At the crossroads of ethnohistory, imperial history and U.S. history, Hämäläinen’s latest book sheds a new light on the Lakota people, arguing that they established a thriving nomadic empire in the heart of America, despite the growing presence of Europeans.
Interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes Region have been the subject of groundbreaking works in American history. But there was more to the story than previously thought, as D. Nichols underlines Lakes Indians’ effective forms of resistance and strategies of survival
For four centuries before the west was won, trappers crisscrossed North America. These marginal figures, who often lived with Native Americans, remind us of a lost world that still haunts the continent.
“Wood runners” is the name given to travelling fur traders in the age of pioneers. Focusing on two centuries of their risky adventures and on their relationship with Amerindian populations allows Gilles Havard to write a monumental multicultural history of the early North American West.
The challenge of going beyond the national narrative has occupied historians for decades. When applied to North America, it has turned our understanding of historical events such as the “Conquest of the West” upside down. Through an examination of the history of the Comanches, a Finnish historian is pushing this reversal of perspectives as far as it can go, in order to highlight the power that was in the hands of the indigenous people when they came face-to-face with the Europeans.
Native Americans have been touted as the quintessential American patriots. Their war record in the 20th century certainly does not contradict this assessment. More fruitful, however, would be to look at their patriotism as one aspect of their colonial relation with the United States.
