Book Review: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen
A deep, slightly revisionist dive into the history of the Lakota Sioux
Yale University Press, 2019, 544 pages
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history
This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early 16th to the early 21st century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then - in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion - as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.
The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
I read Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire, which was a very dense and scholarly work which in many ways provided a more thorough treatment of the Comanche than the more popular Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne. So I approached his second book about a major American Indian tribe kind of knowing what to expect: a lot of historical detail with a bit of "decolonial" gloss on his historical take.
Hämäläinen is trying to present Native Americans as self-deterministic, politically adept empire builders who were every bit the equal of the colonial powers who eventually subjugated them. Rather than being primitive savages crushed by Europeans, he presented first the Comanche and now the Lakota as a full-fledged civilization that held its own and even shaped the course of American history, until superior numbers and technology eventually wore them down.
The problem is, I just don't buy his thesis. So I enjoyed learning more about the Lakota Sioux and I did appreciate Hämäläinen giving them more agency than is often the case in narratives about the clash of colonial powers versus natives. But in the case of the Comanche, I was not convinced by his attempt to portray the very loosely affiliated confederation of wide-ranging Comanche bands who raided across a vast area as a proper "empire" (with trade and diplomacy and strategy and all the other things that empires manage), and I was not convinced by his attempt to portray the Lakota that way either, though they certainly came closer. Hämäläinen's version of history is that the Lakota owned the plains and controlled American expansion, until the U.S. Army finally smashed them. This is true, but it is also merely pointing out the inevitable and trying to make it seem like the Lakota ever had a chance, or the endgame was anything but a foregone conclusion.
The Seven Fires
Properly known as the Lakota (like many tribal names used by whites, "Sioux" was originally a name given to them by their enemies, derived from either "stranger" or "snake", depending on the etymology), the Lakotas are split into seven bands, or "Council Fires," and have been since at least the 1600s, when Europeans first made contact with them. Originally they lived in the upper Mississippi valley (Hämäläinen speculates that they originally migrated there from further south), where they warred with the powerful Algonquins.
Hämäläinen's early history of the Lakota is not of a powerful tribe that commanded respect. Their first encounters with Europeans were accompanied by encounters with Iroquois and other Indians who had allied with the Europeans and been given guns and horses. The Lakota were getting their asses kicked in every battle, and came to the more powerful tribes and the French essentially begging for pity.
What they did have was numbers and land, however. Eventually, they acquired guns, and horses, and became a horse tribe, and began expanding. Their first major appearance in American history was during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lakota repeatedly stopped the expedition, demanding gifts and bribes. A combination of cultural mistakes and Lewis and Clark's arrogance came close to resulting in a battle several times, and could have ended the expedition but for a few close calls.
Lords of the Plains
For a few decades, the Lakota enjoyed supremacy on the plains, in a territory stretching from the Ohio River Valley to the Great Plains. They dictated terms to the Americans, with whom they were eager to trade but to whom they considered themselves equal, notwithstanding their willingness to use "Great White Father" language.
The Lakota were powerful because they were one of the most numerous tribes, and much of their territory was uncharted by whites. Like most Plains tribes, their lifestyle was one of nomadic hunting and warfare. They subsisted largely on buffalo, and traded with other tribes for the carbohydrates they needed. (The need for carbs is a frequent theme of Hämäläinen's, in his books about the Comanche and the Lakota.) But warfare was also a way of life for them. Brutal, genocidal warfare. Here we hit another of my criticisms of Hämäläinen. He goes out of his way to describe the Lakota as autonomous, rational actors managing an empire, just like Europeans did. And when he describes how the Lakota would descend on a smaller, less militant tribe and wipe them out and carry off their women, he acknowledges the brutality of the warfare (it's one of many reasons that the U.S. turned hostile to the Lakota, because many of these tribes were American clients as well and Americans were horrified by this Indian-on-Indian violence) but hastens to point out that this was actually rational and understandable behavior from the Lakotas' perspective. These other tribes were threats, you see. Because they were consuming resources that the Lakota needed. They occupied lands the Lakota needed. They limited Lakota expansion.
Well.... yes. There's a word for that.
The Lakota, literally, did the same thing that was done to them. You can argue that they were later treated in a brutal and inhumane fashion by whites and the United States was wrong to expropriate their lands, but you cannot do that while describing Lakota practices as just "their way of life." Hämäläinen is never willing to address this irony.
Wasi'chu and Indian Giving
The Lakota word for white people, "wasi'chu," is believed to have originally meant "fat eater."
The modern story told about the history of Lakota-Wasi'chu relations is the story told about many Indian tribes: that they had their own sovereign territory, whites began encroaching on it, the Lakota reacted violently, leading to a few decades of Indian wars followed by their inevitable subjugation by the United States Army. Usually there's a lot of stuff about massacres and broken treaties added to the narrative.
This is all true, but it's more complicated than that, and while Hämäläinen is clearly sympathetic to the Lakota, he does present the entire history in a thorough if not unbiased manner.
It is true that the Lakota signed a number of treaties with the United States defining where whites could and could not settle, or travel without their permission. One of the Lakotas' grievances was that white settlers would frequently violate these agreements, and the U.S. Army would do little or nothing to enforce them. Essentially, the Lakota started attacking settlers because the wasi'chu would not police their own.
But there were also misunderstandings on both sides, and of course, the Americans made the same mistake they often did with Indian tribes, which was assuming that "the Lakota" constituted a single people and that signing a treaty with one band meant that everyone who called themselves "Lakota" would be bound by it.
Rarely were treaties simply unilaterally broken by one side or the other. By and large, the U.S. tried to uphold their end of agreements. The problem was that the two sides often had very different understandings of what they had agreed to. The Lakota had an oral tradition, and to them, what they heard said to them face to face was what they had agreed to. The legalistic terms written down on paper meant little to them, and often these terms were either insufficiently explained to them, or they chose to ignore them in favor of what they thought they had been told. Hämäläinen gives several accounts of Lakota chiefs being sat down in Washington to go over what their treaties said, and angrily discovering conditions no one remembered agreeing to. The Lakotas and other tribes felt that they had been tricked, but there was probably no intent to deceive them when the treaties were signed; whites just didn't bother to make sure the Indians really understood what they were signing.
One example was a clause guaranteeing the Lakota the rights to their lands, with no U.S. claim upon it, "So long as buffalo hunting is viable there." The Lakota did not immediately realize that whites meant that when the buffalo ran out, then as far as the U.S. was concerned, the Lakota wouldn't need the land anymore. And of course, Lakota and U.S. officials would have very different ideas of what "viable" meant.
It also didn't help that whites slaughtered as many buffalo as possible to make the Indians' way of life less viable.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 signed with several tribes including the Lakota, was meant to establish permanent peace. It promised safe passage for white settlers along the Oregon Trail, allowed the U.S. to build forts and roads and trading posts, and acknowledged a large section of land as Indian territory unclaimed by the U.S. government. It also promised regular annuities to the Lakota and other tribes.
The Fort Laramie Treaty caused problems that lasted to the present day. Part was the result of the U.S. Army again not preventing white settlers from violating it. The Lakota were given exclusive rights to the Black Hills. The problem with this was that several other tribes also considered the Black Hills their territory and weren't happy to discover that the U.S. had just handed it over to the Lakota. In the aftermath of the treaty, rival tribes continued to fight for resources and the Lakota pushed more of them out of their territory.
The Lakota were happy to collect their annuities, coming to U.S. Indian agent offices annually to get their guns and ammunition, food, and other goods. The United States dutifully provided this even as some Lakota bands increased their aggression, but there was a great deal of corruption, with contractors providing rotten meat, bad flour, and other substandard goods. This of course exacerbated the deteriorating relations with the American government.
This led eventually to a war that the Indians actually won, led by Lakota Chief Red Cloud. Having been humiliated by a Lakota-led coalition, the United States signed a second Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868. The second Fort Laramie Treaty set aside additional unceded Indian Territory, reaffirmed the Lakotas' possession of the Black Hills, and stipulated that the U.S. would abandon forts they had built that had violated the original Fort Laramie Treaty, while the Indians would begin transitioning to a "farming way of life."
It didn't work.
The second Fort Laramie Treaty was also problematic from the start. Lakota chiefs did not all agree to the treaty. Lakotas continued fighting with other tribes. White settlers continued ignoring Indian sovereignty, and the U.S. continued to distribute justice unevenly, punishing Indians who killed white men while not consistently punishing white men who killed Indians. Lakota began to split between "Agency Indians" who hung around Indian Agency stations and tried to take up farming and other white man occupations, and non-Agency Indians who continued to live as horse nomads (including raiding other tribes and white settlers) and then showed up at the stations for their gimmes from the Great White Father. Agency officials knew who was raiding and crimeing, but didn't have much power to do anything about it and had to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty.
The situation was not sustainable, relations continued to deteriorate, white settlers wanted more land, and then gold was discovered in the Black Hills, giving the U.S. even more incentive to force the Lakota off their land.
Sitting Bull and the Sun Dancers
The sun dance was a rather grisly annual ritual in which Lakota warriors would pierce their flesh and hang by their piercings until they tore free.
Sitting Bull, a Lakota chief, began leading a movement among the Lakota to live independently of the white man, and accept none of their handouts or promises, but continue their traditional way of life. Similar to the later prophet who started the "Ghost dance" movement to the south, Sitting Bull preached a vision of the Lakota becoming immune to bullets, and the wasi'chu disappearing. He participated in a ritual in which another man cut off fifty strips of flesh from his arms while he danced and had visions.
Although they didn't actually start anything, it made U.S. officials paranoid about this cult-like behavior. They thought Sitting Bull was up to something, and demanded a greater troop presence, and that led to…
Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee
The most famous Indian battles of all are associated with the Lakota. The Battle of Little Bighorn, in 1876, in which Lakota Chief Crazy Horse destroyed a U.S. Army battalion led by General Custer, was the high point of Lakota power, and also, of course, what led to their final downfall. Because obviously, the United States was not going to let stand the massacre of an entire army battalion. Whereas in the past, the Lakota had elicited public sympathy, especially during much-publicized state visits to the White House by their chiefs (some of whom learned to play the PR game quite well), now the American people wanted them crushed.
The Lakota did not fare so well in subsequent battles, and they were chased, ground down, and eventually reduced to near-refugee status in their own territory. The nadir of their power was reached in 1890, when U.S. Cavalry troops entered a Lakota camp in South Dakota to disarm them. According to one version of the event, one man refused to give up his rifle, and a shot went off. According to another version (which Hämäläinen doesn't explicitly advocate but seems sympathetic to), the cavalry went in looking for a fight, and with Little Big Horn still on their minds, over a decade later, they didn't need much of an excuse to open fire. Men, women, and children were slaughtered in what became known as the Battle of Wounded Knee.
It's hard to overstate just how brutal warfare was during this time period. Plains Indian warfare had always been some of the most brutal in the continent. It was simply understood that losing tribes were wiped out, captives were tortured to death, women were raped, and cannibalism was not a distant memory well into the 19th century.
American soldiers sent to fight Indians soon became just as brutal. Soldiers collected Indian scalps as souvenirs, and it was standard cavalry tactics, when attacking an Indian camp, to target women and children to distract the warriors.
Wounded Knee today is regarded as some sort of special atrocity. The reality is that while it was remarkable for the number of non-combatants slaughtered, and the seeming senselessness of it, it was essentially just a continuation of the warfare that had been going on for decades, and neither whites nor Lakota could really claim this violence was shocking or out of the ordinary.
Shapeshifters
Hämäläinen frequently refers to the Lakota as "shapeshifters," meaning they were adaptable, malleable, and transformed themselves to changing circumstances. They went from a pathetic underdog tribe being preyed on by their neighbors to fearsome horse nomads and plains barbarians, to politicians extracting promises and concessions from U.S. presidents, to guerrilla fighters and savvy manipulators…
And as sympathetic as I want to be to the Lakota, I still feel like Hämäläinen's thesis that the Lakota were practicing power politics all along to be a cope. In the end, they wound up in the same place all the other Indian tribes did: conquered by superior firepower. They weren't hapless victims; they also weren't innocent. Empires clash and borders are redrawn by the winners. Today, we look with abhorrence at Russia launching an invasion of Ukraine, because these things Just Aren't Done anymore. But in the 19th century, they were done. They were done by everyone. They had been done for millennia. This isn't to excuse the United States for mistreatment of Native Americans or abrogation of its responsibilities. But violence and imperialism was a game played by everyone who could pick up a rock.
Hämäläinen ends the book in 2016, after briefly covering the recent history of the Lakota. They were central to the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, and continue to be activists both on the reservation and in court. It was the Lakota leading the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline built through their reservation. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Lakota were entitled to compensation for violation of their rights to the Black Hills, according to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. They were awarded $122 million, but refused to accept it; they want the Black Hills back. To this day, the money gathers interest in a BIA account, and is now over one billion dollars.
But corruption and cronyism has also been endemic in Lakota tribal politics. The largest Lakota reservation, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is one of the poorest in the nation, with rampant unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide. The once proud lords of the plain are now largely living in third world conditions.
I came away from this book feeling more sympathetic to the Lakota than I did the Comanche. The Lakota were no less fierce, but they were, as Hämäläinen describes them, much more adaptable. They got screwed by their interactions with white people, but it wasn't an entirely one-sided screwing. I do have a hard time mustering any generational guilt for power politics as practiced from the dawn of civilization until yesterday, figuratively speaking. But having watched a few videos about conditions on Pine Ridge Reservation today, it is sad.
So what is my final opinion of Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power? As a history, it was somewhat dry reading. It's a very good concise history of one of the most important American Indian tribes. Hämäläinen thoroughly discards the "noble savage" trope, but leans a little too heavily into the "noble oppressed marginalized POC" trope. To be fair, he avoids painting the Lakota as victims, because his entire thesis is that they practiced indigenous power politics that reshaped America. But I find it hard to reconcile two things being true at once, that the Lakota were power players who gave as good as they got, and that the Lakota are reduced to their current sad circumstances because of the brutality and perfidy of whites. To say they were simply losers in a game of power politics would be harsh. But I feel like Hämäläinen wants to have it both ways.
Also by Pekka Hämäläinen: My review of The Comanche Empire.
My complete list of book reviews.
Yale University Press, 2019, 544 pages
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history
This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early 16th to the early 21st century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then - in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion - as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.
The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
I read Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire, which was a very dense and scholarly work which in many ways provided a more thorough treatment of the Comanche than the more popular Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne. So I approached his second book about a major American Indian tribe kind of knowing what to expect: a lot of historical detail with a bit of "decolonial" gloss on his historical take.
Hämäläinen is trying to present Native Americans as self-deterministic, politically adept empire builders who were every bit the equal of the colonial powers who eventually subjugated them. Rather than being primitive savages crushed by Europeans, he presented first the Comanche and now the Lakota as a full-fledged civilization that held its own and even shaped the course of American history, until superior numbers and technology eventually wore them down.
The problem is, I just don't buy his thesis. So I enjoyed learning more about the Lakota Sioux and I did appreciate Hämäläinen giving them more agency than is often the case in narratives about the clash of colonial powers versus natives. But in the case of the Comanche, I was not convinced by his attempt to portray the very loosely affiliated confederation of wide-ranging Comanche bands who raided across a vast area as a proper "empire" (with trade and diplomacy and strategy and all the other things that empires manage), and I was not convinced by his attempt to portray the Lakota that way either, though they certainly came closer. Hämäläinen's version of history is that the Lakota owned the plains and controlled American expansion, until the U.S. Army finally smashed them. This is true, but it is also merely pointing out the inevitable and trying to make it seem like the Lakota ever had a chance, or the endgame was anything but a foregone conclusion.
The Seven Fires
Properly known as the Lakota (like many tribal names used by whites, "Sioux" was originally a name given to them by their enemies, derived from either "stranger" or "snake", depending on the etymology), the Lakotas are split into seven bands, or "Council Fires," and have been since at least the 1600s, when Europeans first made contact with them. Originally they lived in the upper Mississippi valley (Hämäläinen speculates that they originally migrated there from further south), where they warred with the powerful Algonquins.
Hämäläinen's early history of the Lakota is not of a powerful tribe that commanded respect. Their first encounters with Europeans were accompanied by encounters with Iroquois and other Indians who had allied with the Europeans and been given guns and horses. The Lakota were getting their asses kicked in every battle, and came to the more powerful tribes and the French essentially begging for pity.
What they did have was numbers and land, however. Eventually, they acquired guns, and horses, and became a horse tribe, and began expanding. Their first major appearance in American history was during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lakota repeatedly stopped the expedition, demanding gifts and bribes. A combination of cultural mistakes and Lewis and Clark's arrogance came close to resulting in a battle several times, and could have ended the expedition but for a few close calls.
Lords of the Plains
For a few decades, the Lakota enjoyed supremacy on the plains, in a territory stretching from the Ohio River Valley to the Great Plains. They dictated terms to the Americans, with whom they were eager to trade but to whom they considered themselves equal, notwithstanding their willingness to use "Great White Father" language.
The Lakota were powerful because they were one of the most numerous tribes, and much of their territory was uncharted by whites. Like most Plains tribes, their lifestyle was one of nomadic hunting and warfare. They subsisted largely on buffalo, and traded with other tribes for the carbohydrates they needed. (The need for carbs is a frequent theme of Hämäläinen's, in his books about the Comanche and the Lakota.) But warfare was also a way of life for them. Brutal, genocidal warfare. Here we hit another of my criticisms of Hämäläinen. He goes out of his way to describe the Lakota as autonomous, rational actors managing an empire, just like Europeans did. And when he describes how the Lakota would descend on a smaller, less militant tribe and wipe them out and carry off their women, he acknowledges the brutality of the warfare (it's one of many reasons that the U.S. turned hostile to the Lakota, because many of these tribes were American clients as well and Americans were horrified by this Indian-on-Indian violence) but hastens to point out that this was actually rational and understandable behavior from the Lakotas' perspective. These other tribes were threats, you see. Because they were consuming resources that the Lakota needed. They occupied lands the Lakota needed. They limited Lakota expansion.
Well.... yes. There's a word for that.
The Lakota, literally, did the same thing that was done to them. You can argue that they were later treated in a brutal and inhumane fashion by whites and the United States was wrong to expropriate their lands, but you cannot do that while describing Lakota practices as just "their way of life." Hämäläinen is never willing to address this irony.
Wasi'chu and Indian Giving
The Lakota word for white people, "wasi'chu," is believed to have originally meant "fat eater."
The modern story told about the history of Lakota-Wasi'chu relations is the story told about many Indian tribes: that they had their own sovereign territory, whites began encroaching on it, the Lakota reacted violently, leading to a few decades of Indian wars followed by their inevitable subjugation by the United States Army. Usually there's a lot of stuff about massacres and broken treaties added to the narrative.
This is all true, but it's more complicated than that, and while Hämäläinen is clearly sympathetic to the Lakota, he does present the entire history in a thorough if not unbiased manner.
It is true that the Lakota signed a number of treaties with the United States defining where whites could and could not settle, or travel without their permission. One of the Lakotas' grievances was that white settlers would frequently violate these agreements, and the U.S. Army would do little or nothing to enforce them. Essentially, the Lakota started attacking settlers because the wasi'chu would not police their own.
But there were also misunderstandings on both sides, and of course, the Americans made the same mistake they often did with Indian tribes, which was assuming that "the Lakota" constituted a single people and that signing a treaty with one band meant that everyone who called themselves "Lakota" would be bound by it.
Rarely were treaties simply unilaterally broken by one side or the other. By and large, the U.S. tried to uphold their end of agreements. The problem was that the two sides often had very different understandings of what they had agreed to. The Lakota had an oral tradition, and to them, what they heard said to them face to face was what they had agreed to. The legalistic terms written down on paper meant little to them, and often these terms were either insufficiently explained to them, or they chose to ignore them in favor of what they thought they had been told. Hämäläinen gives several accounts of Lakota chiefs being sat down in Washington to go over what their treaties said, and angrily discovering conditions no one remembered agreeing to. The Lakotas and other tribes felt that they had been tricked, but there was probably no intent to deceive them when the treaties were signed; whites just didn't bother to make sure the Indians really understood what they were signing.
One example was a clause guaranteeing the Lakota the rights to their lands, with no U.S. claim upon it, "So long as buffalo hunting is viable there." The Lakota did not immediately realize that whites meant that when the buffalo ran out, then as far as the U.S. was concerned, the Lakota wouldn't need the land anymore. And of course, Lakota and U.S. officials would have very different ideas of what "viable" meant.
It also didn't help that whites slaughtered as many buffalo as possible to make the Indians' way of life less viable.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 signed with several tribes including the Lakota, was meant to establish permanent peace. It promised safe passage for white settlers along the Oregon Trail, allowed the U.S. to build forts and roads and trading posts, and acknowledged a large section of land as Indian territory unclaimed by the U.S. government. It also promised regular annuities to the Lakota and other tribes.
The Fort Laramie Treaty caused problems that lasted to the present day. Part was the result of the U.S. Army again not preventing white settlers from violating it. The Lakota were given exclusive rights to the Black Hills. The problem with this was that several other tribes also considered the Black Hills their territory and weren't happy to discover that the U.S. had just handed it over to the Lakota. In the aftermath of the treaty, rival tribes continued to fight for resources and the Lakota pushed more of them out of their territory.
The Lakota were happy to collect their annuities, coming to U.S. Indian agent offices annually to get their guns and ammunition, food, and other goods. The United States dutifully provided this even as some Lakota bands increased their aggression, but there was a great deal of corruption, with contractors providing rotten meat, bad flour, and other substandard goods. This of course exacerbated the deteriorating relations with the American government.
This led eventually to a war that the Indians actually won, led by Lakota Chief Red Cloud. Having been humiliated by a Lakota-led coalition, the United States signed a second Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868. The second Fort Laramie Treaty set aside additional unceded Indian Territory, reaffirmed the Lakotas' possession of the Black Hills, and stipulated that the U.S. would abandon forts they had built that had violated the original Fort Laramie Treaty, while the Indians would begin transitioning to a "farming way of life."
It didn't work.
The second Fort Laramie Treaty was also problematic from the start. Lakota chiefs did not all agree to the treaty. Lakotas continued fighting with other tribes. White settlers continued ignoring Indian sovereignty, and the U.S. continued to distribute justice unevenly, punishing Indians who killed white men while not consistently punishing white men who killed Indians. Lakota began to split between "Agency Indians" who hung around Indian Agency stations and tried to take up farming and other white man occupations, and non-Agency Indians who continued to live as horse nomads (including raiding other tribes and white settlers) and then showed up at the stations for their gimmes from the Great White Father. Agency officials knew who was raiding and crimeing, but didn't have much power to do anything about it and had to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty.
The situation was not sustainable, relations continued to deteriorate, white settlers wanted more land, and then gold was discovered in the Black Hills, giving the U.S. even more incentive to force the Lakota off their land.
Sitting Bull and the Sun Dancers
The sun dance was a rather grisly annual ritual in which Lakota warriors would pierce their flesh and hang by their piercings until they tore free.
Sitting Bull, a Lakota chief, began leading a movement among the Lakota to live independently of the white man, and accept none of their handouts or promises, but continue their traditional way of life. Similar to the later prophet who started the "Ghost dance" movement to the south, Sitting Bull preached a vision of the Lakota becoming immune to bullets, and the wasi'chu disappearing. He participated in a ritual in which another man cut off fifty strips of flesh from his arms while he danced and had visions.
Although they didn't actually start anything, it made U.S. officials paranoid about this cult-like behavior. They thought Sitting Bull was up to something, and demanded a greater troop presence, and that led to…
Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee
The most famous Indian battles of all are associated with the Lakota. The Battle of Little Bighorn, in 1876, in which Lakota Chief Crazy Horse destroyed a U.S. Army battalion led by General Custer, was the high point of Lakota power, and also, of course, what led to their final downfall. Because obviously, the United States was not going to let stand the massacre of an entire army battalion. Whereas in the past, the Lakota had elicited public sympathy, especially during much-publicized state visits to the White House by their chiefs (some of whom learned to play the PR game quite well), now the American people wanted them crushed.
The Lakota did not fare so well in subsequent battles, and they were chased, ground down, and eventually reduced to near-refugee status in their own territory. The nadir of their power was reached in 1890, when U.S. Cavalry troops entered a Lakota camp in South Dakota to disarm them. According to one version of the event, one man refused to give up his rifle, and a shot went off. According to another version (which Hämäläinen doesn't explicitly advocate but seems sympathetic to), the cavalry went in looking for a fight, and with Little Big Horn still on their minds, over a decade later, they didn't need much of an excuse to open fire. Men, women, and children were slaughtered in what became known as the Battle of Wounded Knee.
It's hard to overstate just how brutal warfare was during this time period. Plains Indian warfare had always been some of the most brutal in the continent. It was simply understood that losing tribes were wiped out, captives were tortured to death, women were raped, and cannibalism was not a distant memory well into the 19th century.
American soldiers sent to fight Indians soon became just as brutal. Soldiers collected Indian scalps as souvenirs, and it was standard cavalry tactics, when attacking an Indian camp, to target women and children to distract the warriors.
Wounded Knee today is regarded as some sort of special atrocity. The reality is that while it was remarkable for the number of non-combatants slaughtered, and the seeming senselessness of it, it was essentially just a continuation of the warfare that had been going on for decades, and neither whites nor Lakota could really claim this violence was shocking or out of the ordinary.
Shapeshifters
Hämäläinen frequently refers to the Lakota as "shapeshifters," meaning they were adaptable, malleable, and transformed themselves to changing circumstances. They went from a pathetic underdog tribe being preyed on by their neighbors to fearsome horse nomads and plains barbarians, to politicians extracting promises and concessions from U.S. presidents, to guerrilla fighters and savvy manipulators…
And as sympathetic as I want to be to the Lakota, I still feel like Hämäläinen's thesis that the Lakota were practicing power politics all along to be a cope. In the end, they wound up in the same place all the other Indian tribes did: conquered by superior firepower. They weren't hapless victims; they also weren't innocent. Empires clash and borders are redrawn by the winners. Today, we look with abhorrence at Russia launching an invasion of Ukraine, because these things Just Aren't Done anymore. But in the 19th century, they were done. They were done by everyone. They had been done for millennia. This isn't to excuse the United States for mistreatment of Native Americans or abrogation of its responsibilities. But violence and imperialism was a game played by everyone who could pick up a rock.
Hämäläinen ends the book in 2016, after briefly covering the recent history of the Lakota. They were central to the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, and continue to be activists both on the reservation and in court. It was the Lakota leading the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline built through their reservation. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Lakota were entitled to compensation for violation of their rights to the Black Hills, according to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. They were awarded $122 million, but refused to accept it; they want the Black Hills back. To this day, the money gathers interest in a BIA account, and is now over one billion dollars.
But corruption and cronyism has also been endemic in Lakota tribal politics. The largest Lakota reservation, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is one of the poorest in the nation, with rampant unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide. The once proud lords of the plain are now largely living in third world conditions.
I came away from this book feeling more sympathetic to the Lakota than I did the Comanche. The Lakota were no less fierce, but they were, as Hämäläinen describes them, much more adaptable. They got screwed by their interactions with white people, but it wasn't an entirely one-sided screwing. I do have a hard time mustering any generational guilt for power politics as practiced from the dawn of civilization until yesterday, figuratively speaking. But having watched a few videos about conditions on Pine Ridge Reservation today, it is sad.
So what is my final opinion of Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power? As a history, it was somewhat dry reading. It's a very good concise history of one of the most important American Indian tribes. Hämäläinen thoroughly discards the "noble savage" trope, but leans a little too heavily into the "noble oppressed marginalized POC" trope. To be fair, he avoids painting the Lakota as victims, because his entire thesis is that they practiced indigenous power politics that reshaped America. But I find it hard to reconcile two things being true at once, that the Lakota were power players who gave as good as they got, and that the Lakota are reduced to their current sad circumstances because of the brutality and perfidy of whites. To say they were simply losers in a game of power politics would be harsh. But I feel like Hämäläinen wants to have it both ways.
Also by Pekka Hämäläinen: My review of The Comanche Empire.
My complete list of book reviews.