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). 118 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. 119 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 DISSENt · SPRING 2020 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 120 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, 121 REVIEWS 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 DISSENt · SPRING 2020 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. 122 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,