Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power - theory and practice

Portland has, by my standards, an outstanding public library, meaning they have new books but also old books, even in languages other than English.  The process of moving has not been good for what I will call intellectual activity, but I now have a new library to play with, and my reading has become a little more ambitious. 

And this book needs to get back to the library, so here it is.

Long ago, I wrote a little four-post series on Pekka Hämäläinen's original and surprising The Comanche Empire (2009), in which Hämäläinen conceives of Comanche-occupied territory as a state, a nomad empire, allowing him to apply a great deal of illuminating international relations theory to what at first seems to be sparse evidence.  Much becomes clear.  He finds an interpretive framework that makes sense of a lot of puzzles.

In Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019), he does something similar with the history of the Lakota Sioux.  The differences are, I think, as follows:

First, the new book is much more synthetic than The Comanche Empire, based less on Hämäläinen’s own archival work and more on that of other historians.  Having said that, it is clear from the notes – not the bibliography; there is no separate bibliography – that the last twenty years, and perhaps especially the last ten, have been an exciting period in the history and anthropology of the interior of America.  There must have been plenty of times when Hämäläinen had to tear up some part of his own book as new archeological or documentary results were disseminated.  The work on Sioux sources, especially the complex pictographic winter counts, is crucial.

Second, and related, Lakota America is more of a narrative history and less of a social history than The Comanche Empire, with more “characters” and with much of the methodology and theory moved to the background.  More readers will likely find the book accessible.  Perhaps that is intentional.

I remember Larry McMurtry, in the New York Review of Books, complaining that there were so many books about Custer and the battle of the Little Bighorn that even he, a top collector of books about the American West, had stopped bothering with “Custeriana” (although a few years later he wrote his own Custer book).  One little irony here is that Lakota America becomes, in the last third or so, another Little Bighorn book, even if here, from the Lakota point of view, it is the battle of the Greasy Grass, and the opposing, losing, general, Pȟehíŋ HáŋskA (Long Beard), is neither a martyr nor hero.

But it’s an exciting story from many perspectives; what can you do.  The entire history is an exciting story.

Style in History

I'm stealing the title of a Peter Gay book (1974) that I have looked at but not read, a study of the styles of a number of European historians (Gibbon, Burckhardt, etc).  I want to write a bit about the style of some American historians.

This week I have presented a few samples of Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire, enough to demonstrate that he's a good, concise professional writer.  The difficulty of the book comes not from its style, but from the huge mass of material and the difficulty of organizing it: two centuries, three borderlands, multiple European nations, a multitude of Indian nations.  Hämäläinen himself succumbs to the problem a time or two.  See the beginning of Chapter 5, where he resorts twice in two pages to the "In this chapter" formulation.  I recognize the symptom, and can diagnose the problem - that section must have been a beast to write.  At some point, he gave up - "Good enough, it works." 

It is good enough, and it does work.  Like I said at the beginning of the week, the book is a triumph.  A generation or more of American history students are going to have to work their way through it.  If I were one of them, the first thing I would do upon re-reading is to make a giant timeline, which would have been a nice addendum to the book.

As I have been writing about The Comanche Empire, I have been reading a different book about a different episode of Native American history, Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851).  Parkman's book about the 1763 uprising of the Great Lakes Indians immediately following the French and Indian War was a similarly path-breaking history in its time.  That hardly explains why the book is still in print, as part of the Library of America, along with the rest of Parkman's massive France and England in North America, all seven fat volumes, and God willing I'll read them all.  The Conspiracy of Pontiac was excellent.

Parkman's books are still read for their style.  He is one more author writing under the shadow of Walter Scott, and the somewhat more transparent shade of James Fennimore Cooper.  It for some reason had never occurred to me that Scott's historical novels might influence not only novelists but also historians.  If a novel can include history, why can't history read like a novel?

Well, there are lots of good reasons why it can't, but Parkman really worked on the problem.  Some of the best scenes  in The Conspiracy of Pontiac are at least as exciting as Scott's battle scenes (the siege of Detroit, for example).  Other sections are more traditional - dense but necessary summaries of the political or military background of an event.

Some atmospheric but overwritten, even ridiculous, Parkman:

The wildcat glared from the thicket; the raccoon thrust his furry countenance from the hollow tree, and the opossum swung, head downwards, from the overhanging bough. (Ch. 28)

And some of Parkman at his best, the very last paragraph, on the fate of the murdered Chief Pontiac:

Neither mound nor tablet marked the burial-place of Pontiac.  For a mausoleum, a city [St. Louis] has risen above the forest hero; and the race whom he hated with such burning rancor trample with unceasing footsteps over his forgotten grave. (Ch. 31)

Guidelines for the historical study of Native Americans - it's so complex!

Exam question: Describe the material conditions of 13th century Plains Indians.

Answer: It's a trick question.  There were no Plains Indians in the 13th century:

The dry period that had begun in the thirteenth century had plunged the plains' vast bison herds into a sharp decline, discouraging the Shoshones from entering.  In fact, the decrease in animal populations was so drastic that most plains people had sought refuge from the bordering regions, using th grasslands only for seasonal hunts. (The Comanche Empire, 21-2)

This startling fact is not Pekka Hämäläinen's own, but is borrowed from the work of archeologists and anthropologists and such.  See David A. Baerreis and Reid A. Bryson, "Historical Climatology of the Southern Plains: A Preliminary Survey," Oklahoma Anthropological Bulletin, March 1963.  Note carefully, 1963!  Note also that this coincides with the Medieval Warm Period.  Note also (also) that it lines up with the collapse of Cahokia, which was not on the Great Plains at all. 

I'm developing some personal guidelines for the study of Native Americans.  Please add more, or tell me I don't know what I'm talking about (since I don't).  Maybe they're all obvious.

1. Categories are necessary, but any statement beginning "Native Americans were" or "Native Americans did (not)" is likely to be wrong. Be specific.

2. Expect nothing to stay the same, large or small.  Civilizations rise and fall.  Climate changes.  Cultures intermingle and split.  Fish and fowl were taboo foods for the Comanches, until the catastrophic drought of the 1850s, when the starving Comanches "routinely ate both" (302). 

3. Native Americans were human (I just violated Guideline #1).  Some were innovative and adaptive, others were stubborn and hidebound.  They made use of their physical environment to increase their material comfort.  The Comanches deliberately turned western Texas into an enormous grazing land for their horse herds, driving out the buffalo, on which they traditionally subsisted.  Timothy Pauketat, who wrote the short book on Cahokia that I recently read, is withering in this subject.  An older generation of researchers told him that Cahokia could not have been a city, because Native Americans did not build cities.  It could not have been ruled by a imperial religious elite, whose power was partly based on mass human sacrifices. 

At the peak of Comanche power, during the 1830s, about one-sixth (very roughly) of the population of Comanche territory were slaves (see pp. 250-1). About one-sixth of the population of the United States at that time were slaves. Comanches were human.

These guidelines of course applies to the study of anything.   I always know something is going to be wrong when a sentence begins "In Europe during the Middle Ages..."  Whatever follows may very well be true for England or parts of France, but rarely has much applicability to medieval Poland or Greece or Iceland.

Scholars continually divide and recombine. The historical study of Native Americans seems to be in an aggressively divisive stage.  It's intensely interesting.

How to miss (and see) evidence - the obese Comanche chiefs

Chief A Big Fat Fall by Tripping, it is told, owned fifteen hundred horses, but he was so fat that he could not ride any of them and had to be moved around on a travois. (The Comanche Empire, 259)

I want to discuss an example of how we (I) misunderstand evidence that is directly in front of us (me!), and how professional historians do their job.

The Comanches may have been the greatest horsemen in American history.  They culture was fundamentally mounted, as was much of their economy, which was based on a mix of seasonal buffalo hunting and raiding for horses, cattle, and humans.  Wealth was often measured in horses.  Yet they were also a trading nation. Meat, hides, horses, and slaves were traded for carbohydrates (squash and corn) and metal goods.

George Catlin, in Letter 42 of Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841), describes his meeting with "a huge mass of flesh," the Comanche chief Ta-wah-que-nah (The Mountain of Rocks - see left for Catlin's portrait).  The chief "would undoubtedly weigh three hundred pounds or more," and was a "perfect personification of Jack Falstaff."  Catlin is baffled by the man, since "[c]orpulency is a thing exceedingly rare to be found in any of the tribes, amongst the men."

Catlin paints Ta-wah-que-nah and moves on to the next portrait subject.  Reading Catlin (a great book, by the way), I did the same thing. 

I should have known better.  Pekka Hämäläinen knew better.  In fairness, he was aware of multiple examples of overweight Comanches, all from roughly the same time period, the peak of Comanche power.  They are evidence, not anecdote.  Hämäläinen calls these chiefs "the new elite men who led the Comanche society in the early nineteenth century."  They became leaders because they were extraordinarily successful traders, not warriors.  They were so rich that they could abandon core aspects of their culture yet maintain their status.  These men were organizers, entrepreneurs, managing enormous households of slaves, wives, and affiliated herders and raiders, producing goods for the American market. 

Their corpulence was a sign, just as it was in other contemporary societies, of their wealth - high calorie input, low energy output.  These men are evidence of a profound change in Comanche society.  Historians depend on witnesses like Catlin, who rarely penetrated past the edge of the Comanche Empire, and only saw disconnected fragments.  With the help of anthropologists and demographers and ecologists, historians like Hämäläinen can reassemble the pieces.

Hämäläinen saw what was going on.  Catlin and I missed it.

Pekka Hämäläinen's audacious The Comanche Empire

A sample of Pekka Hämäläinen's startling The Comanche Empire (2009):

The assault came in March 16, 1758, when an estimated two thousand allied Comanches, Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais appeared at the gates of the San Sabá mission, announcing that "they had come with the intention of killing the Apaches..." Their faces "smeared with black and red paint," equipped with lances, cutlasses, helmets, metal breastplates, and "at least 1,000" French muskets, and led by a Comanche chief clad in a French officer's uniform, they set fire to the buildings... (59)

Does this seem remotely plausible? A large band of Comanches approach a Spanish mission in Texas. Their chief is wearing a French military uniform. The warriors wear French helmets and armor, and wield swords. Try to picture it in a movie. An audience would snort - it would look ridiculous.  Is this how Plains Indians are supposed to look?  Yet it appears to be true, known through multiple eyewitness accounts.

Hämäläinen makes an audacious argument, that the Comanche-occupied territory (in contemporary terms, western Texas and parts of neighboring states) should, from the early 18th through the mid-19th century, be considered as a unified state, as an empire, subclass: nomad.  Like the Mongols, as a for instance.  Hämäläinen demonstrates that Spanish New Mexico, for example, was essentially a tributary province of the Comanches for about a century.

The book is filled with startling reversals like this.  It's become common for historians to simply flip perspectives - to look at America's westward expansion, say, from the point of view of the conquered peoples.  The Comanche Empire is doing something else.  Hämäläinen argues that for a long time the Comanches were the conquerors.  There is no reversed perspective.  Earlier perspectives were simply mistaken.

They were mistaken, often, because of partial evidence, the limited view of the participants.  Spanish residents of Taos and Santa Fe, desperate to scrape up enough tribute to buy off Comanche raiders, had no idea that the horses stolen in New Mexico ended up on the other side of the empire, in the hands of French traders in Louisiana.  Those Comanches in French uniforms and armor are not only plausible, but likely.  Hämäläinen, with the assistance of hundreds of earlier historians, is able to put all of these pieces together. 

I'll try to write about it for a couple more days.  It's a complex book, meant for academic historians and what one might call "advanced undergraduates."  Often, I found myself ill-equipped to judge it.  It's packed with "no way" moments.  Maybe I'll share a few of those.  The book's a triumph.