Hämäläinen 2022

Hämäläinen, Pekka. Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. Norton, 2022.

Introduction: The Myth of Colonial America

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Indians are doomed; Europeans are destined to take over the continent; history itself is a linear process that moves irreversibly toward Indigenous destruction.

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Indigenous Continent tells a different story. It offers a new account of American history by challenging the notion that colonial expansion was inevitable and that colonialism defined the continent, as well as the experiences of those living on it. Stepping outside of such outdated assumptions, this book reveals a world that remained overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century. It argues that rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.

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The reality of an Indigenous continent has remained obscure because European empires, and especially the United States, invested

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power in the state and its bureaucracy, whereas Native nations invested power in kinship.

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Seen from Native American perspective, however, Red Cloud’s War and Custer’s Last Stand appear not as historical anomalies, but as the logical culmination of a long

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history of Indigenous power in North America. They were more expected than extraordinary.

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Although each nation was and is distinct, a cultural crevasse separated the European newcomers from all Indigenous inhabitants of the continent, generating fear, confusion, anger, and violence. That divide fueled one of the longest conflicts in history, while simultaneously inspiring a centuries-long search for mutual understanding and accommodation—a search that continues today.

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There were many types of colonialism—settler, imperial, missionary, extractive, commercial, and legal—and they

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emerge cumulatively as the story told here progresses.

Part One: The Dawn of the Indigenous Continent: (the first seventy millennia)

Chapter 1: The World on the Turtle’s Back

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By 10,000 BCE, there were people in nearly every part of the Western Hemisphere, from still-glacial Alaska and the Yukon to Monte Verde in South America. North America had become an Indigenous continent. It would remain so for nearly twelve millennia.

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As the climate warmed, sustaining the growth of grass and other forage, animal populations proliferated, pushing the hunters to continue innovating. The invention of the atlatl around 7500 BCE was a breakthrough.

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Such a dramatic extension of reach and ambition required adaptability, compromise, and creativity. Relatively classless local communities gave way to more hierarchical orders that could mobilize labor on a large scale and enforce social specialization. By the early second millennium CE—around the 1300s—the Northwest Coast was dotted with sumptuous cedar-plank houses that could be five hundred feet long and

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seventy-five feet wide and accommodate multiple families.

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By 1500 BCE, the Indigenous worlds in North America were flourishing, built on kelp, acorns, hunting, and fishing, and laying the foundation for later civilizations.

Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent

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Highland peoples domesticated corn between nine and six thousand years ago.

Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 12 · Location 365 The Tehuacán Valley was an early center of the systematic cultivation of corn, and agriculture-based village life took root there by 1500 BCE. Political centralization followed, giving rise to empires that drew people into their orbit through military might, appealing religious ceremonies, and long-distance trade.

Page 14 · Location 392 Around 900 CE, rising global temperatures ushered in a new climate cycle, the Warm Period, which lengthened growing seasons. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 14 · Location 393 Ancestral Puebloans who made the most of it. By the middle of the Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 14 · Location 394 eleventh century (around 1050 CE) the ten-mile-long Chaco Canyon in the Colorado Plateau had become a dominant urban center that nearly monopolized the highly lucrative trade in turquoise stones, a luxury item. There, over three centuries, the Ancestral Puebloans built a monumental communal stone building—later known as Pueblo Bonito—that served as the political, commercial, and religious center of the Chacoan world. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 16 · Location 422 Populations expanded, people moved into walled towns, and face-to-face connections gave way to more formal relations. Towns began to compete for farmlands and political preeminence, and the ancient collective ethos crumbled. By the early sixth century CE the great Adena-Hopewell civilization had dissolved into countless competing groups. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 18 · Location 455 Cahokia had become a theater of power. Whether its elites appealed to spiritual mandates or relied on sheer force, thousands of common people now spent much of their time on the ritual work of transforming the earth into a new shape and on raising food for the nobility. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 19 · Location 474 At its peak, Cahokia may have had fifteen thousand residents and thirty thousand people in its orbit, sustaining the great city. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 21 · Location 508 Paquimé arose in the transitional belt where North America becomes Mesoamerica, embodying one of the greatest turning points in the Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 21 · Location 509 history of the Americas. North America was diverging from the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Elsewhere the historical momentum was toward greater concentrations of power, monumental ceremonial centers, and cities, and nations of many thousands persisted, reaching apogees in the major Mayan city-state of Chichén Itzá in northern Yucatán, the Inca Empire that extended more than two thousand miles north–south along western South America, and in the fifteenth-century city of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico, home to 150,000 people and ruled by an Aztec emperor and high priests. By then, Cahokia’s ruins were already covered by grass. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 21 · Location 514 IF THE LITTLE ICE AGE posed daunting challenges to North America’s agricultural societies, it was a boon for the continent’s hunters. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 22 · Location 523 The majority of North American Indians became generalists who farmed, hunted, and gathered to sustain themselves. Instead of striving to maximize agricultural output—an aspiration that had animated Ancestral Puebloans, Cahokians, and other early farming societies—they sought stability, security, and solidarity. Instead of priestly rulers, they preferred leaders whose principal obligation was to maintain consensus and support participatory political systems. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 23 · Location 529 This sweeping retreat from hierarchies, elite dominance, and large-scale urbanization may have Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 23 · Location 529 turned North America—along with Australia—into the world’s most egalitarian continent at the time. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 23 · Location 542 As the second millennium approached its midpoint, nearly every corner of North America was inhabited or used by humans. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 24 · Location 546 The continent was home to approximately five million people. Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 24 · Location 548 In North America, leaders were not autocrats commanding and coercing subjects. They were instead arbitrators and facilitators striving for consensus. They did not seek to maximize personal power; they sought to maximize the number of their followers. Good leaders were poor. They accepted trade goods and gifts from allies, but to govern effectively they had to redistribute most of the goods among Chapter 2: The Egalitarian Continent > Page 24 · Location 550 their people. Their reward was loyalty and expansive networks of fictive kinship that could extend to numerous allied nations. With few exceptions, this became the norm in North America. Kinship—an all-pervasive sense of relatedness and mutual obligations—became the central organizing principle for human life. Kinship was the crucial adhesive that kept people and nations linked together. It would be a mistake to see this adaptation as some kind of a failure or aberration of civilization, as European newcomers almost invariably did. North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them deficient and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world—a communal ethos available to everyone who was capable of proper thoughts and deeds and willing to share their possessions. Their ideal society was a boundless commonwealth that could be—at least in theory—extended to outsiders, infinitely.

Chapter 3: Blind Conquests

Page 26 · Location 583 Cities were the great economic engines of the incipient nation-states in western Europe, bustling with business, innovations, unprecedented wealth, and soaring ambitions. By the late fifteenth century, France and England possessed the means and organizational capacity for overseas expansion. 2 Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 27 · Location 592 Spearheaded by the Iberian kingdoms, Christendom had prevailed against a colossal Islamic challenge—a triumph that quickly transformed into a forceful outward expansion of western Europe beyond its terrestrial confines, with the Spanish leading the way. Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 27 · Location 595 The Spanish conquered the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa in the fifteenth century, gaining a foothold in the Atlantic, along with an education in overseas colonialism and subjugation of non-European and non-Muslim peoples. Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 31 · Location 648 Military imperialism coupled with Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 31 · Location 649 biological imperialism caused the first Native American population catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of people perished, and most of the survivors were enslaved as heathens without rights. Clamoring for quick profits, the Spanish were thorough. Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 31 · Location 654 An unwavering belief in Spanish superiority over the Indians, combined with a moral crusade to spread Christianity among the heathens, emboldened the Spanish newcomers. Already in 1493, Pope Alexander VI had granted America to Isabel and Ferdinand to rule over and convert Indians. Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 31 · Location 663 STARTING IN 1519, Spanish conquistadors invaded the fabulously wealthy Mesoamerican Indigenous Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 31 · Location 664 empires with small but heavily armed forces. Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 32 · Location 666 Cortés founded the encomienda system, a modified version of European feudalism, which awarded subdued Native communities to individual conquistadors to govern and profit from. His brash incursion, mightily assisted by smallpox and Indigenous allies, had created New Spain, a distinctly Hispanic realm superimposed on a preexisting imperial Indigenous bedrock. Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 32 · Location 667 assisted by smallpox and Indigenous allies, had created New Spain, a distinctly Hispanic realm superimposed on Chapter 3: Blind Conquests > Page 32 · Location 675 Spanish colonization received an enormous boost from what has become known as the Columbian Exchange, the widespread transfer of people, animals, plants, ideas, technology, and diseases among the Americas, Europe, and West Africa. Part Two: Appear at a Distance Like Giants: (the long sixteenth century)

Chapter 4: Terra Nullius

Page 42 · Location 792 human presence—even after many disease outbreaks—and made it clear that newcomers who failed to obey Indigenous rules would have no place in it. Cabeza de Vaca had accepted this reality and was rewarded with kinship and belonging. His pliant immersion offered an alternative, however frail, to the ruthless methods of Cortés, Pizarro, and other European conquerors whose tactics stemmed from the centuries-long Reconquista. Chapter 4: Terra Nullius > Page 45 · Location 846 Indigenous resistance and enormous distances were turning North America into a dead end for the Spanish Empire. Its conquistadors may have still been fearsome, holding a vast technological edge over the Indians. They continued to march into Native settlements, exuding confidence and demanding submission. Yet their conquests were fleeting, failing to create substantial colonial realms like Española or Mexico. Chapter 4: Terra Nullius > Page 45 · Location 851 Unlike Central and South America, North America was a poor target for Spain’s ready-to-rule colonialism. Native misinformation thwarted one expedition after another. A cultural barrier also deterred conquest: most Native nations were at least partly matrilineal, with women heading the households and enjoying institutionalized authority. Such polities perplexed the conquistadors, who sought to fight and supplant male leaders. Chapter 4: Terra Nullius > Page 47 · Location 882 Soto and other conquistadors believed they were conquering new lands for the Spanish Empire, but in reality, Indians were carefully Chapter 4: Terra Nullius > Page 47 · Location 883 steering the Europeans’ course, sending them away with fantastical stories of treasures farther ahead. Chapter 4: Terra Nullius > Page 51 · Location 946 Spain had a momentous head start in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, but North American Indians had brought Spanish expansion to a halt: in the late sixteenth century there were no significant Spanish settlements on the continent—only petty plunder regimes. North America was still essentially Indigenous. The contrast to the stunning Spanish successes in Middle and South America was striking: how could relatively small Native groups defy Chapter 4: Terra Nullius > Page 51 · Location 949 Spanish colonialism in the north when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and Maya Empires had fallen so easily? The answer was right in front of the Spanish—the decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas—but they kept missing it because the Indigenous nations were so different from Europe’s hierarchical societies.

Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge

Page 74 · Location 1289 The English claimed land for a colony without Indigenous consent, while the colony’s seal depicted an Indian uttering a biblical quotation, “Come Over and Help Us,” announcing a Christian commonwealth that would embrace Native Americans. It was a sham that was aimed at securing funding for a colonial project. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 74 · Location 1300 The Dutch Indian policy was persistently practical. Dutch merchants quickly determined where the power lay and acted accordingly, forging close ties with the Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 75 · Location 1301 Mahican Nation, which dominated the interior trade. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 75 · Location 1309 Wampum also served as currency, and there the entrepreneurial Dutch merchants spotted an opportunity. They began to supply the coastal Indians with metal lathes that enabled them to manufacture wampum on an industrial scale. Native women could produce five to ten feet of wampum belt a day, and Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 75 · Location 1311 soon some three million monetized wampum beads were circulating in the Northeast, fueling an expanding exchange economy. Europeans had accepted a currency that a moment earlier meant next to nothing to them. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 76 · Location 1318 In 1637, the Massachusetts General Court declared wampum legal tender, exchangeable for shillings and pennies. Weetamoo, a saunkskwa—female sachem—of the Pocasset people of the Wampanoag Confederacy, relied almost exclusively on wampum in her expansive diplomacy with colonists. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 79 · Location 1372 What became known as the Pequot War marked a shift from predominantly maritime English colonialism to more intrusive territorial colonialism, in which property—farms, food stores, houses, and noncombatants were targets. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 79 · Location 1376 More than three hundred Narragansett, Mohegan, and Wangunk soldiers fought alongside the English. Like the colonists, these Native peoples wanted to redefine their relationship with the Pequots, who dominated trade with the English. Unlike the colonists, however, they thought that coexistence with both the Pequots and the English could still be possible. They joined the campaign to create a safer Indigenous world. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 83 · Location 1430 By the end of the decade, New Netherland was a sprawling mesh of farms, orchards, towns, and small forts spreading along the Long Island Sound. Fruit trees were a particularly significant symbol of belonging. Yet New Netherland was a colony with a difference. Unlike the English, Spanish, and French, the Dutch thought they could claim ownership of land as long as it was home to Indians with whom they could trade. They claimed the land through, not over, the Indians. They knew they needed to embed their colony in alliances with their Native customers. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 83 · Location 1439 The Dutch had begun to develop an imperial mindset—a toxic blend of ambition and arrogance, all fueled by fear. Like the English, the Dutch colonists wantonly allowed their hogs and cattle to graze on Native cornfields, and when the Raritan Indians of the Lenape Nation killed the invading beasts, the Dutch lashed out. Chapter 6: Wars at the Water’s Edge > Page 85 · Location 1471 In truth, the massacres exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule. The wars with the far more numerous and larger Native nations stretched the colonists near their breaking point.

Chapter 7: The Pequots Shall No More Be Called Pequots

Page 87 · Location 1505 Uncas’s opportunistic diplomatic maneuvering and his ability to create and break alliances placed the colonists at a significant disadvantage in the contest for position and power. Uncas and his Mohegans endured endless colonial challenges, large and small—not just surviving as a people but controlling the world around them. Chapter 7: The Pequots Shall No More Be Called Pequots > Page 87 · Location 1509 The English thought they could regulate matters of war and peace in the New World, but more often than not, Indians steered them into fighting and financing Indian wars and facilitating truces and treaties with goods and gifts when the fighting stopped. Chapter 7: The Pequots Shall No More Be Called Pequots > Page 88 · Location 1521 Only the wealthy tobacco colonies—Virginia and Maryland—managed to dispossess Native Americans on a large scale; Chapter 7: The Pequots Shall No More Be Called Pequots > Page 88 · Location 1521 everywhere else the Indians held the line. Part Three: The Contest for the Great American Interior: (early and mid-seventeenth century)

Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League

Page 99 · Location 1660 Among all Indigenous nations, the Iroquois came the closest to a matriarchate. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 100 · Location 1665 The Five Nations League was both a political and a spiritual body committed to peace, Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 100 · Location 1666 unity, and cooperation. The early-seventeenth-century European invasions instilled that ideal with new urgency and then militarized it. The result was war and an unprecedented burst of Indigenous power. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 101 · Location 1682 According to Winthrop, God had cleared the land of savages, securing America for a worthier race. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 101 · Location 1683 Winthrop was half-right; there might have been no New England—indeed no English colonies—in North America without this biological catastrophe. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 104 · Location 1738 The Iroquois had driven thousands of people into the west, gaining a vast domain in their wake. It was the first large-scale westward expansion in early American history. But this did not put an end to the warfare, which only seemed to escalate as the Iroquois’s enemies dispersed. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 104 · Location 1742 The intense Five Nations violence was a strategic, emotional, and spiritual response to catastrophic losses. The Iroquois mourning Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 104 · Location 1743 wars were changing the face of the North American interior almost beyond recognition. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 107 · Location 1779 War captives now made up more than half of the Iroquois population, generating both protection and dissonance. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 109 · Location 1806 The result was a lucrative trade triangle that saw the Dutch buying beads from New England Algonquians with manufactured goods, then using those beads to buy pelts from the Five Nations, and finally shipping the pelts to Europe to buy goods for North American markets. Much of New England’s prosperity was built on wampum, a classic Iroquois product. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 109 · Location 1809 Iroquois expansion was driven by a desire for stability and power, and by the middle of the seventeenth century the Five Nations had made themselves indispensable. Chapter 8: The Rise of the Five Nations League > Page 109 · Location 1815 Certain of their authority and position in the world, the Mohawks had moved beyond mere containment of the Europeans. They now expected compliance.

Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith

Page 113 · Location 1886 The Iroquois reshaped geopolitics to serve their needs. In the summer of 1652, a thousand-strong Iroquois army captured between five and six hundred Wyandots in a single campaign, delivering a paralyzing blow to New France’s most important ally and leaving the colonists exposed. France’s colonial enterprise in North America seemed to be failing. The double purpose of French colonialism— Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 114 · Location 1889 the fur trade and saving souls—was sputtering under Iroquois pressure. The Five Nations now had the French exactly where they wanted them: diminished, terrified, confused, and pliable. In the summer of 1653, Iroquois ambassadors made a peace offer to New France. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 116 · Location 1926 IF THE FRENCH WERE struggling on the Indigenous continent, the Dutch were unraveling. In 1664, New Netherland vanished when England absorbed it bloodlessly in the sprawling English-Dutch trade wars, depriving the Five Nations of yet another essential trading partner. With the stroke of a pen, the metal makers were gone. New Netherland had lasted only six decades, dwarfed by neighboring Indigenous powers. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 118 · Location 1957 Jesuits also reported with satisfaction the beginnings of a “little Church” around which a multiethnic community, Kahnawake, had emerged in a place that the Iroquois considered theirs. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 118 · Location 1961 Kahnawake and the other new Saint Lawrence settlements were Indigenous places in the heart of what colonial maps labeled as New France. French soldiers avoided them, and Jesuits, though welcome, trod carefully in them—too timid to condemn the ritual torturing of captives, but not above baptizing them at the moment of their deaths. The Saint Lawrence Valley was not a French possession. It was the northern edge of the Iroquois territory. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 119 · Location 1979 The members of the Iroquois-English alliance recognized their mutual dependency, traded in essential goods, and conceived new ways to resolve conflicts, but the compact was fundamentally embedded in Iroquois political ideology and symbolism. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 120 · Location 1984 Rising amid the beleaguered French and the comparatively more stable English colonies, the Five Nations became the dominant power in the Northeast. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 120 · Location 1989 That any leadership by the English was, indeed, merely symbolic was made clear by Iroquois leaders, who insisted on being treated as equals. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 120 · Location 1992 The Covenant Chain confirmed the Five Nations’ privileged access to English markets and diplomatic support—a position of unprecedented political clout that they leveraged on multiple fronts. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 120 · Location 1993 The Five Nations protected their core territory by allowing weaker groups to settle on their borders as tributary allies, who also served as buffers against enemies. They embraced subjugated enemies—Odawas, Wenros, Lenapes, Shawnees, Meskwakis, and Wendats—as “women” and “nephews,” guiding and commanding them as “uncles,” and expecting them to offer soldiers for their campaigns. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 120 · Location 1996 The mourning wars—the greatest display of military power in seventeenth-century North America—had brought peace in the interior. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 121 · Location 2008 The Iroquois were becoming an empire. They now posed an existential crisis for New France, which Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 121 · Location 2008 relied on furs and Native allies to survive. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 123 · Location 2048 AROUND 1680, ABOUT FIFTY YEARS after the terrible smallpox epidemic that cut their numbers by half, the Five Nations were at the height of their power; they were now the domineering nation in the great interior. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 123 · Location 2050 The French feared them, the English respected them as allies, and the Dutch no longer had a colony in North America. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 124 · Location 2054 With most English colonies now in their orbit, the Five Nations moved to draw their Native neighbors within their sphere of influence. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 124 · Location 2062 As Iroquois ambitions swelled, the confederacy became entangled in complex foreign political arrangements with the surrounding colonial powers. Since the mid-seventeenth century, New France had posed the most serious challenge to the Five Nations’ ambitions and sovereignty. Chapter 9: Enemies of the Faith > Page 125 · Location 2080 There had never been anything like the Five Nations League in North America. No other Indigenous nation or confederacy had ever reached so far, conducted such an ambitious foreign policy, or commanded such fear and respect. The Five Nations blended diplomacy, intimidation, and violence as the circumstances dictated, creating a measured instability that only they could navigate. Their guiding principle was to avoid becoming attached to any single colony, which would restrict their options and risk exposure to external manipulation.

Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness

Page 127 · Location 2110 THE FIVE NATIONS’ RISE TO POWER WAS COUNTERINTUITIVE. Their expansion was triggered by a population catastrophe caused by smallpox, a European import, and they grew stronger by pushing toward, Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 127 · Location 2111 not away from, European colonies whose leaders denounced them as savages, as obstacles, and, ultimately, as expendable. The Five Nations were surrounded by three global empires—French, Dutch, and English—but they managed to turn the apparent death trap into a position of advantage. There were moments when they seemed to unravel under the pressure of multiple rivals. Yet they not only prevailed but dominated. No nation, European or Indigenous, could match their geographical reach and political power in North America over the course of the seventeenth century. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 128 · Location 2124 Greater resources are not what gave the Five Nations their advantage; rather, they overpowered New France by being more creative and more nimble. Born of chaos and terror, the Great League of Peace and Power was both conciliatory and inclusive. All league-wide decisions were based on consensus, but at the local level the league was nearly a pure meritocracy. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 128 · Location 2128 The Iroquois showed two faces to colonial powers. One was that of a sophisticated league with whom one could negotiate, conduct trade, and coexist. The other was that of a military power—forceful, decentralized, unpredictable, uncontainable. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 128 · Location 2130 The Five Nations League profoundly shaped American history by bolstering certain colonial projects—New Netherland, New York, and the other middle colonies—while thwarting others, most notably New France, whose commercial and territorial ambitions in the interior were severely reduced by Iroquois power. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 129 · Location 2144 The world was as it should be. Iroquoia was in the center, hugged by European colonies whose leaders and inhabitants feared and respected the Iroquois and wanted to be their allies. They wanted to trade with them, arm them, protect them against diseases, and rescue their souls. Europeans did all of those things because they needed the Five Nations, whose power propped up theirs. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 129 · Location 2148 FOR THE FRENCH, HOWEVER, the world was out of joint. The Five Nations had eclipsed New France. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 134 · Location 2233 Unable to dominate each other, the French and the Lakes Indians both had to make concessions that could become mutually beneficial. Gradually, one encounter at a time, they forged an extraordinary common world, a middle ground, where they could coexist as allies and equals. Born of weakness, the middle ground was a social space where people accepted their Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 134 · Location 2235 mutual dependency. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 136 · Location 2261 In the middle ground, Perrot and other French officials arbitrated quarrels and sponsored Indigenous rituals that kept the world in balance, and soon new ways of coexisting emerged. Rather than imposing their own norms and values, they had to find something in an alien culture that could be used, appropriated, and repurposed, however odd or abhorrent it might be. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 136 · Location 2263 One concession and one expedient misreading at a time, Native Americans and newcomers began Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 136 · Location 2264 shading into one another—a prime manifestation of Indigenous pragmatism. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 138 · Location 2303 The middle ground was, in the first and last instance, a diplomatic innovation, a perpetually shifting set of alliances that revolved around patriarchal metaphors and specific mutual obligations. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 138 · Location 2310 Native women who married fur traders often became mediators between the French and Indians and built extensive kinship networks through the Catholic institution of godparenting, expanding and solidifying the middle ground. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 139 · Location 2311 Some women who married traders assumed important roles in their communities as religious educators. Marie Rouensa-8cate8a, who was from a prominent Illini family, married a French fur trader, converted to Catholicism, and moved into the grand village of Kaskaskia, where she translated a Jesuit tract into the Kaskaskia language, becoming a leader in her community. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 139 · Location 2315 Underneath all the artful accommodations, however, the Great Lakes region remained a distinctly Indigenous space: French priests, French traders, and French forts thrived there because Indians wanted them to thrive. The middle ground was a negation of colonialism in the vast North American interior. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 142 · Location 2354 There is no record of these two powerful Indigenous confederacies ever clashing. The Sioux and the Iroquois were compatible. The Iroquois pushed westward seasonally in large canoe fleets from their eastern bases, whereas the Sioux were about to make a concentrated push into the bison-rich continental grasslands beyond the Mississippi River. They did not compete for resources: the Iroquois Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 142 · Location 2356 sought pelts and captives; the Sioux sought bison and, increasingly, horses. Chapter 10: The Power of Weakness > Page 142 · Location 2358 In contrast, the colonial powers had become locked in chronic conflicts. Part Four: The Indigenous Backlash: (late seventeenth century)

Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child

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A precise map of North America in 1675 would have shocked those White interlopers who had claimed the land for themselves. The map would have shown a patchy belt of English colonies on the coastal plains, extending from the contested Acadia—the French claimed it too—to the Chesapeake Bay in the south. It would have shown the tiny, recently established Charles Town, two English posts in the James Bay, and an Indian village only fifteen miles from Boston. It would also have shown thirty-five Spanish missions in Florida, reaching from the Atlantic seaboard two hundred miles into the interior, run by a mere forty Franciscan priests who ministered to thousands of Native Americans. There was only one Spanish settlement of any consequence: San Agustín. The accurate map would have shown three French villages and four French forts in the Saint Lawrence Valley and two inland forts, Frontenac and Niagara, at Lake Ontario. It would have depicted dozens of French forts, trading posts, and temporary trading huts dotting the Great Lakes Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 146 · Location 2385 region in an ever-changing constellation. Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 146 · Location 2390 But then, between 1675 and 1690, every colonial project on the Indigenous continent seemed to either wobble or expire altogether. New England exploded into violence over hogs, cows, fences, game, and deeds. The borderlands between Susquehannock country and Virginia became the site of a war no one wanted. The Pueblo Indians attacked their self-styled Spanish masters in a carefully planned uprising. The Five Nations began killing French traders and New France’s Indian allies in the interior, taking their war all the way to Montreal. The Dutch departed the continent after only twelve years, leaving behind a mixed colonial record. Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 149 · Location 2429 John Eliot, the Cambridge-educated Puritan minister, began preaching to the Indians at Natick and other villages. He translated the catechism and the Bible into Massachusetts, a dialect close to Wampanoag, and delivered sermons in that tongue. He also built a large Indian Library that boasted some seven thousand volumes of Christian literature in 1665. Eliot’s was a civilizing mission aimed at reforming the Indians according to Puritan ideals. Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 149 · Location 2436 The underlying, unspoken impulse was to turn the Native Americans into productive laborers for colonial markets. Eliot was trying to peacefully eliminate Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 149 · Location 2437 Indigeneity. Yet, defiantly, the mission Indians mixed Christianity with their traditional beliefs, ceremonies, and celebrations. Many refused to cut their hair. Women put Indigenous beliefs in a dialogue with Christianity, carving out a space for Indigenous spirituality. Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 150 · Location 2450 Several Nipmuc leaders on Noepe sent their sons to English schools and households to learn English ways, and some Native pupils attended Harvard Indian College, where they mastered English, Latin, and Greek. Nipmuc scholar James Printer set the type Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 150 · Location 2452 on the first Bible published in North America, and Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, a Wampanoag literary scholar, drew from classical literature to compose a missive celebrating education. Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 153 · Location 2504 The colonists clamored for more and more land, and war could make Indian land theirs far faster than written deeds could. The major hindrance with the deed-based land grab was Weetamoo, who had fought the deed system for years. She had succeeded in turning the colonial instrument of Indigenous dispossession into a weapon to protect Indigenous landholdings: in a brilliantly simple move, she had both Native and English men—whose Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 153 · Location 2507 property rights were far stronger than women’s under English law—sign deeds on her behalf. Chapter 11: The English as a Little Child > Page 154 · Location 2517 John Sassamon, a bilingual Indigenous scholar and a Christian minister of the Massachusett Nation.

Chapter 12: Metacom’s Challenge

Page 161 · Location 2621 The brutal and graphic Indigenous violence was fueled by accumulated grievances over several generations, and its unleashing was aimed at purging the arrogant and genocidal colonists from their world. For a moment, it seemed as if the Indians might drive the colonists into the sea. Chapter 12: Metacom’s Challenge > Page 163 · Location 2651 THE VIOLENT CLASHES BETWEEN Native Americans and colonists during the late 1670s, which later came to be known as Metacom’s War, or King Philip’s War to the English, were a shocking calamity to the colonists, even in apparent victory. New England had lost six hundred soldiers, roughly ten percent of the total number, and at least a thousand colonists had died facing Indian soldiers, whom the English branded savages. Chapter 12: Metacom’s Challenge > Page 163 · Location 2657 The English would not reoccupy their prewar borders until 1700, and the New Englanders faced the imminent collapse of their Bible commonwealth. Chapter 12: Metacom’s Challenge > Page 164 · Location 2664 Their slaughter of Native women and children, mutilation of Indian bodies, and sheer hatred and rage shook the colonists’ view of themselves as civilized people. New England as a whole seemed to be slipping into savagery, its moral rot Chapter 12: Metacom’s Challenge > Page 164 · Location 2666 confirmed by the heathens’ victories on the battlefield. Chapter 12: Metacom’s Challenge > Page 164 · Location 2666 make sense of it all, the colonists relied on ink. Between 1675 and 1682, twenty-nine narratives were written about the war. The most famous of them was Mary Rowlandson’s account of her captivity.

Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars

Page 169 · Location 2747 Since the collapse of the Powhatan Confederacy in 1644, Indian-hating had only intensified in Virginia. By the 1670s, Virginia had become a self-conscious settler colony—arguably North America’s first—driven by fear and land hunger and determined to eliminate Indigenous peoples from its claimed borders. Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 171 · Location 2789 “having protected, favored, and emboldened the Indians against His Majesties loyal subjects, never contravening, requiring, or appointing any due or proper means of satisfaction for their many Invasions, robberies, and murders committed upon us.” Virginia’s Indian policy was a matter of its very survival, Bacon seethed, and Berkeley had botched it, endangering the entire colony. Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 173 · Location 2827 In the late spring of 1677, Jeffreys, now the lieutenant general of Virginia, arranged a large treaty council with the Pamunkeys, Appomattucks, and other remnants of the Powhatan Confederacy. Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 174 · Location 2833 Cockacoeske retained the title of mamanatowick, or “paramount weroance,” over the tributary tribes of the Powhatan Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 174 · Location 2834 Virginia’s recognition of her power created a paper empire of loyal Native subjects, but it also acknowledged Indigenous perseverance against terrible odds. Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 174 · Location 2835 Virginia, the continent’s most racist and anti-Indian colony, had made space for Native Americans. Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 174 · Location 2840 IN 1683, THE FIVE NATIONS confronted a peculiar and presumptuous new arrival who, in the previous year, had brought twenty-three ships from England to the Delaware Valley and concluded a treaty with the Lenape Nation, hoping to build a new colony. Chapter 13: Virginia’s Civil and Uncivil Wars > Page 175 · Location 2845 William Penn entered American history as the good colonist who respected Indigenous sovereignty: thousands of Indians moved to Pennsylvania over the following decades. But Penn’s conciliatory approach was not pure altruism; he was reacting to Native-driven geopolitics and power.

Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion

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It was not a revolt of a subjugated nation. It was a carefully orchestrated war launched by the sovereign Pueblo people against Spain’s imperial pretensions. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 177 · Location 2893 The grievances and resentments that pushed the Pueblos to rise up against the Spanish had been brewing ever since the Acoma Massacre Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 177 · Location 2894 in 1599, when the Spanish killed eight hundred Pueblos under Juan de Oñate’s leadership, roughly a century earlier than the wars between Native Americans and the English, which gave them a different tone. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 178 · Location 2908 The Spanish missions, churches, and friaries along the Rio Grande Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 178 · Location 2908 constituted a network of power and surveillance, unveiling the anxiety of the Franciscans and Spanish soldiers, who knew painfully well how much the Pueblos and other Native Americans resented their demands and interfering. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 179 · Location 2921 By the late seventeenth century, the colony held some five hundred non-Pueblo slaves, a significant pool of labor for the approximately eighteen hundred colonists. Slaves were wealth, and wealth gave governors more control over New Mexico’s Indian affairs—and by extension its economy and politics—enabling them to develop crucial patronage connections and challenge the Franciscans’ iron grip on the colony’s relations with Spanish imperial centers. The Franciscans’ hold over New Mexico was giving way to a secular elite. 4 The fault lines within the Spanish imperial system created blind spots in Spanish rule, offering openings for the beleaguered Pueblos. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 181 · Location 2949 In reality, New Mexico was an isolated archipelago in a vast Indigenous sea; it was hemmed Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 181 · Location 2949 in by powerful Indigenous nations whose domains converged around the upper Rio Grande valley. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 181 · Location 2955 For the neighboring independent Indians, the prosperous but confined New Mexico was both a commercial outlet and a magnet. Moving toward it, they competed and clashed with one another, becoming entangled in prolonged wars. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 185 · Location 3009 Like the wars waged by the Powhatans and Wampanoags in the East, the 1680 Pueblo insurrection was at once an act of self-preservation, cultural revitalization, and spatial reimagination. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 188 · Location 3071 The Pueblo Revolt—also known as the Great Southwestern Rebellion for its virulence and scale—changed the history of the region irrevocably. It cut the Spanish colonists down to size and emboldened the Indians—not just the Pueblos but also many other Indigenous nations—to challenge Spain’s imperial claims. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 189 · Location 3079 The most important geopolitical change came when the Pueblos started selling Spanish horses to neighboring nomads in the plains and the surrounding mountains. The horse trade ignited a technological revolution that reconfigured several Indigenous worlds within a generation. Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 189 · Location 3086 THE NEARLY SIMULTANEOUS Indigenous rebellions against European imperial ambitions in all regions of North America at the end of the seventeenth century brought Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 189 · Location 3088 English, French, and Spanish colonists near their breaking points. Shockingly, Native Americans had rolled colonialism back in different corners of the continent, forcing colonists to retreat, recalibrate their ambitions, and reconsider their ingrained ideas about Native peoples. The Europeans suffered a crisis of self-confidence. Traumatized New Englanders, consumed by Indian wars, believed that their god was displeased with them. They turned against one other, denouncing neighbors, relatives, and those who were generally suspect as witches. Virginians, unable to decide what to do or how to live with their Native neighbors, fell into a civil war that nearly pulled the colony to pieces. New Chapter 14: The Great Southwestern Rebellion > Page 190 · Location 3093 France, once the most promising of the colonial ventures, found its expansive sphere of influence in the interior dramatically reduced in the shadow of the ascending Five Nations League. In New Mexico, Spanish colonists entered into a tense, postrebellion accommodation with the Pueblos—an imperial retreat that instilled a softer edge on Spanish colonial rule. Part Five: The Enduring Indigenous Continent: (early eighteenth century)

Chapter 15: Holding the Line

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There were many such maps in the Piedmont and elsewhere in North America—maps that kept the invaders out and taught newcomers how to behave. Colonies had to bend around Indigenous borders, rather than vice versa. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 195 · Location 3138 Around the same time, the great southeastern Indigenous confederacies—the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Muscogees—began to self-identify as people separate from the Whites. To distance themselves from the colonists geographically, the Catawbas denied them kinship. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 195 · Location 3143 In the early eighteenth century, in the aftermath of Metacom’s War and the Great Southwestern Rebellion, colonial control in North America was limited to Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 195 · Location 3144 small coastal and riverine settlements. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 196 · Location 3150 By the 1710s, the English had spent a staggering 100,000 crowns on Indian diplomacy and trade, adopting the French model of embracing the Indians as trading partners, military allies, and kin. They had withdrawn from dispossessive settler colonialism. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 198 · Location 3191 ENGLISH AMBITIONS WERE SWELLING TOO. Unlike in the French and Spanish Americas, in English America colonial households, not imperial governments and their officers, were the main agents of expansion. By the late seventeenth century, there were nearly 250,000 English colonists in North America, and the population growth showed no signs of abating. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 199 · Location 3210 Indians, Spanish, and the Papacy. English colonists saw the Indians as an exploitable and expendable resource, as a mass of bodies that could be either shoved aside or put to use. This was the origin of systematic Indian slavery and slave trade in the English colonies, which turned the North American Southeast into a war zone. Colonists hunted Native captives, and Indians raided Indians to secure slaves, the continent’s most precious commodity. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 199 · Location 3215 The shift in English treatment of Native Americans had been unusually harsh, and it drew a dramatic response. In 1710 the Iroquois League sent four envoys—Tejonihokawara, Sagayenkwaraton, Onioheriago, and Etowaucum—to London. Queen Anne received them at St. James’s Palace, where they shared their grievances with the British sovereign. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 200 · Location 3230 In that year the Yamasee matrilineal clan sent the seventeen-year-old Yamasee “prince” to London to establish diplomatic ties in the hope of mitigating the escalating violence. The mission failed, and the slave raids continued. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 200 · Location 3233 As many as fifty thousand southern Indians may Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 200 · Location 3233 have been enslaved. Many of them were shipped to Caribbean slave islands, while others were sold to planters on the Eastern Seaboard, where they labored in rice and tobacco fields alongside African slaves. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 201 · Location 3244 It was the most coordinated Indigenous war since the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. More than four hundred colonists were killed, and the slave raids—a terror-inducing brand of settler colonialism—effectively stopped. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 201 · Location 3248 The Yamasee rebellion was followed by a Muscogee rebellion. Both confederacies were communicating through war, telling the English how to behave. They wanted the English to adopt a new mindset and conform to Indigenous ways by negotiating, compromising, and sharing. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 202 · Location 3260 South Carolina had become a fiasco. Almost all its citizens were hiding in Charles Town, and it lost its status as a proprietary colony. Not since the Spanish-Pueblo war had any European colony come so close to being wiped out by Indians. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 202 · Location 3264 efficiency, into rice cultivation and African slavery. By the 1720s the colony was dotted with sprawling rice plantations, where some twenty thousand West African slaves worked under a brutal regime. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 203 · Location 3278 An anomaly among the British colonies, Georgia may have been the most utopian of North American colonial schemes. It was designed Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 203 · Location 3278 to turn a profit and provide defense against rival empires, but it was also a philanthropic and self-consciously idealistic project. There were to be no wars, no dispossession of Native Americans, no slavery, no lawyers, and no hard liquor—just a better life for common White people than was possible in Europe. Georgia was conceived as an experiment in social uplift that would alleviate urban poverty in England by offering the destitute a home in North America. The colony was managed by the Georgia Trustees, a group of London reformers and humanitarians that envisioned a model colony where yeoman farmers would be the backbone of the society and where they could find material Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 203 · Location 3283 and moral fulfillment. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 203 · Location 3287 Revealing their colonial mindset, the trustees sought to turn the region’s Native inhabitants into laborers to alleviate the colony’s great dilemma: the Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 203 · Location 3289 trustees had banned slavery. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 204 · Location 3300 The Cherokees lived in a vast collection of towns. Each town had its leader and a council, which were inclusive: women, men, and children participated and voiced their views. Women routinely advised male council members, and matrilineal clans served as arbiters of justice. A strong communitarian ethos—gadugi—pervaded the Cherokee world. Men and women cleared fields, burned underbrush to create fertile ash, and harvested crops. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 206 · Location 3334 FROM AN INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE, Georgia was part of a much larger dynamic. In the late seventeenth century, Native Americans had rolled back imperial advances across the continent. But in the early eighteenth century, colonial pressure brought by land-hungry colonists was becoming uncontainable along the Eastern Seaboard; by the 1730s, due to immigration and improved farming methods, the number of English colonists reached nearly six hundred thousand. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 207 · Location 3351 In 1708, South Carolina planters held fourteen hundred Native Americans in bondage, and the South Carolina assembly supplied Catawbas with “fifty guns a Thousand flints and 200 tw of powder 400 tw of Bulletts” in the hope of securing more Indian Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 208 · Location 3353 slaves. This is when Native Americans began to profoundly question their foreign political strategies in the face of colonial aggression, spawning “modern Indian politics,” which recognized that Native people would have to accept a larger presence of White colonists in their world. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 208 · Location 3356 Over the course of the eighteenth century, many of the rights and privileges that the Indians in English colonies had enjoyed earlier—advising juries, giving testimony, becoming constables, carrying firearms, moving about freely—disappeared. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 208 · Location 3359 A legal and physical color line—spawned by fear and a sense of weakness—came to separate the English from their Indigenous neighbors, who no longer could own real estate, marry a White person, have multiple wives, or take a walk at night without a passport and a lantern. Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 208 · Location 3362 Native languages were sidelined in diplomatic meetings because the colonists expected the Indians to learn English and refused to provide translators. Medals and written documents replaced wampum, Chapter 15: Holding the Line > Page 208 · Location 3363 pictographs, and tattoos as means of cross-cultural diplomacy. But the laws against Native property ownership, intermarriage, and mobility applied only within the borders of English colonies, and the vast majority of Native Americans lived outside those borders by choice.

Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators

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In a striking contrast to most English colonies, New France was built on close collaboration with the Indians, who became trading partners, military allies, and kin over the course of the seventeenth century. But as their rivalry with the English intensified, largely over religious differences, the Bourbon kings awakened to the reality that most of their North American territories were paper claims. The French started to expand their domains in ways that would shape the Indigenous continent well into the eighteenth century. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 210 · Location 3401 By symbolically and literally absorbing other Native peoples, the Iroquois created a massive colonial vacuum in the interior. European colonialism in the heart of the continent could not exist without Indian allies. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 213 · Location 3439 The shrewd Five Nations diplomacy paved the way for a massive summit in Montreal in the summer of 1701. More than a thousand delegates representing some forty Indigenous nations arrived and stayed for months, restoring order to their world one encounter, one ceremony, and one bargain at a time. They planted a tree so that a general peace could grow from its root and concluded with Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 213 · Location 3442 the French what became known as the Grand Settlement, the crowning achievement of French-Indigenous diplomacy. The Iroquois, whose territory still covered more than thirty-five thousand square miles, pledged to remain neutral in any future conflicts between England and France. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 214 · Location 3460 The Williams’s daughter Eunice, seven years old, spent seven years in captivity, her story becoming a sensation in the English colonies and New France. She was adopted Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 214 · Location 3461 into a Mohawk family, converted to Catholicism, married a Mohawk man, had three children, lost her English, and became known as Kanenstenhawi. She did not want to be redeemed. She died in Kahnawake, near the Saint Lawrence Valley, at the age of eighty-five. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 215 · Location 3475 The French called the enslaved Indians Panis, a label of obscure origins that connoted loss of freedom, as well as slave status, that erased all ethnic identities. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 217 · Location 3506 Louisiana’s founding marked a new phase in the contest over North America. French strategists began to think in continental terms, imagining a vast crescent-shaped empire stretching from sea Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 217 · Location 3508 to sea. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 227 · Location 3663 Choctaw, Illini, Quapaw, and Apalachee societies were all intact, and they expected the French to comply with their traditions. The consequences for Louisiana were far-reaching. Métissage—cultural mixing—became the norm, shaping the most intimate aspects of the colonists’ lives: sexual practices, gender roles, and child-rearing. The French in Louisiana came to realize that to survive in North America, newcomers needed to embrace its Indigenous inhabitants and convince them to become allies. Chapter 16: They Smelled like Alligators > Page 229 · Location 3704 The Sioux nations, however, did not press the advantage; they were comfortable in their place in the world, and they knew that time was on their side. Their power and dominance did not translate into an aggressive expansion, which challenged the Europeans’ entrenched and misguided views of Native American perfidy and savagery. It was the French officials who seemed to be unraveling on the Indigenous continent.

Chapter 17: An Infinity of Rancherías

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Colonists could do very little in North America without Native support and consent—a constraint that drove them to radically recalibrate their ambitions. The early- Chapter 17: An Infinity of Rancherías > Page 233 · Location 3759 eighteenth-century low midcontinent became a world of flexible alliances, malleable identities, and imperial failures. Colonies founded as imperial power centers morphed into Indigenous resource domains. Chapter 17: An Infinity of Rancherías > Page 236 · Location 3815 In 1732, when the thirteenth colony, Georgia, was added to British America, most of the Chapter 17: An Infinity of Rancherías > Page 237 · Location 3815 western part of the continent remained unknown to Europeans. It was still an article of faith to many Europeans that much of the western interior was covered by a “Sea of the West,” offering an extraordinary shortcut to China and its markets. Four-fifths of the continent remained under Indigenous control—a striking display of Native American resilience and power. Indians had held the colonists at bay through diplomacy, war, and sheer numbers. Recurring disease outbreaks had ravaged their communities, but Native Americans still outnumbered the roughly seven hundred thousand English, French, and Spanish Americans. Chapter 17: An Infinity of Rancherías > Page 240 · Location 3880 IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia embraced the Five Nations as preferred allies, siding with the dominant power in the interior, and leaving the smaller nations exposed.

Chapter 18: Magic Dogs

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The arrival of the horse was a galvanizing moment for numerous Indigenous peoples in the North American West, and a turning point for the continent as a whole. Comparisons to the dog, the Native Americans’ first domesticated animal, captured the scope of the transformation. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 249 · Location 3972 A Rocky Mountain trade chain had carried horses to the northwestern plains by the 1730s, moving them across several climatic belts, which required careful Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 249 · Location 3973 modifications in the ways of tending, feeding, and using the animals. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 250 · Location 3996 Horses brought a revolution. Not since the spread of corn across the continent had Native Americans experienced such an increase in power. Equestrian nomads could do almost everything—move, hunt, trade, fight, kill, evade, and protect themselves—faster and more efficiently. There was the time before horses, and there was the time after them. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 251 · Location 4002 Dogs, Native Americans’ only domesticates before horses, were omnivorous and could use the West’s greatest resource—grass—only indirectly. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 251 · Location 4005 By transforming inaccessible plant energy into tangible and immediately available muscle power, horses opened up an astonishing shortcut to the sun, the source of all energy on Earth. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 253 · Location 4045 Lakota winter counts, waníyetu iyáwapi—pictographic calendars that mark each year with a single event—depict attacks by Indians who had more horses, more guns, and more allies. The early-eighteenth-century winter counts of the Sicangu Lakotas were a catalog of clashes, small and large, with the Missouri Valley nations. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 258 · Location 4126 In the early eighteenth century, the continent was still resolutely Indigenous. The English were confined to the eastern side of the Appalachians; the Spanish boasted numerous missions and forts, but their colonies were little Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 258 · Location 4128 more than glorified bridgeheads; and French colonialism remained effectively confined to the Saint Lawrence Valley and to a few weak positions in the lower Mississippi Valley. Chapter 18: Magic Dogs > Page 258 · Location 4129 Fundamentally, it was a matter of distance and geography. North America had become divided in two: there was the narrow and patchy colonial belt on the coastal plains, where Europeans dominated, and there was the immense Indigenous interior, where Native territories extended deep into what, to Europeans, was a great unknown. The two Americas were almost complete opposites.

Chapter 19: Wars to the End of the World

Page 260 · Location 4157 Pennsylvania’s infamous “Walking Purchase” marked a turning point in the history of the Indigenous continent. In the mid-eighteenth century, English colonists began to dispossess Indians more methodically. Indigenous borders, sovereignty, and lives were under unprecedented attack in the East. Buoyed by a booming economy and an influx of German, Swiss, Scottish, and Irish immigrants, southeastern Pennsylvania had seventy-three thousand European inhabitants in 1740. Philadelphia alone had become a city of ten thousand. Chapter 19: Wars to the End of the World > Page 260 · Location 4167 By the late 1720s, the Appalachians marked a hard border between colonial America and Indigenous America. Chapter 19: Wars to the End of the World > Page 265 · Location 4233 The intensification of colonial ambitions in the mid-eighteenth century was nowhere more evident than in the strategically central Ohio Country, a hot spot that was the continent-wide colonial-Indigenous clash in microcosm. Chapter 19: Wars to the End of the World > Page 266 · Location 4251 By the mid-eighteenth century, there were 1.2 million English colonists on the continent. Chapter 19: Wars to the End of the World > Page 268 · Location 4282 The Indians kept the settlers anxious by promising alliances, military support, and trade, only to withdraw their promises when they needed the settlers to do their bidding. They created a military and diplomatic landscape that was often unreadable to Europeans. Chapter 19: Wars to the End of the World > Page 274 · Location 4368 Braddock invaded, all but blindly, a world where the Indians and the French had lived as allies and kin for generations. In the 1750s, the Ohio Country was the most viable part of the battered but persistent French-Indian middle ground. Multiethnic villages of Odawas, Lenapes, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, Potawatomis, Wyandots, Seneca-Cayugas, and many others filled the region with people and power: the residents could pool resources, skills, and ideas that enabled them to navigate the increasingly violent world and turn strangers into kin with generosity and sharing. Almost all of these nations had entered the middle ground with the French, and most of them still embraced the governor of New France as Onontio, a benevolent father who protected them without controlling them. This Indigenous realm was France’s power base in North America. Braddock’s plan was utterly detached from reality.

Chapter 20: British America Besieged

Page 276 · Location 4404 Diminished by Native Americans, Britain’s imperial project was in crisis, and shock waves reverberated across its colonies. British officials fretted over the “pernicious consequence” of the French seizing of the Ohio Country: Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 276 · Location 4413 Instead of fighting New France, whose noblemen were rapidly militarizing their colony, many British colonies began attacking their Native neighbors, hoping to capitalize on disorder. Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 277 · Location 4431 In 1756, its militia attacked the Lenape town of Kittanning and killed fifty men, women, and children. Pennsylvania declared war Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 277 · Location 4432 on the Lenapes and began paying bounties for Lenape scalps. Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 278 · Location 4439 The war and the broader contest for dominance now followed two designs—colonial and Indigenous—that converged and diverged in an ever-shifting pattern. The Indians expected the settlers to share their technology and embrace the Indians as allies and kin, whereas the British sought to dictate to the Indians. Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 284 · Location 4539 Native American diplomacy and military might had determined the outcome of the Seven Years’ War: thousands of Indians had fought alongside the British to defeat New France and banish the French from the continent. Yet, when peace came, many of them realized that North America had become a more dangerous place for them. Numerous Indigenous nations had relied on the presence of two empires to force compromises and concessions. Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 284 · Location 4544 Freed of European rivals, the British would begin to treat the Indians as subjects. Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 287 · Location 4593 Slighted and vulnerable, thousands of Native soldiers joined a general war that swept across the interior from the Susquehanna Valley to the Mississippi. It was a war of survival against British settlers who pushed west and openly violated Indigenous sovereignty. Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 287 · Location 4597 As the war ground on, trade came to a near halt, and the critical linkages between settlers and Indians became dangerously frail. The British officers did not seem to care. They now intended to dictate to the Indians. Haughty and authoritarian, Britain kept its army in the field, while its officers snubbed Indigenous diplomatic protocols. British settlers began calling Indians “dogs” and “hogs.” They thought they could simply ignore Native demands. 18 Chapter 20: British America Besieged > Page 287 · Location 4602 Back on Earth, Neolin began to preach about separate creations of humanity. The Master of Life had created different kinds of people—Indians, Blacks, and Whites—for different parts of the world, but the Europeans had shattered that divine design by colonizing America.

Chapter 21: Worldly and Otherworldly Wars of Independence

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Pontiac invited Odawas, Chapter 21: Worldly and Otherworldly Wars of Independence > Page 289 · Location 4621 Ojibwes, Potawatomis, and Wyandots to a council in early May 1763, where he spoke about British arrogance and the English colonists’ rejection of the politics of the middle ground. Telling Neolin’s story, Pontiac challenged his audience: “Why do you put up with the Whites on your lands? Is it because you can’t get along without them?” Indigenous ambitions in the heart of the continent were expanding beyond mere survival. Chapter 21: Worldly and Otherworldly Wars of Independence > Page 290 · Location 4645 The allied Indians outside Fort Pitt’s walls demanded that the British abandon the bastion. The British, alarmed by the scope of Indigenous cooperation, were becoming desperate. After long parleys, British soldiers handed the Indians two blankets and a handkerchief Chapter 21: Worldly and Otherworldly Wars of Independence > Page 290 · Location 4647 from their smallpox hospital, hoping for “the desired effect.” Two weeks earlier, Amherst had asked Colonel Henry Bouquet in a letter, “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in Our power to Reduce them.” Bouquet had written back in the affirmative, and Amherst had responded, “You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.” There was little ambiguity about what had happened: Governor-General Amherst had called for biological warfare. Chapter 21: Worldly and Otherworldly Wars of Independence > Page 296 · Location 4737 Although united and emboldened through the Great League of Peace and Power, the Six Nations had never consolidated into a full-fledged military empire, but after a century of territorial expansion, they had a series of imperial moments. This was one of them. Chapter 21: Worldly and Otherworldly Wars of Independence > Page 296 · Location 4739 Rather than fizzling out, Pontiac’s War was transforming into a pan-Indian war. To mitigate renewed Iroquois dominance, British officials had to offer generous and regulated trade, prohibit rum traffic, and ban land sales.

Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall

Page 302 · Location 4835 The Treaty of Fort Stanwix anticipated a new world, but it was not the world that either Johnson or the Indians wanted. Land, not trade or alliances, would now define relations between Native Americans and British Americans. During the 1760s, roughly fifteen thousand immigrants—Britons, Scots, Irish, Germans, and others—arrived every year. The price of land soared, stoking uncertainty and resentment. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 303 · Location 4849 THE RIVALRIES BETWEEN INDIGENOUS nations and European settlers had centered for generations on resources, rivers, roads, and respect—or the lack thereof. Now land became the source of conflict. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 307 · Location 4909 PONTIAC’S WAR, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Lord Dunmore’s War, and Henderson’s Purchase were pieces of a larger pattern. The British, with their long history of fearing and hating Indians, were moving toward the elimination of Native peoples within and beyond their borders. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 309 · Location 4951 Flying Crow’s neutrality posed a dilemma to Patriots and British alike. The Continental Congress had already agreed to seek military alliances with Native Americans, and the British needed Indigenous allies to attack and defend their forts in the Great Lakes region. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 309 · Location 4958 Proportionally, more Indians than New Englanders fought in Patriot forces in the course of the war. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 311 · Location 4981 Geopolitically, the 1783 Treaty of Paris left the United States in limbo, failing to solve nearly all of the issues that had triggered the war, and the individual states continued to pursue independent foreign policies. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 312 · Location 4998 IN JANUARY 1777, IN the midst of the cataclysmic war, one of the most significant turning points in American history took place, throwing almost all war strategies into question. Abruptly and shockingly, the Six Nations ritually extinguished their central council fire for the first time in the history of the league. Suddenly, the Iroquois Empire was no more. A disease epidemic had broken out, and the Iroquois, suffering and dying, turned against each other. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 313 · Location 5004 With the Six Nations debilitated by a civil war, unprecedented strategic options became available to Americans. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 318 · Location 5098 THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR, Pontiac’s War, Lord Dunmore’s War, and the Revolutionary War were to the British a single, twenty-year conflict geared at preserving their hegemony in North America and, by extension, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The 1783 Treaty of Paris extinguished that long-standing ambition. The thirteen colonies were severed from the British Empire and recognized as the United States of America. Native Americans had not been invited to the treaty talks, and they knew to expect an undesirable outcome. Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 319 · Location 5121 The wars of independence, both Indigenous and Anglo-American, that covered a half century were about respect, resources, land, and sovereignty. More abstractly, they were about legitimacy and the moral mandate to determine how war, commerce, and diplomacy were to be conducted. At the heart of the matter was the question of power—not just who should have Chapter 22: A Second Chinese Wall > Page 319 · Location 5123 it, but how it should be wielded in a world where Indigenous nations remained largely undefeated. Part Seven: American Revolutions: (late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century)

Chapter 23: The American Crucible

Page 323 · Location 5153 The Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s War, the Revolutionary War, and Lord Dunmore’s War had positioned the Native Americans to contain the United States stalwartly. The Great Lakes region remained resolutely Indigenous, Spain was distracted by a war with Britain, and the United States was crippled by a $ 75 million war debt. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 324 · Location 5162 The United States was now the dominant force east of the Mississippi, but its reach did not even extend to that attractive boundary. Britain continued to occupy forts in the interior to protect the fur trade, its most important resource in North America, but it lacked a coherent strategy for reconquest. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 325 · Location 5181 Native nations formed Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 325 · Location 5181 what became known as the Indian Confederacy, the largest pan-Indian resistance movement in the history of North America. It had one overarching agenda: stop the United States, now a nation of four million people, from stealing Native land. The confederacy’s members were committed to restoring the pre-1776 colonial borders and, in a radical measure, agreed that no nation could sell its land without the consent of the others. The member nations—Shawnees, Illinis, Miamis, Lenapes, Potawatomis, Wyandots, Odawas, Ojibwes, Piankashaws, and Wabash—agreed that all decisions had to be unanimous in order to present a unified front to the Americans. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 325 · Location 5190 Where the United States should have been cultivating alliances with Indigenous nations, most of which they had not defeated, rogue colonists and soldiers alienated nation after nation. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 326 · Location 5192 Blinded by land hunger and vicious racism, the Americans were fostering a dangerous climate of violence, hatred, and revenge along their badly exposed borders. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 328 · Location 5241 The U.S. government was far more concerned about White separatist schemes, such as the independent Mississippi Valley republic, than about Indigenous rights. Much of the new western land was sold to land companies in enormous blocks. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 329 · Location 5245 In 1789, Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, launched a systematic program aimed at civilizing Indians. The plan was redundant: Native Americans were already civilized. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 330 · Location 5253 Rather than trying to remove the Indians by force, the Confederation Congress sold millions of acres to land speculators, who in turn would sell land in 160-, 640-, and 5,760-acre tracts. The strategy was obvious: once the land was sold, colonists would eradicate Native Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 330 · Location 5255 Americans on their own. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 332 · Location 5286 The United States’ weakness also emboldened the Indians and British to enter into alliances. Indians saw the remaining British as useful partners who could supply them, arm them, and fight the Americans alongside them, protecting the Ohio Country as a boundary between Indigenous and American domains. The British were fighting proxy wars against the United States through Native Americans, but that did not mean the Indians were pawns in Britain’s lingering imperial ambitions. Limited for the most part to Canada, British America had to rely on Indigenous allies to fulfill its ambitions. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 333 · Location 5315 Louisiana’s Spanish became to southeastern Indians what the French had been to the many refugee Indians displaced by the Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 333 · Location 5316 Iroquois in the seventeenth century: trading partners, military allies, and fictive kin and fathers who cared for their needs. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 334 · Location 5322 While the Indians tried to keep the Americans out of the interior, the Spanish tried the keep them out of New Orleans, the Gulf coast, and the Mississippi Valley. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 334 · Location 5323 Indigenous and Spanish interests were aligned, and Spanish Louisiana became a haven for Indians. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 335 · Location 5351 In late 1786, at the Wyandot settlement Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 335 · Location 5351 of Brownstown near Lake Erie, most of the member nations of the Indian Confederacy came together to stop colonial encroachments into what the Americans now called Kentucky country and the Ohio Territory. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 336 · Location 5358 Defiantly and stubbornly, the Indian Confederacy combined forceful diplomacy with war, shifting from one to the other as the circumstances dictated. Now fully aware that the Northwest Ordinance was geared to divest Indians of their lands, the allies, cooperating with the British, sent a message to the U.S. Congress, rejecting the 1784–86 treaties as invalid: Native Americans had been falsely labeled as conquered people without rights. Congress refused to negotiate, and the Indian Confederacy went to war, attacking Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 336 · Location 5361 encroaching colonists across Ohio and Kentucky. Their leaders sent wampum belts to other Native nations, inviting them to join in a pan-Indian campaign to protect Indigenous sovereignty. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 336 · Location 5373 Shockingly, the United States forced the Six Nations to relinquish all their claims to the Ohio Country. Coming twelve years after the quenching of their confederacy’s central council fire, the loss of the Ohio Country marked the final collapse of the centuries-long Iroquois dominance in the North American interior. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 338 · Location 5401 By the end of 1791, all the states on the Atlantic coast except Georgia had abandoned the fiction that their borders stretched Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 338 · Location 5402 to the western edge of the country at the Mississippi River. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 339 · Location 5421 The Indian Confederacy was filling the power vacuum in the interior left by the fading Six Nations. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 340 · Location 5425 Unable to defeat the allied Indians in battle, the president of the United States relied on terror and total war, targeting noncombatants, fields, orchards, and trade centers. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 343 · Location 5489 The first twenty years of the United States had been marked by nearly constant wars with Native Americans. The long fight over western lands had drained the nascent republic’s coffers, absorbing nearly five-sixths of the total federal expenditure year after year. Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 344 · Location 5507 The pent-up desire for land brought a deluge of colonists to the Ohio Valley. Washington had proved not to be a protective father Chapter 23: The American Crucible > Page 344 · Location 5508 in the French or Spanish mold. The Indian Confederacy dissolved itself, but only temporarily.

Chapter 24: Western Promises

Page 345 · Location 5528 In reality, the United States controlled only portions of its mammoth domain. Its borders were far from self-evident; they had to be asserted through violence, over and over again. Traveling from the nation’s capital to the Illinois and Ohio Countries took approximately two months. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 345 · Location 5529 Unlike most empires, the United States tried to govern its territories from the fringe, not from the center. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 349 · Location 5573 Too weak to reduce the Indians to subjects, the United States had to negotiate contracts with sovereign Native nations. They would have to do so 222 times between 1804 and 1970, the largest cessions occurring before 1867.7 Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 349 · Location 5583 Jefferson’s weapon of choice was the United States’ nascent civilization program, which was designed to turn Native hunters into farmers and Native women into housekeepers by providing the necessary tools and reeducation. This kind of systematic social engineering, Jefferson believed, would free up land for American colonists without war and pave the way for his ideal commonwealth of yeoman farmers. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 350 · Location 5592 The Cherokee women who gravitated to the civilization program believed they would boost their economies and secure their territories. They seized the opportunity to acquire spinning wheels, looms, and Anglo-American-style clothes. By the early nineteenth century, Cherokee women owned nearly twenty thousand hogs, twenty thousand cows, more than six thousand horses, and 129 slaves. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 350 · Location 5603 A blend of Christianity and Indigenous spirituality, Skaniadariyo’s message was one of the many new Indigenous movements that would challenge the United States’ hegemonic pretentions and insidious influence in Native lands. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 352 · Location 5637 This version of Lakota history placed the Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 352 · Location 5637 Lakotas and the United States on parallel trajectories: in 1776, according to American Horse, two nations had been born in North America, both destined for discoveries of new worlds, dominance, military glory, and, finally, a terrible, violent clash with each other. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 353 · Location 5657 Before the epidemic, the upper Missouri Valley had been home to tens of thousands of agrarian Indians; afterward, only eight thousand remained. The once-extensive domains of farms and towns dissolved into isolated and exposed nodes. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 353 · Location 5660 The Lakotas would eventually eliminate the weakened agrarian nations as a threat. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 355 · Location 5681 Like the Ohio Valley earlier, the Missouri Valley was becoming a hot spot in Native-colonial struggles. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 357 · Location 5729 Jefferson unrealistically wanted to remove most eastern Indians, pushing them west of the Mississippi, where a vast trading empire would be built to channel Indigenous products, mainly furs and skins, to eastern markets. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 358 · Location 5732 To Americans, Saint Louis was the gateway to the Trans-Mississippi West, and the Missouri River was the natural highway for colonists. That made the Lakotas, who now controlled the upper section of the river with an iron grip, the most important Native nation to win over. Chapter 24: Western Promises > Page 362 · Location 5812 The Lakotas had exposed the fiction at the center of the Corps of Discovery. Lewis and Clark tried to hold on to their conqueror narrative, in which they were asserting U.S. authority over the Missouri Valley, but in reality, the Lakotas were consolidating their supremacy over the valley in the expedition’s wake. Instead of extending the American empire into the deep interior of the continent, Lewis and Clark had provoked an awe-inspiring imperial Indigenous response that foiled the Jeffersonian vision for the continent.

Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open

Page 366 · Location 5874 Situated on the eastern edge of an Indigenous continent containing hundreds of Native nations, the republic had to continually adjust to the Indigenous presence and territoriality on its self-imposed borders. Every Native nation the Americans came in contact with was unique, forcing them to calibrate their foreign policies again and again. Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 371 · Location 5960 The War of 1812 was a regional war between the United States and Native Americans, as well as an imperial conflict over British impressment of American sailors and British violations of U.S. maritime rights. Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 372 · Location 5977 ELSEWHERE, INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS turned inward, seeking to protect the core of their cultures, identities, and sovereignty. Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 374 · Location 6007 The Ohio Country became a settler space. Soon after Tecumseh’s downfall, the last kernel of the middle ground died, marking the Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 374 · Location 6008 end to a remarkably creative and effective strand of Indigenous resistance against colonialism. Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 376 · Location 6038 From the 1760s on, the Spanish Empire descended into a hemispheric crisis. Repelled by the Indians, Spanish policymakers retreated to the older practice of pairing missionization with warfare. Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 379 · Location 6096 The Jesuits had rejected the feudalistic encomienda labor drafts of the wider Spanish Empire and had built a self-sufficient economy. Most missionaries had refrained from refitting sacred Indigenous spaces for Christian purposes, allowing local Native religious sites to remain visible, even as they converted large swaths of the population. But the Jesuit state was an exception. In North America the Spanish Empire was weak and vulnerable, which brewed fear and intolerance. The Spanish thought that “Indigenous religion” was an oxymoron, and if denied attempts to convert the Indians, they quickly turned to mass violence. Their overarching ambition was to bring Native Americans into their fold—peacefully if possible, but violently when facing resistance. Chapter 25: The White Devil with His Mouth Wide Open > Page 382 · Location 6128 Between 1783 and the outbreak of the Civil War, Indigenous nations would conclude more than three hundred treaties with the U.S. government, negotiating hard and creatively. Most treaties transferred land to the United States, but they did not erase Indigenous sovereignty.

Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era

Page 386 · Location 6167 Fort Tecumseh, the Negro Fort, and Prairie du Chien together reveal North America’s racial and geopolitical crisis in the early nineteenth century. After Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 388 · Location 6201 Americans desperately wanted to secure the nation’s southern frontier by putting an end to Indigenous-maroon collaboration in Florida, which posed a threat to the South’s slave regime: as long as Florida remained unoccupied, escaped slaves would gravitate there. American officials were also concerned about British inroads into Florida. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 389 · Location 6223 State-of-the-art steamboats could not navigate Florida’s shallow rivers, prompting U.S. strategists to seriously consider using hot-air balloons to detect the elusive Seminoles. By the mid-1830s, the cost of the war for the United States had exceeded $ 20 million, more than the price of Louisiana. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 390 · Location 6230 Seminoles attacked sugar and cotton plantations and liberated Black slaves, inflicting massive losses in property and lives. They opened negotiations, only to resume their guerrilla tactics, unnerving the Americans, who feared that the joint Seminole-Black resistance could ignite a South-wide rebellion: the inclusive Seminole society was a rejection of the White southerners’ racial order. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 390 · Location 6240 The Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole populations had grown rapidly, exceeding seventy Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 390 · Location 6240 thousand in total in the 1820s. They had entered into treaties with Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 390 · Location 6243 Cherokees had adhered to the American standard of civilization to convince the U.S. government to let them stay in their ancestral homelands. They published newspapers and had a ninety percent literacy rate, and they were well-off, having improved the land through intensive farming. The Cherokees, along Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 390 · Location 6245 with the Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Muscogees, relied on Black slave labor, often outperforming their White neighbors in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, even though their slave regimes were far less brutal. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 391 · Location 6253 Three racially charged removals took place in this period. The first, orchestrated by southern planters, deported four hundred thousand Black slaves from the older slave states in the Upper South to newer Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 391 · Location 6255 ones in the Deep South, where they were to grow cotton. The second removal, endorsed by southern settlers and emerging cotton capitalists, aimed to purge the Cotton Kingdom of Indigenous southerners, especially the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Muscogees, who owned the most fertile lands on the continent. As Whites saw it, the Indians now took up too much space, and they would be deported to a designated area in the West that became known as the Indian Territory. The third removal, organized by the U.S. government, would relocate thousands of northern Indians into the West. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 391 · Location 6262 Even in land-hungry Georgia, settlers admitted that they had too much land to farm. It was clear that the underlying motives driving Indigenous dispossession were not economic but racial. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 392 · Location 6271 The Cherokee leader Guwisguwi already lived in a two-story home, had an estate of several orchards, and owned nineteen Black slaves and a ferry. He presented himself as an aristocrat and a leader, and he did it well—too well, as it turned out. Guwisguwi’s prominence as a slave owner grated on his White neighbors and challenged the American ideas of uncivilized and therefore deportable Indians. Racial ideas began to creep into Cherokee marriage laws. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 392 · Location 6280 The Cherokee Constitution, modeled after the U.S. Constitution and ratified in July 1827, declared the Cherokees to be a sovereign people on a par with the United States. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 393 · Location 6291 Harboring no illusions about the trustworthiness of the American state, the Chickasaws sold their land—ten thousand square miles in all, some of it the richest on the continent—before it could be taken from them. They placed the resulting money in trust with the U.S. government, which, ironically, provided credit and liquidity to land speculators, enabling them to deliver more Native land to the market. Collusion was the speculators’ favored method. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 395 · Location 6324 On March 18, 1831, Marshall dismissed the case because the Cherokee Nation did not possess standing to obtain judicial relief. The court framed its decision in broad terms, extending removal to all “tribes which reside within the acknowledged limits of the United States.” Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 395 · Location 6329 Jackson had been thwarted and embarrassed by a coalition of Indians, humanitarians, evangelical Christians, and the nation’s chief justice. He found the failure hard to swallow. Along with alarmed planters and southern politicians, he wanted to destroy Indigenous sovereignty in order to entrench settler sovereignty. Jackson simply ignored Marshall’s ruling. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 395 · Location 6332 Jackson mobilized the powers of the Indian Office, and systematic mass removals began soon after. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 396 · Location 6337 In the absence of proper government oversight, White settlers and officials raped and murdered countless Native women. More than three thousand Muscogees died during their removal, triggering a yearlong on-again, off-again war that ravaged large parts of Alabama and Georgia. The Cherokees witnessed their lands being transferred to settlers through lotteries. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 398 · Location 6375 Guwisguwi, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot (also known as Buck Watie), and many other Cherokee leaders fought the Removal Act in courts, in meetings with American officials, and in the pages of the Cherokee Phoenix—the first Native American newspaper—but they failed to reverse the act. White missionaries and reformers challenged Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 398 · Location 6378 the assimilationist policies and the notion that individual states had the right to impose regulations on Native American land. They won their case in the Supreme Court, only to witness Jackson refusing to enforce the ruling. Old fault lines within the Cherokee Nation deepened as people split into opposing parties that favored either accommodation or resistance. In 1835, the Treaty Party, a minority group of Cherokee leaders, met with U.S. officials at New Echota, the Cherokee capital. Guwisguwi and Buck Watie were among the group’s leaders, and they believed that the Cherokees should accept a removal treaty before it was imposed on them. Guwisguwi signed the Treaty of New Echota on December 29, ceding all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi to the United States for $ 5 million. He hoped at least to be able to shape the conditions of his people’s dispossession. Most Cherokees denounced the Treaty Party as traitors, and they categorically refused to leave their homelands. With American supporters, they petitioned the U.S. Senate to overturn the Treaty of New Echota, but the pushback from southern senators was too strong. When Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor as president, ordered the army to march fifteen thousand resisting Cherokees to the Indian Territory in 1838 at gunpoint, the Cherokees were too fractured to resist. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 399 · Location 6390 Removal seemed like an overwhelming endeavor, but thousands of Indians avoided being forced to the west through evasion, making themselves inconspicuous and unreachable by leaving their homelands of their own volition and retreating into hard terrain, becoming nomadic, weaponizing their deep knowledge of the terrain, and hiding in swamps, forests, and other hard-to-reach Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 399 · Location 6392 places, which they knew intimately. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 399 · Location 6395 Whenever possible, the fugitive Indians sought refuge in the South’s most treacherous and spiritually significant places. With such maneuvers, they kept themselves out of the Indian Office’s deportation ledger books, thereby preserving the Indigenous South: approximately twenty percent of the Native Americans targeted for removal remained in the South, humiliating the growing U.S. bureaucratic machine. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 403 · Location 6465 Exploiting their strategic advantages, the Lakotas moved to expel the agricultural nations—Pawnees, Omahas, and Otoes—from the river valleys of the central plains. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 403 · Location 6467 The Lakotas needed the valleys and their resources for their growing horse herds. Chapter 26: The Long Removal Era > Page 404 · Location 6485 Theirs was a kinetic empire whose power stemmed from the systematic repetition of key political acts: short-and long-range raids, tribute extraction, and diplomatic missions, which gave the empire an on-again, off-again character: it could be all over the place one moment and hidden the next. The Americans never realized its existence.

Chapter 27: The Comanche Ascendancy

Page 416 · Location 6672 Spain was outraged by the extension of the United States’ southern border to the thirty-first parallel, which ignored Spanish claims on the Ohio-Mississippi confluence. The United States refused to compromise, leaving the Spanish in limbo. Spain’s solution to the crisis also became the solution to the Comanches’ crisis: this was when Spain adopted its secularized Indian policy to protect its enormous territorial holdings, offering Native nations support in the form of gifts, trade, and treaties. Chapter 27: The Comanche Ascendancy > Page 421 · Location 6763 Most native plants in the Americas had not evolved to coexist with large grazing animals, and when Eurasian fauna arrived in the sixteenth century, many of these plant species were rapidly devoured and replaced by more resilient European weeds. In the North American Great Plains, however, grasses Chapter 27: The Comanche Ascendancy > Page 421 · Location 6765 had coevolved along with large grazers—most notably the bison—and were therefore exceptionally resilient in the face of Europe’s faunal invasion. When the Comanches grasped the full extent of that advantage, they dramatically streamlined their economy and way of life. They stopped using some one hundred plants, abandoning two-thirds of their ethnobotanical tradition, and they forged trade relations with Pueblo, Pawnee, Ponca, Kansa, Wichita, and Iowa farmers to secure carbohydrates in the form of maize, squash, and beans.

Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield

Page 432 · Location 6929 THE UNITED STATES’ EXPANSIONIST burst—mightily boosted by rising capitalism—was a dark moment for many Native Americans in the West. Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield > Page 433 · Location 6944 In 1846, there had been 150,000 California Indians; in 1860, only 35,000 remained. Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield > Page 436 · Location 7001 The U.S. Army was overwhelmed by the seemingly multiplying small wars against Indigenous nations, even as a civil war seemed more inevitable by the day. Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield > Page 438 · Location 7023 The mass roundups and the mass execution were a warning: Indigenous nations now faced an administrative behemoth capable of inflicting enormous harm. Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield > Page 441 · Location 7083 Like the South and the North, the West, too, had a removal era that extended into the 1860s. Nine thousand Navajos became prisoners of war, and U.S. officers confiscated one hundred thousand sheep from Navajo rancherías. Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield > Page 445 · Location 7128 U.S. officials were putting out fires all across the West. After four centuries of colonialism, the extent of Indigenous power was still staggering. Chapter 28: The Lakota Shield > Page 450 · Location 7218 The sheer vastness of the Trans-Mississippi West had helped the equestrian Indigenous powers for decades, allowing them to put distance between the Americans and themselves. But mobility on the continent now belonged to the Americans, whose railroads had ushered in a modern corporate world centered on Wall Street, where Indians had no place.

Epilogue: Revenge and Revival

Page 458 · Location 7350 When the Indian wars came to an end in 1877, the United States was simultaneously imperious and exhausted. Since the founding in 1776, there had been more than sixteen hundred official military engagements with Native Americans. Page 459 · Location 7364 There was a direct link between the Indigenous success and Americans’ sense of vulnerability and scale of vengeance. Page 460 · Location 7382 Indigenous power in North America reached its apogee in the mid-to late nineteenth century, which, at first glance, appears counterintuitive. This was the period when the United States emerged onto the world stage with its “monstrous contiguous economic territories,” inspiring awe and fear in Germany and fueling an impression as the “greatest menace” in Italy. Subduing independent Native nations and erasing their sovereignty seemed to the imperial United States a straightforward problem of plying its overwhelming military might and technological advances, including railroads. But the Indigenous nations, too, reinvented themselves, in part as a response to the rising American empire. Page 461 · Location 7388 The Lakotas, relying on their equestrian mobility, their broad alliance network, and their generations-long experience of blocking colonial ambitions, emerged as the leading, though inadvertent, guardians of the Indigenous continent. Over a period of seven decades, they foiled U.S. expansion again and again, protecting in the process scores of smaller and more vulnerable nations. There is no way to measure the lives saved, but given the palpable genocidal tendencies of the American settlers, the Lakota Empire’s protective presence may have been the most significant single entity keeping the continent Indigenous. Page 461 · Location 7398 In the 1890s the number of remaining Indians was 250,000—a terrifyingly low figure that reveals the enormity of U.S. genocidal campaigns. American expansion had diminished North America’s Indigenous population by seventy percent. Page 462 · Location 7417 it is worth pausing to consider just Page 462 · Location 7417 how recent the United States, and its ascendancy, are. The four hundred years of colonialism that followed Columbus’s arrival failed to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty in North America. It was only 130 years ago, a brief span when compared to the long precontact history of Indigenous America, that the United States could claim to have subjugated a critical mass of Native Americans. Iroquois power lasted from the sixteenth century deep into the nineteenth century, making the Iroquois Nation older and more historically central than the United States. On an Indigenous timescale, the United States is a mere speck.