Native Americas
Christine Mathias
Dissent, Volume 67, Number 2, Spring 2020, pp. 118-122 (Review)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2020.0039
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/753145
[ Access provided at 13 Apr 2020 16:53 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]
DISSENt · SPRING 2020
industrialization as such a key source
of opposition to capitalism, his work
is threaded with pessimism about the
present. Although Fraser has long emphasized the importance of radical politics in
U.S. history, he is skeptical about where
such a challenge might emerge now.
“Memories of the way things were, however remote from the realities of those
dead times, provide the nuclear energy
powering animosities about the way things
turned out,” Fraser writes. Recollection of
promises lost and betrayed often drives
the quest for a different future. But if the
New Deal was a diminished politics to
begin with, how can its memory provide
the source of something genuinely new?
Still, Mongrel Firebugs does give the
sense that we are at the conclusion of an
era. Might not the dismantling of the New
Deal Order provide the fuel for some new
critique, in which New Deal compromises
on security and social mobility are transformed into moral claims as they become
increasingly difficult to attain? Historians
are beginning to think about the distinctions and the precise moments that distinguish the past forty years since Reagan’s
election. the ebb and flow of conservatism, the shifting nature of liberalism,
and the dynamics within the neoliberal
epoch can now become their own subject of analysis. the very questions that
Fraser poses in this new collection—What
would a left politics that was not organized around rehabilitating the New Deal
look like? How can we begin to nurture a
political vision that is not embedded in
defending the institutions of the postwar
years?—hint that we find ourselves in a
new place, one that would have been hard
to imagine a decade ago. Despite Fraser’s
own wariness about the present, the fact
that he dares to raise them at all suggests
he holds out some hope for us, that we
may yet imagine a politics beyond the New
Deal order.
Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of Fear City:
New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of
Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books,
2017).
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Native Americas
Christine Mathias
Lakota America: A New History
of Indigenous Power
by Pekka Hämäläinen
Yale University Press, 2019, 530 pp.
At my elementary school in Baltimore in the
1990s, we celebrated thanksgiving in style,
with feathered headdresses made of construction paper and stories about Squanto,
who taught the Pilgrims to farm. Later,
we learned that Native American women
made history too: Sacagawea helped Lewis
and Clark explore the Louisiana Purchase,
while Pocahontas saved John Smith. I can
still remember the mournful lyrics of that
pseudo-environmentalist ballad from Disney’s Pocahontas: “Can you sing with all the
voices of the mountain? Can you paint with
all the colors of the wind?” the implicit lesson was that we could not. Popular culture
trained us to view Native Americans and
their presumed unusual talents as relics of
the past.
In 1992, my class observed the 500th
anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to
the Americas by reciting a poem about
the Genoese admiral’s sense of adventure, even as the broader political winds
began to shift. Indigenous activists were
organizing new social movements from
Alaska to tierra del Fuego, and historians
were revising their approaches. the symbolic anniversary helped critical voices to
resonate. Rigoberta Menchú tum of Guatemala won the Nobel Peace Prize, the
United Nations proclaimed an International
Decade of Indigenous People, and the
Zapatistas declared autonomy in southern
Mexico. As conversations about the legacies of settler colonialism, dispossession,
and genocide became more common,
some U.S. cities, counties, and states
decided to observe Indigenous People’s
Day in place of Columbus Day. this spirit
of reckoning has affected even our most
cherished civic rituals. Mommy bloggers
now advise readers to “say no” to Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, while progressive journalists warn that “everything
you learned about thanksgiving is wrong.”
Still, most contemporary discussions
about indigenous history in the United
States operate within the same problematic framework that my elementary school
curriculum did. Whether celebrating Native
Americans’ contributions to the republic
or lamenting colonial violence, we tend to
take the nation’s present-day shape and
status as a given. What if, instead, we envision the Americas as a region of overlapping indigenous territories? For more than
five centuries, European empires and then
American nation-states have tried to conquer those lands. Many indigenous people
lost their lives to colonial violence or epidemic disease, but Native Americans also
survived, adapted, and continued to make
history. the legacy of conquest is something that Americans across the hemisphere share. How we understand that
legacy affects how we imagine the future.
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REVIEWS
Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen is
one of a number of scholars dedicated
to overturning popular misconceptions
about North America’s indigenous past. In
his prizewinning first book, The Comanche Empire (2008), Hämäläinen argues
that Comanches, who called themselves
Numunuu, met the challenges of Spanish, French, and then U.S. colonialism
with “adaptive fluency.” they used European guns, metal tools, and horses to
become successful hunter-pastoralists,
developed a centralized political system,
and managed to control a large portion
of North America in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. Provocatively,
Hämäläinen refers to their ascendancy
as an indigenous empire and a case of
“reversed colonialism.” His analysis is at
once politically compelling and uncomfortable: he suggests that Native Americans were powerful once and could be
again, but he runs the risk of undermining
Numunuu claims for restitution as victims
of U.S. colonialism.
In his new book Lakota America,
Hämäläinen develops a similar argument
about the history of a more prominent
indigenous group. the Lakotas are one of
seven nations (oyátes) who make up the
Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, usually translated as
the Seven Council Fires or the Great Sioux
Nation. Like many Native Americans, these
seven groups are best known by a derogatory term from another language: Sioux
is a shortened form of an Ojibwe word for
snake or enemy. the most persistent stereotypes about indigenous people derive
from Hollywood versions of Lakota warriors: men on horseback who wear headdresses, live in tipis, hunt buffalo, and
battle the U.S. Army. two legendary Lakota
leaders, Crazy Horse (thašúŋke Witkó) and
Sitting Bull (thatháŋka Íyotake), defeated
George Armstrong Custer at the Battle
of Little Bighorn in 1876. Sitting Bull later
joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and
participated in the Ghost Dance, a prophetic religious movement. He was killed in
1890, shortly before the U.S. Cavalry massacred about 300 Lakota men, women,
and children at Wounded Knee.
Lakotas are often remembered as the
most defiant indigenous enemies of the
United States and as its noblest indigenous victims. In 2016, Lakota protests
over the Dakota Access Pipeline generated widespread concern and sympathy. Hämäläinen aims to make their
history “seem strange and unfamiliar.” His
Lakotas are not caricatured traditionalists; rather, they succeeded because they
were “shapeshifters,” unusually willing
and able to change. they became effective marksmen, equestrians, hunters, and
herders, conquering the Missouri River
Valley and then spreading west across the
Northern Great Plains. Hämäläinen terms
this an “empire of equals.” At their height
in the 1860s–70s, approximately 20,000
Lakotas and allies controlled much of the
continent’s center, while Numunuu power
faded to the south. The Comanche Empire
suggests that Numunuu raids helped the
U.S. military defeat Mexico in 1848 and
conquer the U.S. Southwest, an argument
developed in more detail in historian Brian
DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts (2008).
Similarly, Lakota America contends that
“Lakotas inadvertently paved the way” for
the U.S. West.
Some readers may query Hämäläinen’s definition of “empire,” but there is no
denying that he recounts this story with
unusual verve. Commendably, he presents
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Winter Count on cloth, by Long Soldier, a Húnkpapha Lakhóta chief, ca. 1902 (Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian)
Lakotas as “protagonists” rather than
as “props that bookend America’s westward expansion.” this might seem like
an obvious point: people make their own
history, albeit not “under circumstances
chosen by themselves.” Lakotas have told
their own history this way for as long as
anyone can remember, and Hämäläinen
is not the first university professor to
follow suit. Nevertheless, many histories
of the United States still depict Lakotas
as “props” or ignore them altogether.
Hämäläinen’s work gestures toward a new
map of power in North America’s past,
where indigenous polities and politics were
as important as non-indigenous ones—
until suddenly they were not.
those seeking to rewrite North American
indigenous history face a methodological
challenge: for most of the continent’s history, most Native Americans did not keep
written records. to compensate, historians tend to read non-indigenous sources
“against the grain,” trying to extract useful information from documents produced by fur traders, government agents,
missionaries, and other outsiders, while
remaining mindful of those actors’ biases
and limitations. Historians also draw on
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archaeological findings, pictographs, artwork, and other forms of material evidence,
as well as on oral histories. Whether an
account transcribed by a long-dead anthropologist or a spoken narrative passed down
through generations, oral histories can be
invaluable, although they are as likely as any
other source to contain distortions.
Hämäläinen proves himself an adept
reader of non-indigenous documents.
By centering his book in Lakota territory,
he reinterprets actions that struck nonindigenous observers as haphazard or
bloodthirsty as elements of a coherent,
dynamic foreign policy. He also incorporates Lakota calendars, known as winter
counts (waníyetu iyáwapi). Each winter,
Lakota keepers marked the passage of
time by painting a single image on a hide,
cloth, or paper. the image represented a
significant event that had occurred that
year: a face covered with dots for a particularly virulent smallpox outbreak, or
a campsite with two U.S. flags for a large
trade fair. Keepers used these visual cues
to remember and recount their communities’ histories.
Experts do not always agree about how
to translate and interpret winter counts.
the most significant area of uncertainty
has to do with the origins of these records
as imperialist newcomers ... marked the
Sioux as nomadic, rootless, unsettled,
and malicious, which made their removal,
genocide, and colonization more palatable.” Hämäläinen depicts Lakota expansion as a consequence of European
colonialism, but he makes no claims
about moral distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous violence. It is an
unsettling approach.
Hämäläinen’s title introduces a valuable
concept with wider resonance: Lakota
America refers to an expanding, shapeshifting indigenous polity and also to “a
broader vision for America,” at once “supple and capacious.” Native American kinship patterns are often described as
immutable, but in reality, all social beliefs
about insiders and outsiders evolve over
time. Historically, the seven nations of
Očhéthi Šakówiŋ shared a sense that
“belonging was a matter of behavior rather
than blood: anybody capable of proper
sentiments, words, and deeds could
become a relative, takúye.” this belief
allowed for strong yet flexible political alliances and a pragmatic approach to foreign
policy. While U.S. military leaders misclassified Native Americans as “hostiles”
and “friendlies,” their Lakota counterparts
made new alliances and enemies as circumstances changed. Lakotas also developed kinship ties with nonhuman beings,
including buffalo and rivers.
Lakota America urges readers to resist
“teleology, a sense that things were destined to unfold a certain way”—specifically,
that Lakota warriors’ dominance over the
Great Plains was as inevitable as their ultimate loss of territory. Hämäläinen devotes
more space to undermining the first fallacy
than the second, although he does provide
a breezy epilogue on Lakota “struggles for
sovereignty” on reservations, in cities, and
in courts. One such case is United States v.
Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), in which the
U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that Lakotas
had not received just compensation for the
Black Hills. the U.S. government had first
recognized their claim in an 1868 treaty,
only to seize the land illegally in 1877,
after gold was discovered there. In 1980,
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and, consequently, of the Lakota nation.
Most surviving winter counts are copies
from the late nineteenth century; however,
some record events from earlier periods.
For example, Battiste Good (Wapóštangi)
kept a winter count that began approximately fifty years before his birth, in
1821–22. When making a copy in 1880,
Good interviewed elders and extended his
timeline further back. Hämäläinen uses a
similar copy preserved by an anthropologist, Colonel Garrick Mallery, who decided
that the images representing events before
1700 were “obviously mythic” and contained “historical errors.”
But what if Mallery was the one who
erred? Good’s first image, which some
interpreters date to the tenth century,
relates to the slaughter of buffalo and the
appearance of a sacred visitor, White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesáŋwiŋ). there are
many versions of her story; as Hämäläinen
explains, it “reach[es] back to a time when
Lakotas first emerged as a distinct, selfaware people.” For many Lakotas, that
process of emergence is inseparable from
their claim to the Black Hills (Pahá Sápa),
6,000 square miles of sacred territory in
South Dakota and Wyoming. In the nineteenth century, the hills supplied more
reliable and diverse food than surrounding
areas; as Lakotas spent more time there,
they became wealthier, more politically
centralized, and more powerful.
Hämäläinen attempts to sidestep controversy about when Lakotas first inhabited
the Black Hills by focusing on their “discovery—or rediscovery” of the region, referenced in at least two winter counts in the
1770s. these, too, are subject to debate.
As Lakota intellectual Severt Young Bear
explains, the winter counts depict a sacred
cedar tree that was “used to heal certain
sicknesses.” the image “doesn’t necessarily mean that this was the first time
they saw such a tree or had been to the
Black Hills.”
In the past, histories of Lakota violence and westward expansion have
been used to justify U.S. conquest and
to undermine Lakota land claims. In
Our History Is the Future (2019), Lower
Brulé Sioux intellectual Nick Estes
writes, “Attempts to classify the Sioux
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Lakotas refused the courts’ suggested payment of $122 million including interest,
preferring to fight for the return of their
sacred land.
Ojibwe writer David treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (2019) begins where
Hämäläinen’s research ends, with the 1890
massacre, an event that has long signified
Native Americans’ demise. Conventional
histories suggest that twentieth-century
Native Americans lived on shrinking reservations, where their numbers dwindled,
they relied increasingly on government
aid, and some resisted when they could.
treuer frames his story differently: Native
Americans “have been living in, have
been shaped by, and in turn have shaped
the modern world.” He directs his message as much to fellow indigenous people
as to ignorant outsiders: “If we insist on
raging against our dependency on the
United States and modernity itself, we
miss something vital: as much as our past
was shaped by the whims and violence of
an evolving America, America, in turn, has
been shaped by us.” treuer writes about
the United States, but his argument holds
true across the Americas. Indigenous conceptions of pluralistic political community
have persisted and evolved, guiding deliberations throughout the hemisphere about
collective land tenure, cultural diversity,
plurinational citizenship, and the rights
of nature.
In 1872, a nine-year-old Lakota boy
named Black Elk (Heháka Sápa) had
a vision. He later recalled standing in
the Black Hills, “upon the center of the
earth ... and round about beneath me was
the whole hoop of the world ... And I saw
that the sacred hoop of my people was one
of many hoops that made one circle ... and
in the center grew one mighty flowering
tree to shelter all the children.” Like Black
Elk, we face an ecological crisis that dwarfs
existing structures of governance; his
vision of intersecting hoops is as appealing
as it is remote. Black Elk survived Little
Bighorn and Wounded Knee, traveled to
England with Buffalo Bill, and eventually
settled on Pine Ridge Reservation in South
Dakota. He became a Lakota healer and
also a Catholic. According to treuer, “Black
Elk was determined to live and to adapt.
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that doesn’t make him less of an Indian, as
I see it; it makes him more of one.” We may
never learn to sing like Disney heroines, but
if we study Black Elk’s history and others
like it, we might just learn to adapt to our
own changing world.
Christine Mathias teaches Latin American
history at King’s College London.
Socialism in One Factory
Staughton Lynd
Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981
by Donald Reid
Verso, 2018, 512 pp.
In the early 1960s, I wrote an essay for the
journal Studies on the Left entitled “Socialism, the Forbidden Word.” the world has
changed. thanks to Bernie Sanders and
many others, it has again become possible
to say publicly, “I am a socialist.”
But what does “socialism” mean? And
how do we make real progress toward it
within the confines of a capitalist society?
Can socialism take the form of merely
changing the distribution of income, or
must there also be changes in ownership of
the major means of production—what Lenin
called capitalism’s “commanding heights”?
Furthermore, are there social and cultural shifts, beyond economic changes
like nationalization, that are needed to
bring about a socialist society? And if so,
how can the individualism, violence, and
male hegemony that presently permeate
the social world of the United States be
transformed?
these are the questions of today.
Very few economic entities have managed to operate successfully in a
sustained socialist manner within a capitalist framework. typically, the project
either gives up its utopian features and
becomes a capitalist firm like any other,
or else it fails and disappears.
One such effort, which lasted longer
than most from 1973 to 1981, was at Lip,