The Truth About Native American History We Rarely Talk About

The history of Native Americans is usually told with a heaping side of pathos. Forced displacement. Slavery. Rapid decline. A featured review in The New Yorker for a new book from historian Pekka Hämäläinen called Indigenous Continent aims to share a different story:

"Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with Native nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better. The result, he promises, will be a North American history recentered on Native people and their own 'overwhelming and persisting' power."

The scope of the book is ambitious as it offers a chronological look at Native American history, often succumbing (as many other historians do) to telling the story through the perspectives of white settlers who encountered and often slaughtered the Native people. Still, the reviewer writes that the book does succeed in sharing the larger story:

"My civilization hadn’t been destroyed; that my tribe’s contribution to the past wasn’t merely to fade away in the face of history; that Native peoples, for better or for worse, made this country what it was, and have a role to play in what it now struggles to be."