Book Review: Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen

A fascinating deep dive into the long-lasting power of Native nations in North America

Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen, Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford

I hadn’t planned to write a review of Indigenous Continent, but I saw a copy at my local library, and then I was inexorably going to do so. The book demanded my attention, then successfully held it. A one-volume history of the Indigenous nations of North America, this chef d’oeuvre brilliantly integrates the decades of new scholarship that have forged a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

Kelp forests rock

For example, the book has a delightfully ecological bent, explaining how life-forms like kelp, corn, squash, beans, salmon, acorns, bison, beaver, and horses were vital to Indigenous life in North America. Kelp forests likely provided the first major highway for humans to arrive in the Americas, with fish, shellfish, and marine mammal-rich marine ecosystems providing sustenance for Pacific Rim voyages even while what is now Alaska and Canada were thickly glaciated. Salmon became the primary food source for the Pacific Northwest peoples, shaping hierarchical kingdom societies based on control of key salmon rivers, while acorns became the primary food source for peoples in what is now Northern California, shaping more egalitarian societies spread across plentiful oak groves. (This absolutely fascinating salmon/oak nation distinction is further discussed at length in modern anthropology classic The Dawn of Everything). Corn, squash, and beans were the symbiotic “Three Sisters” of North American agriculture, the core crop of lands from the Pueblo to Cahokia to the Wampanoags, providing a balanced diet while keeping the soil fertile. Beaver pelts were the core trade good of North America for centuries, with pelts exchangeable at French, Dutch, and British trading posts for everything from cloth to scissors to kettles to guns & ammo.

Comanche Feats of Horsemanship, painting by George Catlin

And horses…well, horses changed everything. Native Americans previously had dogs as their main domestic animals, and they weren’t nearly as useful. Dogs have to be fed meat from herbivorous animals: they’re a high-trophic-level species, with big energy losses between photosynthesis and usable animal work. Horses (in a delightful detail, the Comanche called them “magic dogs”) are one trophic level down, and thus could more directly access the immense caloric resources of the vast grassy Great Plains with less energy losses. As Hämäläinen eloquently puts it, “The horse was a bigger and stronger dog, but, more profoundly, it was an energy converter. By transforming inaccessible plant energy into tangible and immediately available muscle power, horses opened up an astonishing shortcut to the sun.” This allowed much more effective hunting of bison, enabling the rise of nomadic, ultra-bison-dependent “horse rider nations” like the Lakota, Comanche, Crow, and Blackfoot. The Comanche actually focused their food-production activities so intensely on hunting bison that at one point that they traded with sedentary Native peoples for almost all of their carbohydrates, swapping protein and fat-rich bison meat for Three Sisters crops (and by then, European imports like bread as well).

Full review below paywall!