Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen – who hates the film ‘Dances with Wolves’ – wrote a book called ‘Indigenous Continent,’ in which he explains that the tribes of North America had notable military capacity and that their defeat was by no means inevitable
The defeat of Custer and his Seventh Cavalry at the hands of the Sioux and Cheyennes at Little Bighorn in 1876 was not at all a matter of bad luck on the part of the general and his troops. Rather, it was the logical and expected result of the Indigenous people being better strategists, more familiar with the terrain and tactically superior to the American soldiers.
By no means was this the only time in which the natives proved to be very capable of defeating the whites and imposing their own military dynamics from the beginning of the 16th century until the end of the 19th century. In a fascinating history of the American Indian Wars — Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (2022) — Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen calls into question the inevitability of colonial expansionism. The researcher — who holds a doctorate in History from the University of Helsinki and is considered to be one of the world’s specialists in the conquest of North America — reveals how, on several occasions, the Indigenous people came close to inflicting a definitive defeat on the European colonial powers, as well as the United States. In fact, they nearly expelled these settlers from North America entirely.
In the revolutionary account by the 57-year-old Hämäläinen — who is currently the Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford — the Indigenous tribes of North America cease to be the usual passive victims, subject to an inexorable and irreversible destiny. Instead, in the book, they become powerful agents who dominated the continent for centuries after the arrival of the colonizers and represented a very serious threat to their plans of conquest.
