This Week, I'm Reading...

Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen

Indigenous Continent is a sweeping history of our entire continent from an indigenous point of view, covering 400 years and a massive landmass and centering, as its author, Pekka Hämäläinen, notes, on power. His aim is to show us, as the jacket copy puts it, “a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals.” The book is organized chronologically—the first section is subtitled “the first seventy millennia” (!)—with chapters focusing on particular groups and conflicts. I got through the first three parts before I had to take a break. There is just so much killing, not only between European colonizers and Indian nations but also among the tribal nations themselves, and the killing is often horribly inventive and gruesome. Nevertheless, this is an important book, and I plan to continue. It’s filling in gaps in my knowledge, but also shifting the paradigm away from the stories most of us probably grew up learning in history class. In Hämäläinen’s version, Europeans stumbled in, pretended to take charge, and sent home outrageous claims of “success,” while the reality on the ground was quite different for a very long time. Occasionally in Indigenous Continent, you meet a European who seems to get what it’s going to take to successfully trade, for example, with an Indian nation, but these men are few and far between. One of my takeaways so far, beyond the obvious theme of the book, is to watch the way these rare Europeans interact with the people indigenous to the place they’ve entered with humility and respect—a lesson that would seem to extend far beyond those particular circumstances and one we still don’t seem to have learned today.

What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comments section below!