Anyone who uses the imported American phrase “First Nations” in an Australian context is not a person to be taken seriously. Yet, “First Nations” has, in the blink of an eye, become the de rigeur left-media descriptor for Australian Aborigines. Mostly because the Australian left-media are squawking parrots: followers, to a one.
But, is “First Nations” a legitimate term in the Americas? There were unquestionably no nations in Australia until 1 January 1901. Before that, there were British colonies; before that, hundreds of tribal bands, many of them no more than a few dozen to maybe a hundred or so individuals.
In the Americas, including the US, the situation was very different. There seem very good grounds for regarding pre-Columbian America as peopled by nations (but not nation-states, given the vagueness of borders). But this has ramifications far beyond mere nomenclature: if there were not just nations but empires in what is now the United States before Europeans arrived, by what right do the descendants of indigenous empires today complain about “colonialism”?
Indeed, much of the narrative of American history suddenly changes.
The lore about Jamestown and Plymouth, Pocahontas and Squanto, leads many Americans to think in terms of tragedy and, eventually, disappearance. But actually, Indigenous people continued to control most of the interior continent long after they were outnumbered by the descendants of Europeans and Africans.
Much more accurate is the picture Pekka Hamalainen paints in his new book, Indigenous Continent: a North American history that encompasses 400 years of wars that Natives often, even mostly, won—or did not lose decisively in the exceptional way that the Powhatans and Pequots had by the 1640s. Out of these centuries of broader conflict with newcomers and one another, Native peoples established decentralized hives of power, and even new empires.
This is not to excuse the often brutality of the European conquerors — but it seems a little rich for the descendants of people who were often even more brutal conquerors to complain about historical ills.
In a previous book, The Comanche Empire, Hamalainen wrote of what he controversially referred to as a “reversed colonialism,” which regarded the aggressive, slaving equestrians of “greater Comancheria”—an area covering most of the Southwest—as imperialists in ways worth comparing to the French, English, Dutch, and Spanish in America […]
Hamalainen showed how the Comanche developed what he termed a “politics of grass.” A unique grasslands ecosystem in the plains allowed them to cultivate huge herds of horses and gave the Comanche access to bison, which they parlayed into market dominance over peoples who could supply other goods they wanted, such as guns, preserved foods, and slaves for both trade and service as herders.
Hamalainen, the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, extended his argument to other native nations such as the Lakota.
In essence, Hamalainen demolishes the simplistic binary of “noble Indians” and “wicked Colonisers”. Indeed, the accepted narrative demeans Native American political achievement, as well as ignoring their own opportunism.
Indigenous peoples adapted strenuously and seasonally to environments that remained under their control but had to contend at the same time with Europeans and other refugees encroaching on their vague borders. These newcomers could become allies, kin, rivals, or victims.
Hamalainen sees a larger pattern of often-blundering Europeans becoming part of Indigenous systems of reciprocity or exploitation, followed by violent resets. When Dutch or French traders were “generous with their wares” and did not make too many political demands, Natives pulled them into their orbit. Spanish and, later, British colonists, by contrast, more often demanded obeisance and control over land, leading to major conflicts […]
These wars redirected European imperial projects, leading to the destruction of some nations, and the migration and recombination of others, such as the westward movement of the Lakota that led to their powerful position in the Missouri River Valley and, later, farther west. In this history, Indigenous “nomadic” mobility becomes grand strategy. North America is a continent of migrants battling for position long before the so-called nation of immigrants.
Far from being simple victims, native polities capitalised on the opportunities opened to them by European arrival. The Iroquois confederacy, for instance, exploited depopulation by epidemic into what Hamalainen terms “mourning wars”, in which they attacked weakened tribes and took captives to swell their own numbers. They also strategically employed their geographic centrality between the fur-supplying nations on one side, and the tool and gun-supplying Europeans on the other.
Hamalainen insists that their warfare was “measured, tactical,” that their use of torture was “political spectacle,” that their captives were actually adoptees, that their switching of sides in wartime and the Iroquois’ selling out of distant client tribes such as the Delaware was a “principled plasticity.” This could almost be an expert on European history talking about the Plantagenets, the Hapsburgs, or Rome.
MSN
In other words, indigenous peoples were no better or worse than Europeans. Their only real virtue, for the left-media narrative, is that they lost.