Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hämäläinen (review)

lakota america is Pekka Hämäläinen's ambitious reconstruction of Lakota history beginning in the sixteenth century and ending with contemporary times. His ambitions, however, lie not only in his narrative's great time span but also in its content. In his introduction Hämäläinen explains that he aims at nothing less than dismantling certain taken-for-granted assumptions and strategies that he believes have long dogged the writing of the tribe's history. As he tersely states, he desires "to make them [Lakotas] unfamiliar again" (4).

So exactly how does Hämäläinen intend to "defamiliarize" his readers with the Lakotas, the tribe that represents the American Indian throughout most of the world? His strategy, as I understand it, contains two key elements. The first of these lies in challenging the static stereotype of Lakotas as equestrian hunters and warriors. The Lakotas, he submits, "have become the embodiment of the horse-mounted Plains, but here [in his book] they spend most of their time in river valleys" (4). His strategy's second element is to avoid the temptation of committing the common fallacy of writing Lakota history as if it were "destined to unfold a certain way"; the author proclaims that his treatment, unlike all others, has successfully buffeted the kinds of "teleological currents" that "drive the story to its assumed culmination" (4).

Whatever one's initial response to such claims may be, a good Lakota might say that the proof is in the wojapi, or berry pudding. Over the course of nine long chapters and an epilogue, Hämäläinen pursues his goals by drawing upon a wealth of western documentary evidence and selected Lakota sources, including winter counts and key figures in Lakota oral traditions. Chapters 1 through 4 detail the Lakotas' preplains existence and their slow emergence as a powerful nation (the Oceti Sakowin) among the northeastern tribes through a combination of strategic political and economic negotiations with European powers and alliances or warfare with other Indian communities. The second set of chapters (5-9) describes their slow evolution from preequestrian hunters and gatherers to a horse-centered people as they moved from the eastern banks of the Missouri into the Great Plains, Black Hills, and beyond. It then presents the growing contacts between the Lakotas and the United States and their tentative diplomatic dance until circumstance allowed the United States, through treaty and warfare, to segregate the Lakotas onto reservations. In the epilogue, Hämäläinen presents a frankly sparse overview of the people's postreservation life.

So does Hämäläinen accomplish his goals? The answer depends on how you view his history in comparison with those of the past. There is no doubt that he has dedicated more documentary-laden detail to the Lakotas' life in the woodlands and on the prairies than any other author in memory. As far as his goal of avoiding the pitfalls of writing his history guided by a predetermined end, I am not so sure. He does emphasize key turning points and contingency in Lakota history, but whether this makes for a qualitatively different presentation of the Lakotas' journey through time, I remain unconvinced. I will leave it up to the reader to decide for himself or herself.

The key problem with Hämäläinen's book lies not so much in whether he conquers the dilemmas that he believes have plagued Lakota history but others of a far different kind. Among the most notable of these is his almost complete neglect of the complex, symbolic system by which Lakotas made sense of the world and gave their actions meaning and purpose. So while it is true that he does discuss kinship, the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the trickster Iktomi, and winter count pictographs, he pulls them out of their cultural context in order to transform them into vehicles more comfortable to the European American mind. This transformation...