemed shocked that their centennial-celebrating nation had been stopped in its tracks by Indians. Lakota America offers much to American religionists who find themselves weaving “highlights” of American Indian history into their survey courses. Hämäläinen’s focus on contingency and transformation presents an alternative to two unhelpful trends in many textbooks: one that presents Native practices as frozen in time and another that characterizes change as inauthentic. Häm...