Pekka Häkäläinen: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

 

Lakotas worship Wakhán Thánka, the Great Spirit, whose messenger was Ptesánuin, the White Buffalo Calf Woman. She appeared, Häkäläinen writes, at a time when “Lakotas were starving because their lives had no structure or meaning”—no regime. She gave their chief, Bull Walking Upright, the seven sacred ceremonies, including the Sun Dance and the purification lodge, along with the sacred ceremonial pipe, an instrument of peacemaking, of prayer, and of prosperity—the latter, because if unwrapped and smoked it would bring the buffalo. Before vanishing, she transformed herself into a white buffalo calf.

Although the story is ancient, it “acquired new urgency in the early nineteenth century, when Lakotas made their second concerted push into the West, this time from the Missouri Valley” toward the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota. The urgency arose this time not as a response to famine but in response to the Lakotas’ increasingly desperate confrontation with the most recent and most formidable modern empire, the United States. They regarded Pahá Sápa, the Black Hills, as “the gift of the White Buffalo Calf Woman,” a fulfillment of her ancient prophecy, and thus a place in which sanctity and prosperity intertwined. The Black Hills’ favorable climate attracted large buffalo herds, which migrated to the Hills when droughts struck the grasslands. When the Lakotas arrived, the Cheyennes had already “emerged as the dominant group” in the region, allied with the Arapahos. To the Lakotas, “control of Pahá Sápa became a spiritual and material imperative without which nothing in the world was secure,” and by the 1820s they had displaced the rival peoples. “The Black Hills belonged to them.”

From there, “Lakotas reinvented themselves, with stunning speed, as equestrian hunters and herders who relied on horses to move, feed, clothe, protect, enrich, and perfect themselves”— feeding on the rich buffalo herds and faithfully performing the Sun Dance, as prescribed by the prophet of the Great Spirit. “Almost all resident Indians saw the Lakotas as aggressors and mobilized to drive them back,” making the region “an ever-shifting geography of violence” among peoples who shared similar regimes, regimes including “a hunting-pastoral way of life” which “demanded an unusually high people-to-land ratio,” requiring each people to range freely or perish. Throughout the decades of the 1830s and 1840s, Lakotas fought Crows and Shoshones to the north and west, Pawnees, Omahas, Poncas, and Otoes in the south, where “the competition over hunting rights became particularly vicious because the herds had begun to thin out,” partly because the supple hides of buffalo cows were prized by American traders. “The central planes erupted in carnage,” with “self-perpetuating cycles of killings and retributions.” Nations holding one another to be “irredeemable enemies…exploited, conquered, or dispossessed” one another. That is, the ethos of the warrior regime, which despised peaceful herding, pursued wealth beyond mere sustenance by trading with representatives of the American commercial republican regime, which had organized its exploitation of herd animals on peaceful ranches. The American regime (at first unwittingly) depleted the resources of the warrior regime, which organized its political economy along the lines of warfare and hunting. Trade between sharply differing regimes need not bring peace and understanding; it may even be, unwittingly or not, a catalyst for war.

In these wars, Lakotas enjoyed the advantage of superior numbers. Their population exceeded ten thousand, now sustained by immunity acquired from vaccines distributed by the Americans. They had firm links to American traders, having already established commercial relations with them in the Missouri Valley. And their kinship structure, based not on bloodlines alone but adoption of both allies and captives, further enhanced their power. They eclipsed their Dakota kin, who had remained in the east, even as “the booming Missouri traffic demoted the Mississippi-Minnesota trade to a sideshow. The beaver population declined, taking Dakota wealth with it, the Dakota were impelled to sell their lands to the Americans. But the Lakotas continued to add lands to their domain, combining policies of ethnic incorporation with what we now call ethnic cleansing. Polygamy increased, along with the regime’s tendency toward a quasi-aristocracy of warriors—a “quintessential warrior society.” “Horrified and humiliated by the seemingly unstoppable violence and human suffering unfolding before them, U.S. agents denigrated Lakotas as irredeemable savages ‘determined to exterminate’ their neighboring tribes.” Häkäläinen charges that Americans inclined to impute Lakota savagery to an ingrained way of life rather than to a more ordinary struggle over land and resources, which begs the question of why they struggled in such a savage way. This turns out to be important, since he will later criticize the Americans for similarly savage tactics. 

By mid-century, the Black Hills had replaced the Missouri Valley as the geographic center of the Lakota empire. Whereas Lakotas once had used the Black Hills as a “sanctuary and supply depot” on their forays from the valley to the west, the “spatial logic” of the regime “inverted,” with the valley now the sanctuary and supply depot on forays to the east—a “seismic shift of power in the great interior of North America.” The rich and diverse “microclimate” of the Black Hills “sustained rich and diverse plant communities” featuring “hundreds of native species,” many of them edible and nutrient-rich. Some 30 million bison on the Great Plains enabled the Lakota to pursue a way of life consisting of hunting animals and men alike, a perfect training ground for cavalry fighting with plenty of the red meat warriors thrive on. They needed such an imperial metropole and such a hunting ground; beginning in the 1830s, they fought the Crows for nearly 50 years in “the longest known war in the history of North America.” This was not only a war for resources but a religious war, the Black Hills having long been regarded by local Amerindian nations as a place of spiritual significance where they “gathered to hold ceremonies and seek visions.” For all of these reasons, “the fighting became unyielding.” 

The Lakotas had the advantage of both a far greater population and a central and geographically secure base of operations—in effect, the closest thing to a modern state in the region. They pushed west into the Rocky Mountains, crucially “contain[ing] the violence in enemy lands…far from their own,” much as the United States has done since the Civil War. And, like the United States, such a strategy means that weakening one adversary leads another to rise up in an attempt to take its place. The Blackfeet exploited the Crows’ slow decline, “push[ing] in from the north to poach the superior Crow horses.” Both sides also engaged in diplomacy, forging alliances with smaller tribes in attempts to outflank and decisively overpower the enemy. “It was into this world that Sitting Bull, Gall, Spotted Eagle, Touch the Clouds, John Grass, and other warrior-leaders were born.” Warriors who led successful military raids enhanced their authority. Sitting Bull, for example, was said to own “more than a hundred horses, a pool of redistributable wealth that brought him respect, followers, and power.” Military success translated into economic and political power. And the successes of the few meant prosperity for the many. Until the consolidation of the Lakota empire centering in the Black Hills, “the northwestern Great Plains had been used by many but were home to few.” Now, as “in the course of the 1830s and 1840s Lakotas fought and defeated scores of people and absorbed uncounted numbers as captives,” the Plains were controlled by the 13,000 Lakotas. And as the Comanche empire on the southern plains disintegrated under pressure from the Texans, they “emerged as the most powerful Indigenous nation in North America.” 

Indeed, “their vision for the West was supple and capacious.” Far from materialists, simply, “their quest to control game, pasture, water, and trade in the West coexisted with a spiritual mandate to balance the world by extending wólakhota”—kinship—to “those capable of proper behavior and thoughts.” Such behavior and thoughts had been provided by the White Buffalo Calf Woman, whose gift of the ceremonial peace pipe provided an instrument whereby foreign nations could be incorporated into the Lakota regime, both under the rule of the Great Spirit. “When the Lakotas smoked and prayed, they created a compact with Wakhán Thánka” and with those who shared in the ceremony. In the words of one Lakota elder, “the spirit in the smoke will soothe the spirits of all who thus smoke together, and all will be as friends and all think alike.” It is impossible not to see in this the Lakota equivalent of the Americans’ notion, ‘Manifest Destiny,’ and in the Americans’ willingness to accept immigrants from Europe who ‘thought alike’ with respect to the American regime. The Americans themselves didn’t understand this until later on, as they continued to sell guns and merchandise to a people who wanted those things in order to strengthen and extend their empire. The Lakota “regime…was becoming too big for [Americans] to reign it in.” 

Häkäläinen pauses to describe the institutional structure of the Lakota regime, which in the form of its ruling offices differed substantially from that of the United States. Based, as he has already described, on kinship ties sanctified by the actions of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the regime consisted of “concentric circles” extending “from nuclear families to extended families, to thióšpayes [clans], to oyátes [peoples of council fires], to the Ochéti Šakówin [the Seven Council Fires, i.e., the Lakota as a whole], and, through wólakhota [the life of peace, forged and solemnized in the pipe ritual], to non-Lakotas willing to embrace the Lakota ethos and way of being.” The thióšpaye consisted of ten to twenty extended families, with an ithánchan or spokesman and a council of respected elders who deliberated and decided when to move camp, when to hunt, when to negotiate with foreigners, and when to make war on them. Once the decision had been reached and announced, rule shifted to the men selected as wakícunzAs or “deciders,” who organized the hunts themselves, distributing the goods acquired and arbitrating any disputes that arose over those goods. Their decisions were enforced by a set of marshals appointed by the ithánchan, men who “enforced the council’s decisions, with brutal force if necessary.” The ithánchan’s authority rested on the safety and prosperity of the clan, as failure could result in a challenge to his authority by anyone, and anyone could leave the clan “at any time.” Dissenters could “go out on their own, establish distinct political identities, and yet remain full-fledged members of the Lakota nations.” Whereas the American Union could sunder over a matter of principle, Lakotan union consisted more of a shared ethos or ‘spirit of the laws’ under the rule of the Great Spirit—better able to bend without breaking.

All of this recalls Aristotle’s analysis of the components of the polis in Greece. Indeed, the move to the Black Hills triggered a shift in political authority from the clans to the tribal councils, from the ithánchan to the nacá or tribal chief, betokening “a growing centralization of Lakota political life.” The ceremonial counterpart to this structural centralization was the hunká ceremony, “by which prominent older women and men symbolically adopted members of other families, becoming their guardians.” A chief could extend his kinship network into multiple clans and council fires, “cut[ting] across traditional band and tribal lines.” But “the most tangible expression of the councils’ increasing political weight was a revolutionary institution of shirt wearers, wicháša yatánpikAs, a select group of ‘praiseworthy men,'” who came to form a kind of administrative committee that executed the decisions passed down by the councils. They were charged with the responsibility to “bind their oyátes behind council decisions through moral authority, lead attacks on enemies, and serve as peacemakers with outsiders.” Given the Lakotas’ warrior ethos, the structure of their ruling offices (their politeia, as Aristotle would say) led to strife between the “younger men who needed combat to prove themselves as warriors and providers” and the more cautious elders, the shirt-wearers; “long periods of peace could jam the war-driven social engine that turned boys into warriors, husbands, and leaders.” In republican America, individual liberty was air to the fire of faction; among the aristocratic Lakota, faction arose from generational conflict. European titled aristocrats kept their elder sons in line by the device of primogeniture; they were really oligarchs, not aristocrats in Aristotle’s sense, persons of virtue. Lakotas rested their aristocracy squarely on virtue, warrior virtue; when well balanced, this honed an impressive military class, but when unbalanced it could shatter the union.

Fortunately, “the great genius of the Lakota political system was its prodigious capacity to absorb and dilute [these] built-in tensions.” The senior men constituted the tribal councils while the younger men “found a countervailing instrument in traditional men’s societies,” which sponsored celebrations, planned war parties, and followed codes of conduct that “infus[ed] the larger society with hard military discipline that underwrote Lakota power.” In Tocqueville’s terms, the elders held governing authority, the young men’s societies held the authority of civic associations, which could “exert pressure on tribal councils,” taming factional impulses by ‘institutionalizing’ them. “Consummate shape-shifters, Lakotas understood power as a pliable substance that could be carved up, shared, and transferred fluidly among different institutions and bodies of people, and it was this expansive concept of power that allowed them to keep their bustling and polarized nation on a common orbit.” Aristotle emphasizes the ethical and political importance of prudence, the rational capacity to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining ethical and regime principles; Lakotas understood this, “shift[ing] power from people to people and situation to situation,” with the band councils ruling in times of peace, warriors drawn from the young men’s societies ruling in times of conflict. Then, “harsh punishments were considered normal, ‘the soldier’s right,’ and not even headmen were immune.” 

All of the Seven Council Fires “lived by this ethos, keeping people and power movable and channeling both wherever they were needed,” making the Lakotas “appear far more formidable than they actually were,” given the fact that “their population density,” though greater than that of their Amerindian rivals, “was less than one person per ten square miles.” It was their “horse-powered capacity to connect and exploit key strategic nodes…which allowed them to control resources without controlling people” as they “rang[ed] widely but rul[ed] lightly.” Häkäläinen calls this a “kinetic empire.” They ruled not “by forcing others under direct control or by making things predictable” but by “keeping things—violence, attachments, borders, power, themselves—fluid and in motion.” Aristotle, meet Heraclitus, therefore with no need for a single Alexander the Great or (as the nineteenth century saw) Napoleon. “For Lakotas mobility did what capitals, bureaucracies, and standing armies did for sedentary empires: it kept them safe and united, empowering them to maintain enduring relationships of hierarchy and difference” in “a human kaleidoscope of ever-changing shapes and patterns”—all pervaded by the teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman, prophet of the Great Spirit. 

The rival empire had other ideas. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824, giving institutional reinforcement to America’s longstanding policy of Indian removal, solemnized in dozens of treaties in which Indian nations ceded landed in exchange for annuities. “The cotton boom shifted the practice into overdrive and stripped it of lingering constitutional scruples,” as President Jackson countenanced (he may have had little real choice) Georgia’s removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from land established for them under their own peaceful regimes during the Washington Administration. Indians became “subjects of a rising imperial power that was already seizing Indian lands faster than it could sell them.” “Jackson harnessed the [Indian] Office to implement a wholesale removal of Natives from the East and, by extension, the expansion of slave capitalism across the South”—effectively replacing the Indians’ slave systems with the American one. One hundred thousand Indians departed from a hundred million acres of land.

Many Americans assumed the same could be done in the West, with much less trouble. “The southern Indians had possessed what white southerners deemed”—rightly, one might add—as “impressive qualities”: self-rule, literacy, “city-like villages with large, well-tended farms.” The inhabitants of the West consisted of nomads in the north and an unimpressive number of Mexicans in the south—effectively, “an empty vastness.” The Plains wasn’t even much worth occupying; the Pacific coast was the real prize. 

This changed with the discovery of gold in California and Oregon in 1848. More Americans than ever began to cross Indian Territory, where diseases imported by the travelers reduced the Indian populations still further. In 1851, Colonel David Mitchell, superintendent of Indian affairs in St. Louis, called a meeting of the Plains Indians. Admitting that Americans were “disturbing pasturelands and bison,” he offered $50,000 worth of compensation in the forms of (in his words) “provisions, merchandise, domestic animals, and agricultural implements” per year for half a century. This suggests more than just a material offer in exchange for noninterference; it suggests another American strategy, as old as removal, the strategy of regime change. Mitchell quite evidently wanted the Plains Indians to stop fighting one another and settle down as peaceful farmers and herders. Institutionally, he wanted “to convert the decentralized plains tribes into coherent nations under supreme leaders who would be closely attached to the U.S. government” whose members would “learn to farm, worship and live properly under the tutelage of agents and missionaries.” Under his plan, the Great Plains would consist of three regions: Lakotas, Crows, Assiniboines, Mandans, northern Cheyennes, and northern Arapahos in the north; Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches in the south; southern Cheyennes and southern Arapahos in-between. Although Häkäläinen calls this a “spatial solution to what was essentially a racial problem,” it was more fundamentally a regime solution to a regime problem.

The Lakotas demurred, being no mean imperialists themselves, and devoted to their own regime, a regime they intended to defend. As a principal Lakota spokesman explained, a one-chief system would not do for the mobile, hunting, warrior people that they were, needing to “split up and coalesce in an endless nomad’s cycle.” We will follow the bison, he insisted, animals which respect no lines drawn on maps. Further, Lakotas demanded recognition of rule of the plains “all the way south to the Arkansas—much of it still a Pawnee territory—as well as more territory in the West,” a demand they justified by “the right of conquest,” inasmuch as westerly lands “once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped these nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” True enough, Mitchell agreed, recalling the longstanding alliance between the Lakotas and the United States—but only so long as the Lakotas kept peace among the Indian nations and with the United States. Although Häkäläinen doesn’t seem to notice, the right of conquest was not necessarily a prudent principle for the Lakotas to invoke, although it must have seemed so to them, at the time. But he does see that “the meeting between Lakotas and Americans was a meeting between two fundamentally different powers,” the difference being a regime difference—two regimes “coexist[ing] on separate mental planes”—beginning with different understanding of what is worth having and of what way of life is worth following. “Lakotas sought the land’s resources, whereas Americans coveted the land itself.” Ominously, the treaty language “allowed both to claim they now possessed the right to rule the midcontinent as sovereign powers.” 

Initially, the American strategy worked. Although war broke out between Lakotas and Crows in 1852, they made peace the following year, and generally peaceful trade prevailed among the Indians, except for the Lakota-Pawnee struggle. But relations with Americans declined, as overlanders killed bison and the United States government cut their promised annual annuity from a fifty-year term to ten. More immediately, in August 1854 a U.S. Army force of thirty soldiers provoked an incident at a large Lakota camp; regarding this as a betrayal of the treaty and of the longtime alliance, Lakotas conducted a series of retaliatory raids on U.S. sites that winter. This was at exactly the time when the Kansas territory erupted in what amounted to a civil war over the introduction of slaves. The Pierce Administration and its Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, undertook what it hoped would be a short, decisive war with the Lakotas, bringing in General William S. Harney, “one of the army’s most experienced generals,” to fight it. The Indians, Harney averred, “must be crushed before they can be completely conquered”. He proceeded to inflict “the worst military defeat” of the Plains Indians in “more than century” at Blue Water Creek in present-day Nebraska. Harney then set down his terms in March 1856: cultivate the land; replace warrior bands with a more formal chain of command; halt horse trading, “which he saw as an engine of intertribal warfare”; elect a tribal chief in each council fire, a man who could restrain the young warriors. In return, the United States would restore the annuities.

But the Lakotas hadn’t really surrendered their ambitions. “Lakotas were making themselves scarce, but not because they had been defeated or domesticated.” They simply withdrew, “distancing themselves from Americans and their institutions” in yet another shape-shift. While duly collecting the annuities they had been promised, they reduce their harassment of travelers along the Oregon Trail. Reassured, the Americans turned their untender attentions to the untender Comanches, destroying their empire. 

Once again, U.S.-Lakota peace succumbed to the advance of American settlers. The Indian Office, which preferred a less harsh policy toward the Indians than the War Department, proposed a policy of establishing reservations for the Plains Indians as a shield against “an imminent settler wave from the east.” Yet the Lakotas had been “expanding an empire of their own.” During the summer of 1857, “what may been the most significant summit in Lakota history” occurred at the northern edge of the Black Hills. The longstanding debate between tribal councilors and warrior societies renewed, as did factionalism between council fires who trusted the Americans and those who did not. The young warrior chief Sitting Bull “emerged as a leading hard-liner” at the conference. In the end, the Seven Council Fires agreed to keep Americans out of the Black Hills and to keep the existence of gold there a secret. They also determined to continue their expansion. After all, the regime required it. “Young men needed war and raiding to establish themselves as warriors and providers and live full and meaningful lives” in accordance with the ethos of the Lakota way of life. Neither Americans nor the other Indian nations were exempt from this policy. Upon learning of the Lakotas’ policy, the War Department followed the recommendation of a young lieutenant, G. K. Warren, who argued that Americans should wait and allow the Indians to succumb to their own wars and the further attrition caused by “disease, poverty, and vicious indulgence.” 

As anticipated, the Lakotas and Crows fought one another, a war that continued into the 1870s, with the Lakotas eventually gaining the upper hand. As for the Americans, they could not have intervened easily even if they had wanted to, as they soon fell into cataclysmic war with one another. During the American Civil War, Lakotas “extended their range of operations to the U.S.-Canadian border in the north, the central plain in the south, the Missouri Valley in the east, and the Continental Divide in the west,” consolidating an empire of their own, structured in a way “Americans could neither see nor understand”: “Built around a shifting tribal alliance rather than a state, it was a distinctively fluid organism that reflected Lakotas’ vision of the world and their place in it,” a place in which they eschewed “direct control over foreign people or territories to secure them ” but instead rested their authority “on a capacity, underwritten by military power and mobility, to do certain things—raid, extort, intimate, and kill—over and over again and cross vast distances.” Whereas most empires established ruling institutions over subject peoples, the Lakotas preferred to “harness resources, create dependencies, enforce boundaries, and inspire awe” in a manner that ensured the Lakotas “a presence even when absent.” More specifically, whereas “the U.S. empire was built on institutional prowess and visibility…the Lakota empire was an action-based regime, which gave it a fickle, on-and-off-again character”—fluid and hard to discern. This empire enabled the Lakotas to amass horses, cattle, mules, human captives, weapons, food, and even such luxury items as Navajo blankets. The Lakotas now had “the largest, richest, and safest Indigenous domain in North America.” With the integration of many non-Lakota bands into the Lakota regime under the auspices of way-of-life kinship, the Lakotas numbered about twenty thousand in the early 1860s. These new members “were not nations within a nation,” as seen in most empires, but “individuals, families, and bands residing among Lakotas who dealt with diversity by simply accepting it,” judging their new members on the basis of “loyalty, not likeness.” In a sense, they were doing what the American Founders had done, and what Lincoln and the Republican Party sought to re-establish after the decades of departure from American principles seen in the ‘race theory’ of the Southern planters.

They were doing it by “elud[ing] the long arm of the U.S. military-bureaucratic machine by shifting shape and hiding in plain sight.” Although the U.S. Army remained suspicious, Lakotas “cultivated face-to-face relationships with Indian [Office] agents and through those intimate relationships they could manage and control them,” influencing the reports the agents sent back to Washington. Among these agents, Thomas Twiss understood the Lakotas better than other U.S. civil officials. On the eve of the Civil War, he reported that the Lakotas intended to preserve the wild game in the region—their main food source—and to maintain their independence, having seen what had happened to the eastern Indians who had ceded their lands to the Americans. Twiss hoped that the Lakotas eventually would accept settlement on reservations. The Dakotas accepted the offer, but sure enough, in 1862 the Lakotas severed their ties with the United States. 

They remained disunited, however, with those who “embraced yeoman farming and Christianity,” the regime-change policy of the Americans diverging from “traditionalists who held on to the collapsing communal world of the hunt and the village,” the waning aristocracy Tocqueville had likened to the European aristocracy, three decades earlier. In the Minnesota Valley, some Dakotas who had not acceded to their council fire’s surrender killed several hundred settlers, took more as hostages, burned farms and looted stores. President Lincoln sent Major General John Pope (the loser at Second Manassas, he could be spared) to chase the Indians away. Lincoln commuted the sentences of many captured Dakotas, but the remainder were hanged in “the largest mass execution in American history.” [1] Congress annulled all treaties with the Dakotas, cutting off their annuities and thereby driving them to Lakota territory, where Pope determined to pursue them. Häkäläinen judges this “the Union army’s biggest misstep in the west,” as the war which began in Minnesota in 1862 ended some four years later in Montana, having involved the much more formidable Lakotas in what had begun as a campaign that could have been limited to a simple expulsion of a handful of Dakotas. In so doing, the Army tipped the scales of Lakota politics towards the warriors, including Sitting Bull. “Just as the Confederate South was teetering toward collapse, the United States faced another daunting challenge to its authority”—a sustained guerrilla war Lakotas fought with “hit-and-run attacks that emphasized mobility over firepower and debilitated the enemy piecemeal,” especially along the key geopolitical chokepoint, the Oregon Trail. This didn’t prevent them from undertaking full-scale battles when they enjoyed superior numbers; after one such battle, at Sand Creek in the Northern Platte, Lakotas cut off travel along the Trail, making “the United States’ ties to the West…dangerously frail.” Subsequent treaty negotiations with Lakotas were confined only to those among them who wanted peace with the Americans; “Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Crazy Horse shunned the talks.”

Congress drastically reduced the size of the U.S. Army in the years following the war. Without much military force at their disposal, the Americans resorted to a variant of its longtime divide-and-rule strategy. Instead of attempting to identify friendly and unfriendly factions among the Lakotas, the Americans made treaties with the ‘friendlies,’ leaving the Lakotas who refused to sign treaties now self-identified as ‘hostiles’ and targeted for conquest. That conquest turned out to be harder than Americans anticipated. 

In spring of 1866, hostile Red Cloud met with the Americans at Fort Laramie. Citing the longstanding alliance between his people and Americans, he proposed a new treaty, guaranteeing peaceful coexistence if the United States controlled the number of emigrants and supplied Lakotas with ammunition, goods, and food—that is, if the U.S. bridled its own source of power while enhancing the power of the Lakotas. The Americans agreed, but soon afterwards, just as the Lakota chiefs were working to gain the consent of their people, Army Colonel Henry B. Carrington announced that he intended to occupy the Powder River, Big Horn country, and the Yellowstone. Carrington and his allies in the Army didn’t know that the Lakotas had obtained guns from the Hudson Bay Company in Canada, and so miscalculated Lakota military strength. The Americans learned otherwise in the winter of 1866-67, losing a battle near Fort Phil Kearny. “Humiliated, the army demanded revenge, and the government recognized a grave threat to the westward course of the empire.” No more General Pope: Washington now sent General William Tecumseh Sherman at the head of ten thousand troops to the West. Sherman was cautious. Having been denied the much larger force he wanted, and having recognized the vastness of the Great Plains, Sherman wanted to avoid “universal war” there.

Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and the Minneconjous chief High Backbone dominated a major council of tribes called in 1867. They headed “a burgeoning warrior cult fueled by decades of war against American and Native rivals.” The centralization Lakotas had long resisted now came to fruition, as the three chiefs “coordinated operations through their personal gravitas.” They blocked American access to the Bozeman Trail and contained the U.S. Army in its forts. At the same time, Comanches now launched raids against American settlements in Texas; Apaches harried U.S. troops in Arizona. Sherman complained that “fifty of these Indians can checkmate three thousand of our soldiers.” “Only two years after the close of the brutal Civil War, Americans faced another spiraling crisis that ate away at their moral fiber.” 

As a member of the Congressionally-established Indian Peace Commission, Sherman stiffened his position. The Indians could become farmers or face war. Negotiations ensued, resulting the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, “a bafflingly inconsistent compromise” which allowed the construction of a railroad along the Platte (“now a more tolerable concession” for the Lakotas, “as bison hunting in the region was becoming useless”) while establishing the Great Sioux Reservation, extending from the Missouri River across the Black Hills and roughly two hundred miles north to south in lands including several important rivers—an area of more than 48,000 square miles. The treaty recognized Lakota sovereignty, with a “nation-to-nation relationship between the Lakota nation and the United States”; “the United States seemed to have embraced the Lakotas as equals and favored allies.” 

The Fort Laramie Treaty set a clear border between the United States and the Reservation. This settled the geographic dispute, but it did not settle the regime tensions between a commercial republic and a warrior aristocracy. For the Grant Administration as for the Washington and Lincoln administrations, Amerindian regime change remained the solution to those tensions, inasmuch as the reverse policy, a policy of changing the United States into a Lakota-like warrior aristocracy would scarcely have brought peace to the Plains, even if Americans would have stood for such a revolution. The technological instrument for such change was the railroad. As early as 1869, Secretary of the interior Jacob B. Cox observed that extension of the rail lines would make exploration for “mineral and agricultural wealth” more feasible in Lakota territory, even as it made buffalo hunting less feasible. Nevada Senator William Stewart concurred: “As the thorough and final solution of the Indian question, by taking the buffalo range out from under the savage, and putting a vast stock of grain farm in its place,” the railroads would bring regime change to the region. In Häkäläinen puts it, “As the Union and Pacific and the Central Pacific inched closer to their Utah meeting point in the winter of 1868, it was as if a countdown toward the end of the Lakota reign in the northern plains had begun”; “modernity, it seemed, was finally catching up with the nomads.” Grant put General Philip Sheridan, the best U.S. cavalry commander of the Civil War, in charge of protecting Americans and the less powerful Indian nations against Lakota and Cheyenne raiders, still animated by the warrior ethos. Sheridan chose George Armstrong Custer as the field commander of this force.

The Grant Administration’s Indian policy, implemented by the Indian Office under the directorship of Ely S. Parker of the Seneca nation—a former military aide to Grant—operated under the principle that a warrior aristocracy would only become peaceful if it saw that armed resistance was impossible. Armed resistance would become impossible when Americans greatly outnumbered the Lakotas and Cheyennes, and when the buffalo population had diminished to the point that the warriors needed to become farmers. Congress refused to allow Grant to put the Army in charge of this policy, so he installed Quakers, “effectively subcontracting them to implement the United States’ Indian policy,” a move Häkäläinen rightly describes as a “softer and more mature imperialism,” albeit one (as he does not say) consistent with one dimension of American policy from the beginning. The same policy was being implemented in the American South, as Reconstruction was precisely an attempt to reconstruct the regimes of the Southern states, taking them from planter aristocracies to commercial republics.

As in the South, so in the West. Some Southerners and some Lakotas did adopt the new regime, “experimenting with farming in the unforgiving northern plains conditions and gradually adopting elements of the American culture.” But most Lakotas still wanted “guns and ammunition, not plows and seeds”—the longstanding policy of demanding from the Americans the means of strengthening their own regime and their own territorial control. Häkäläinen bravely attempt to describe this as a means of forging a Lakota form of modernity, but what he means isn’t ‘modern,’ only (as he puts it) “relatively new,” namely, the “horse-powered bison hunt that could yield massive quantities of hides, meat, fat, and sinew in a manner of minutes.” That isn’t modernity; it isn’t the scientific conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, although it is an intelligent way of reorganizing natural resources for the relief of man’s estate. Similarly, Lakotas wanted such modern technological devices as guns, metal, and textiles (they greatly esteemed the Winchester rifle, which “nearly revolutionized their ability to inflict harm on their enemies”), but they had no little interest in changing their regime, which was the central question. “Lakotas were still Lakotas and in control of their world, even though that world had changed fundamentally.” 

This notwithstanding, even such militants as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, recognized that the Lakotas would need to “learn to live with the wašicus,” the whites, “whose presence in their world had become an irrevocable fact.” “I shall make peace with whitemen slowly,” Sitting Bull said, now speaking as the supreme war chief of his people. Häkäläinen interprets this to mean that they would become farmers and settle into reservation life. But at the same time, they remained suspicious, having seen that others among the Seven Council Fires who had changed their regimes had declined, thanks to crop failures and declining government rations. Lakotas wanted to take the American agencies located on their lands as conduits of American resources, first and foremost. For their part, many American agents saw that the federal government assistance was inadequate to the task of regime change. “Most of the funds went to appeasing the militant chiefs and bands that categorically rejected farming and lived in the Black Hills and the Powder River country, far from the Missouri agencies,” where the Lakotas were more willing to adapt. 

Skirmishes continued. To defuse the situation, in 1870 President Grant called a conference in Washington with Lakota chiefs. There, the chiefs learned that the printed version of the treaty differed from the version as read to them, two years earlier. “Back then interpreters had provided a more cursory—perhaps a purposely selective—reading of the terms to Lakota chiefs who had accepted their words as facts.” But now they saw a document authorizing the United States to build new roads through the Reservation, to retain existing forts near their borders, to put Lakota agencies only in the Missouri Valley, not on the westerly sections of the Reservation, and, crucially, that Reservation lands themselves would belong to Lakotas only “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” Red Cloud vigorously denied that this had been the substance of the document he had signed, according to the oral version which had been read to him. He demanded to be taken back to his homeland. In response, U.S. officials agreed to locate government agencies wherever Lakotas wanted them, and they could continue to live on their territory for thirty-five years, buffalo herds or no buffalo herds. They would continue to receive annuities and would choose who could trade in their country; further, “the Black Hills and all the resources and riches they might contain were inviolate and belonged to Lakotas.” 

None of this mattered, however. The United States House of Representatives determined to put more tribal lands in the public domain, so that the railroads could be extended. The House also declared a halt to any new treaties. “Lakotas did not know it, but the United States had ceased to consider them—along with hundreds of Indigenous societies—as a sovereign nation.” That is, they effectively voided the Fort Laramie Treaty, in both its written version and in the version orally reported to the Lakotas during the initial treaty negotiations. 

While Red Cloud temporized, eventually continuing negotiations over the placement of a principal Indian agency on Reservation land, Sitting Bull and his allies gathered Lakota military and economic strength. “Much of their maneuvering—raids, wars, transnational diplomacy and commerce—unfolded in the deep interior, beyond the reach and sight of the American state, leaving the agents uninformed and nervy.” Even as “the United States was starting to emerge as a global power by extending its imperial reach to the Pacific,” intending to leave “no room for sovereign Native nations in the modern United States, northern Lakotas spearheaded an explosive expansion in the heart of the continent,” intending “to command all the northern grasslands where bison still existed in adequate numbers,” whether or not those lands were on the Reservation. “It was a forward-looking campaign that would turn a vast segment of the interior into a buffalo reserve where Lakota power and sovereignty would endure.” For this to occur, Lakotas would need to dispossess the other Amerindian nations in the region, once and for all, in order to make Lakota territory “overlap, almost perfectly with the bison.” In 1872, Sitting Bull “accepted government rations for the first time,” but not because he was relenting to American pressure. Once again, he took the supplies because they “helped expand and consolidate the Lakota empire in the far north—just as the U.S. empire was gearing up for an invasion.” (Some decades later, V.I. Lenin would famously tell a Kremlin colleague that the Soviet Union would obtain the rope to hang the capitalists from the capitalists themselves.)

Lakota wars against Pawnees, Crows, Shoshones, and Utes went well, as “massive Lakota war parties seeking game, horses, mules, and cattle” proceeded. “As their rivals yielded ground, Lakotas emerged, in many ways, more powerful than ever” in the 1870s. After winning a decisive victory over the Crows in 1875, “never before had they ranged over more territory or reached so far”; “formidable, flexible, and ubiquitous, they commanded the attention of the U.S. government like no other Indigenous nation.”

Such attention was far from tender. It was the railroad that would enable the rapid U.S. troop deployments that would seal the fate of the Lakotas. Although the financial panic of 1873 slowed construction, it didn’t stop professional buffalo hunters from depleting the herds, a campaign welcomed by Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano “as a way to accelerate the nomads’ domestication.” Soon the herds plunged into “terminal decline.” Seeing that the Americans had no evident intention to fulfill the terms of the Treaty of Laramie as they understood them, Lakotas “started preparing for war.” The Americans’ discovery of gold in the Black Hills led to an overwhelming push by prospectors, overwhelming General Sheridan’s capacity to enforce the treaty—which he, at least, still intended to do. Red Cloud disbelieved U.S. claims that they were undermanned, pointing to the presence of American troops “all over the world,” although it must be remarked that those overseas troops were mostly sailors. When government officials recommended that the Lakotas leave the Black Hills for Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Spotted Tail rather tellingly argued, “If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone.” Lakotas rejected an offer to purchase the Black Hills, continuing to reject the policy of regime change.

President Grant saw no alternative but war. But the U.S. Army really was undermanned, and U.S. Indian agents underestimated the Lakotas’ capacity for making war. Sheridan nonetheless formulated a campaign consisting of a three-pronged attack, with columns from western Montana, Fort Fetterman in today’s Wyoming, and Fort Abraham Lincoln on the upper Missouri River. Given the Lakotas’ well-known cavalry prowess, the overall commander of the expedition, General Alfred H. Terry, depended upon George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry to match Lakota mobility with American mobility in “a war of attrition in which American matériel and strong supply lines would decide the outcome.” What the U.S. Army, from Sheridan on down the chain of command, failed understand was the Lakotas’ capacity to mass troops, when necessary. “Blinded by preconceived notions of what counted as organization, he could not see how kinship, a shared sense of connectedness, had allowed Lakotas to forge a common front against an overpowering enemy” in a “sweeping national mobilization Lakotas had implemented in plain sight.” Unknowing, Custer rode to his Last Stand.

With that spectacular defeat, Congress and the Army alike snapped to attention, “mount[ing] a comprehensive campaign to defeat and dispossess the Lakotas,” while “elevat[ing] [Custer] into an exemplary Christian knight.” Although the signatures by three-quarters of adult Lakota males necessary to cede lands never materialized, “Congress did not care,” claiming the Black Hills in February 1877. Sheridan shouldered the Indian agents aside, putting the agencies under military control and confiscating the Lakotas horses and weapons. Sitting Bull took his followers to Canada, returning several years later to surrender; Crazy Horse was killed during an Army attempt to arrest him; Spotted Tail killed by a captain of the Indian police. Lakotas left the Black Hills for the Great Sioux Reservation, having lost eleven million acres of land. Even as they attempted to learn farming—a way of life severely limited in the drought-prone Reservation lands—Congress cut their rations.

“In the midst of the death and despair arrived a message of hope, rebirth, and deliverance from Nevada where the Paiute Indian holy man and prophet Wovoka spoke of a new religion that promised the resurrection of the dead and the return of the old, seemingly lost, Indigenous world.” While prophesying “the resurrection of the dead and the return of the old, seemingly lost, Indigenous world,” Wovoka also “urged Indians to be industrious and to work with and for the whites,” with the whites’ territory restricted to the eastern half of the continent. Lakota emissaries traveled to hear Wovoka’s prophesy and brought it back to their people, along with its attendant ceremony, the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance, Wovoka claimed, would hasten the Millennium, uniting all Amerindian nations, as the ghosts of their ancestors would assist in their defense. By 1890, one-third of the Lakotas were participating in the Ghost Dance. One of their chiefs augmented the prophesy by claiming that warriors who wore “ghost shirts” would be invulnerable to bullets.

All of this alarmed the Americans, and the tensions erupted at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, when an attempt to disarm a Lakota village led to gunfire in which some 150 to 300 Lakotas, including women and children, were killed, along with 25 U.S. soldiers. Häkäläinen judges it “an atrocity, a betrayal, and a human catastrophe” perpetrated by the American troops. Other accounts make it look like an instance of panicked troops grossly overreacting to Lakota resistance; others still claim that some of the Lakotas fired first. Whatever the facts may have been, the fight occurred in a context in which the Lakotas had likely been deceived by the Fort Laramie Treaty in a more or less irreconcilable regime struggle with the United States. Subsequent years saw the federal government “abandon[ing] its obligation to protect Indigenous property for a distinctively colonial land policy, whereby the Indian Office “manag[ed] them as wards.” The Indian Office “continued to attack the Lakotas’ religious traditions, pressure them to dress and talk like white Americans, and limit their rations to force them to lease and sell their land to white farmers and cattle raisers.” Lakota children often were sent to American boarding schools, in an attempt to assimilate them into the American regime. Nonetheless, both the Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance continued to be practiced, now ‘underground,’ “sustaining the principle of indissoluble Lakota sovereignty.”

Generations later, the Indians Claims Commission ruled that the federal government takeover of the Black Hills violated the Fort Laramie Treaty and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. In 1980, in the case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed upheld the decision, requiring that Lakotas be compensated for the illegal taking of lands guaranteed to them by the Fort Laramie Treaty. Lakotas have refused compensation, however, demanding the return of the Black Hills. Contemporary Lakotas have also attempted to revive their old regime, establishing tribal courts and colleges and a “Lakotanized curriculum” in schools. It is unclear how far they intend to take this policy, inasmuch as some of the traditional practices were decidedly sanguinary. Many Lakotas aim at peaceful secession from the United States. Some say this explicitly, others more indirectly. At a recent meeting of one South Dakota governing body, a Lakota woman arrived just late enough to avoid the flag pledge.

 

Note

1. Lincoln’s policy regarding the Lakotas formed part of his larger policy regarding Western lands, as described by Richard W. Etulain in Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society, 2020). Lincoln approved the Homestead Act, passed by Congress in 1862, the establishment of the Department of Agriculture, the establishment of agricultural colleges, and the construction of a transcontinental rail line. Farming and railroads supported one another by opening farm produce to the national market; railroads also strengthened the Union itself by giving Americans the technological means to extend their extended republic. With regard to the western Amerindians generally, Lincoln had little time to consider them: “Pressed by the mounting demands of the Civil War, the president neither addressed Indians’ needs nor reformed a flawed Indian policy system.” He assured those who urged reform that he would take up the problem after the war, but such good intentions were never tested, perforce.

 

 

 

Pekka Häkäläinen: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

 

In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates proposes three “noble lies” or myths teachers will tell their students. One of them, the myth of autochthony, strengthens citizens’ attachment to the territory of his proposed polis. Tell the young that their people initially sprang from the very soil the polis occupies; this land is your land because your ancestors literally grew up out of it, coming from nowhere else but here. In North America today, ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ Americans sometimes make this claim. We didn’t come here from Asia, traversing a ‘land bridge’ that connected the two continents, millennia ago. We originated here. The Lakotas claim ownership of large sections of the upper Midwest on exactly those, well, grounds, although it’s impossible to say whether they believe it. 

Häkäläinen clarifies the matter. He sidesteps the question of Asian origins, contenting himself with showing that the Lakotas entered the territory they now claim much more recently from lands they had held farther east on the North American continent. This is only one result of his excellent approach—telling the story of the Lakotas not as an adjunct to the story of their American conquerors but as their story, “central and enduring protagonists who contended with a range of colonial powers since the seventeenth century variously diverting, foiling, and boosting their ambitions.” Telling the Lakotas’ story as their story does not, however, mean telling it as they tell it to themselves, and to others. Häkäläinen writes history, not mythology.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Lakotas numbered among the several tribes of hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands of North America, a minor tribe (never more than 15,000 in population) clustered around the Great Lakes, with “no guns and no metal weapons” with “little political clout.” They nonetheless undertook “what may be the most improbable expansion in American history,” leaving “their ancient homelands and reinvent[ing] themselves as horse people in the continental grasslands that stretched seemingly forever into the horizon.” This was hardly inevitable, the working-out of some historical teleology. They pursued a strategy, one eminently successful as exercised with and against other Indian nations and empires and also with and against the French and British empires. “How Lakotas harnessed that imperial cauldron to serve their interests…is one of the great untold stories in American history.” It was the United States’s imperial venture that did them in, but even then not straightforwardly so, as “Lakotas and Americans expanded simultaneously into the West, often claiming the same tracts of land and water,” “neither compromis[ing] their core convictions about themselves and the world,” and “often talk[ing] past one another.”

The Lakotas were part of the seven nations or tribes constituting what for convenience’s sake Häkäläinen calls the Sioux, or what the members of the confederation themselves called, and still call, the Ochéti Šakówin or Seven Council Fires (‘Sioux’ meant ‘enemy’ among their Indian enemies, primarily the Iroquois). They had come into the area immediately west of the Great Lakes from the central Mississippi Valley, “triggered by a warmer and wetter climate cycle that began in the ninth century, rendering the lands in the previously colder north and direr west more appealing.” Initially, the Lakotas were not even the most prominent Sioux tribe, that honor being held by “their close kin,” the Dakotas, who had entered the area before the other Sioux. The Lakotas settled farthest to the west, near the Minnesota Valley. In the Great Lakes region, their main enemies were the Crees, who lived along the northern shores of Lake Superior, and the Sauteurs, both of whom enjoyed the advantage of iron weapons, for which they had traded from the French. Between the Sioux and the French “lay dozens of Native nations, all of them inside the gun and iron frontier and all of them familiar with the European newcomers and their strange ideas and habits.” To make direct contact with the French, in order to obtain their novel and seemingly magical weapons, “each of those nations would have to be won over, pushed aside, or otherwise neutralized.” 

Against the better-armed Crees and Sauteurs, the Sioux confederation pitted not only the warlike virtue of courage but better organization. As a whole, the confederation numbered some 30,000 by the middle of the seventeenth century; they recognized one another as kind, “bound to one another and the universe by a pervasive life-giving essence, wakhán.” The confederation shouldn’t be understood in a formal sense, having “no overarching governing structure or leaders who could speak for all members of the alliance.” Along with kinship, they shared the same language; the Council Fires called themselves the “real people,” distinguishing themselves “from strangers and thókas, enemies.” Nor did they think of their kinship primarily as a matter of blood; “anybody capable of proper sentiments, words, and deeds would become a relative, takúye.” It was a matter of ethos. “Sioux saw in every person a potential kin, which meant that their society had no predetermined boundaries.” Within each Council Fire several bands, villages, or “camp circles” lived together throughout the year; the circle, itself a symbol of “spiritual unity and cosmological order,” included twenty households, more or less. They necessarily occupied a set space, but only temporarily, moving from woodlands to grasslands to marshlands in an annual cycle. The Seven Council Fires consisted of “a human kaleidoscope where individuals, families, and bands moved around constantly, arranging themselves into different constellations as circumstances demanded,” united not by territorial boundaries but by “a thick lattice of kinship ties that transcended local and regional identities,” a framework wherein “they could travel anywhere within their realm and always be among kin.”  

As for the foreigners, they too reinforced ties among the Sioux. Like so many ‘ancient’ peoples, they waged war frequently, “to protect their lands, to exact revenge, to secure hunting and trading privileges, to enhance their power and prestige by taking slaves, to preempt threats,” singing their war song: “I am going to War, I will revenge the Death of such a Kinsman, I will slay, I will burn, I will bring away Slaves, I will eat men.” If a father died in battle, his daughters “received slaves and had the right to decide whether they lived or died,” while the victorious warriors obtained wives from among the captives. 

The smallpox epidemic which began in Massachusetts in the 1630s indirectly helped the Sioux. By the end of the decade, it was ravaging the Wyandots in the Great Lakes region, as the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes trade corridor “became a disease corridor,” with mortality rates around fifty percent of the population. “Despair and sorrow gripped entire communities, spawning apathy or, increasingly, violence to ease the pain.” This included the powerful confederation of the Five Iroquois Nations, who responded to their devastating loss of population by a campaign of conquest, with “warfare more ferocious than anyone could remember.” The Wyandots were among their victims, chased into the western Great Lakes, but they were not alone. “Several nations crumbled as political entities,” while others fled “in the face of the most concentrated projection of power in seventeenth-century America,” as “Iroquois war parties carried thousands of war prisoners into Iroquoia, where clan matrons slated them for slavery, adoption, or execution.” The lucky ones were “adopted into Iroquois clans and assumed the social role and name of the deceased, thereby repairing fractured lineages as newly born Iroquois.” 

As the refugees from Iroquois depredations crowded into the area between Lake Michigan and the southern shore of Lake Superior, with their iron and guns, they threatened the Sioux. Using the Odawas as middlemen, Seven Council Fires established a treaty with the French, hoping to exchange furs for iron and guns. Since, “neither possessed the power to dictate to the other…they were forced to accommodate one another” as best they could, given “the yawning cultural gap that separated them.” And they intermixed through mutual gift giving and marriage. The Sioux called the French governor in distant Montreal the Onontio or father, a father conceived less as a commanding head of household as a kind and generous benefactor. In fact, they “hardly tolerated one another” but worked for their mutual interests to stabilize the region in order to maintain the benefits of trade. But the Sauteurs and other tribes, themselves pressured from the east by the Iroquois, maintained their advantage in weaponry. “Whatever the reason, Sioux remained outsiders. Odawas, Wyandots, and others would shun alliances with them and keep driving into their hunting lands” in “a massive war zone” where the Sioux “fought some dozen nations, vying for hunting rights, trade, and predominance.” The Sioux began to retreat to the west of the Mississippi River, only to find themselves at war with the Iowas. 

“Yet the seven fires possessed a singular advantage: they were more numerous than any of their enemies, boasting a population that, by some estimates, was thirty times larger than that of the geopolitically privileged Sauteurs.” Their distance, their isolation, hurt them geopolitically but helped them to avoid contagious diseases, there being no evidence of any epidemic in Sioux territory in the seventeenth century. What they lacked in weaponry they made up for in warriors, fielding thousands on a battlefield against enemy war parties of a few hundred. And the western lands they had moved into were rich in bison; the French began calling them the “Nation of the beef.”  

The French needed them more and more. The English had allied with the Iroquois, threatening the numerically inferior French. For their part, “what the Sioux needed was a thorough geopolitical realignment of the American interior.” They allied with their longtime enemies, the Sauteurs, to the delight of the French. By now, they were well established in the western lands, and even pushed back into the western Great Lakes. But in 1670, King Charles II of England chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company—bad geopolitical news for the French, who responded by strengthening their alliance with the Sioux and Sauteurs in the west. This enabled the Sioux to insist that the French come to them, rather than insisting that the Sioux venture eastward toward the French. “To be powerful in late seventeenth-century North American meant having allies and kin; not to need to move “connoted power,” as “the weak traveled to the more powerful, and markets were not so much opened as brought in.” In this, the Sioux had an unwitting ally in Louis XIV’s court: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis’s finance minister, who issued an edict opening inland trade, quite in contrast with his usual mercantilism. With beaver pelts satisfying the French appetite for luxury clothing, the Sioux finally “had broken Lakes people’s grip on the fur trade,” with vastly increased “access to guns and iron”—a “terrifying development for the Great Lakes Indians.” “Dangerously isolated just a few years earlier, the Sioux country emerged in the 1680s as a central place where commercial and diplomatic circles converged. The Sioux now had allies, iron, and guns—and the eye of the French.” 

With that, the Iroquois, armed with English guns and goods, pushed back, sending war parties into lands south and west of Lake Michigan and alarming the French, who knew a proxy war when they saw one. By now, the French knew that the Mississippi River flowed south to the Gulf of Mexico, not west to the Pacific Ocean. This made the lands between Lake Michigan and the lower Ohio and middle Mississippi Valleys all the more crucial for their empire. But the Iroquois had the warriors on the ground, and “New France was soon tottering.” Only the alliance with Sioux could save it. But further arming the Sioux “risked alienating the Lakes Indians, New France’s ancient shield against the Iroquois.” The shield turned against the one it had protected, as the French lacked the material goods to appease all of their allies. This gave the Sioux even greater leverage over France. 

In general, “seventeenth-century North America was a vast Indigenous ocean speckled with tiny European islands.” The Europeans might claim “vast chunks of the continent through the doctrines of discover and terra nullius (no one’s land), but such claims mattered little on the ground where the Indians controlled the balance of power.” Not for long, however. The Europeans held the advantage of ‘modernity’: not only weapons technology but the centralized organization of the modern state. Machiavelli’s lo stato had already overwhelmed the feudal structures of medieval Europe, and they would do the same to the tribal regimes of North America. Those “fringe outposts were pockets of dense military-technological power that could shape developments far beyond their borders,” especially with contagious diseases serving as their advance corps. Trading posts in Indian territories “made empires,” and although the Indians found this “laughable,” interpreting the existence of the posts as indicators of their own power and prestige, the reality turned out to be quite the opposite, in the fairly near term. 

For their part, the Lakotas, the westernmost Sioux, prospered amongst the bison of the Great Plains, warring against the Indians already living on those lands. As early as the 1680s, war had broken out between the Lakotas and the Arikaras on the Missouri River. The Lakotas “were in the West, but the West was not theirs.” “Each spring they returned east to the precious prairie-forest ecotone where they could enjoy one of the best diets on the continent” while trading with the other Council Fires. They tempered their enjoyment with the knowledge “that this new world”—new not only to the Europeans but to themselves—was “an unforgiving place where people often were expiring if they were not expanding.” They determined to expand, still westward. 

It was not entirely a matter of their own choice. The introduction of horses to the Great Plains proved indispensable to this movement. The Spanish had brought horses to the New World, thousands of years after they had perished here, along with the many other extinctions that occurred during the Pleistocene era. After the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest temporarily eradicated Spanish settlers in the 1680s, the horses came into the hands of several nomadic tribes, including the Comanche. The horse enabled “a new kind of nomadism, one that transcended human and canine power to carry things and did not require giving up all but the bare minimum of possessions,” “at once a hunting tool and a weapon, allowing its owner to both chase game and kill enemies more efficiently.” As horses moved northward, even as guns moved westward, converging on the Great Plains in a timely boon to Sioux ambitions. Having been excluded from a 1701 peace conference in Montreal, whereby the Iroquois and some three dozen other Amerindian nations settled their differences with the French, the Sioux felt betrayed by their erstwhile allies. For their part, the English, alarmed at the prospect of increased French control of North America and with their own intra-European disputes with their main rival, entered into a war with the French on both continents. “The West, including the Sioux country, became a sideshow.” The Sioux were forced out of their territory; what had been a policy of seasonal forays into the west became a permanent shift—or could so become, if the Lakota, the westernmost Council Fire, could manage their relations with the Omahas, Otoes, and other nations already settled on the Plains. 

Having little to offer in trade, Lakotas resorted to warfare, centering on the river valleys of this arid region. “For Lakotas, river valleys were both havens and obstacles,” needed for survival but occupied by others. “This was the paradox of the grasslands: they were an immense reservoir of space and wealth that pinned people down” to “small ribbons of water and fertile earth.” “For the next half a century, well into the mid-eighteenth century, war would drive Lakota policy in the West,” as “Lakotas set out to conquer” the peoples that stood in their way in a “pitiless and protracted” struggle. Although their increased isolation from the other Council Fires interfered with coordinated foreign policy, each foothold in a river valley concentrated the Lakotas, enabling them to centralize politically and militarily; they did not have a modern state, but geography forced them to do by accident something of what statists in Europe had done as a matter of policy. Gradually, the fought and defeated not only the Otoes and the Omahas but the Poncas, Iowas, Suones, and Minneonjous. Refugees gathered in the Missouri River valley, perhaps as many as 50,000. In their newfound territories, the Lakotas “were feverishly trying to turn themselves into a true horse and gun powder” society, “but until they did, they would be dangerously exposed,” if their now-concentrated enemies allied against them. 

To the east, the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 reconfigured the geopolitics of the Great Lakes. The British obtained recognized rights to rule the area around Hudson Bay and to rule the Iroquois. The lower Great Lakes and the Ohio valley became a free trade zone where Indians could trade with either empire. Alliances with Indians in other areas remained a matter for competition. France was especially concerned about the lower Great Lakes, which linked the core of their New World holdings with the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers. “Not only was Louisiana being severed from New France, but a door was opening for the Spaniards to ascend the Missouri and look for the Northwest Passage.” The Mesquakies, allies of the Sioux, occupied the area near Detroit; the French offered iron, guns, and military alliance to the Sioux, who abandoned their erstwhile friends, most of whom were then killed. The alliance did not lead to political integration, however, as the Sioux refused to conform to the way of life of the French and their Jesuit missionaries, insisting on the contrary that French settlers in Sioux territories “behave like, essentially to be, Sioux.”

The French had little choice but to comply, especially since they sought a bigger prize. The Peace of Utrecht had barred them and the British from the “Spanish Pacific,” setting off a quest for the imagined Northwest Passage to the ocean. “A continent-wide French belt could isolate the British in Hudson Bay, open access to Mexican silver, and force the Indians to privilege Frenc traders over all the others,” additionally “bring[ing] France closer to China and its riches,” turning “the comparatively modest colonies of New France and Louisiana into pivots of a globe-spanning French Empire.” In this, the Cree, one of the nations still unconquered by the Sioux in the West, would prove an obstacle—unless the French could negotiate an agreement between the two nations. When the French couldn’t persuade the Cree to desist in raiding Sioux lands, they “directed them to attack the Lakotas” in the West, “apparently not realizing that this would draw the French into a conflict with the most numerous of the Sioux divisions.” Indian slave trading by the French meanwhile “alienat[ed] the very people they were trying to win over.” The struggle that ensued resulted in the Lakotas blocking further French advances in the West and in Sioux expansion into the Missouri River valley. The refugees there had another thing they wanted, in addition to land: horses, with which they could fight the remaining Plains Indians, the most powerful among them being the Crows. 

To the east, the Crows remained a formidable rival, one of their chiefs declaring that the Sioux “were only good to eat.” To prevent that eventuality, the Sioux held back from attacking the French, preferring to use them as a source of guns and iron. This was “an extraordinarily difficult thing for their chiefs to do,” given a regime whose way of life required “retaliation to restore spiritual and emotional balance” when families lost kin. But by 1742, the policy of restraint paid off; when the governor of New France called another conference in Montreal, he made sure to invite the Sioux, whose demands he met. “The momentum of historical change was now on the side of the Sioux.” When, two years later, the British blockaded the St. Lawrence River, injuring French trade with the Indians, the Sioux remained prudently quiet, and when the war ended in 1748 the French strengthened trade ties with them. The Sioux agreed to allow the French to build three fortified trading posts on their territory as a convenience to both partners. The principal French trading agent, Paul Marin, “became a passionate advocate of the Ochéti Šakówin’s territorial integrity,” inasmuch as any imperial land grab would interrupt trade and prevent exploration in search for the Northwest Passage. His colleagues in Paris agreed, since the British were making inroads in the Ohio Country, threatening to cut off the Canada-Mississippi corridor. “The Sioux alliance was essential for French efforts to reverse the momentum,” which soon led to the French and Indian War, spiraling into the Seven Years’ War in Europe. The war enabled the Sioux to strengthen their foothold in the Missouri River valley.

Hämäläinen pauses to admire Sioux powers of adaptation. Their “mythological hero,” Iktómi, is a shapeshifter. He wields the “rewarding and dangerous, unpredictable and uplifting” spiritual power to change course, including change political regimes, with changing circumstances. The Sioux conception of kinship as an ongoing regime change prevented them from thinking of families and clans as relatively fixed biologically-based entities; learn our language, accept our way of life, and you are one of us. “By the mid-eighteenth century the Sioux had shifted shape many times over.” They had forged an alliance with the radically alien French in the east while pushing into the Plains in the west. They now occupied nearly 100,000 acres of land, second only (among the North American Indians) to the territory controlled by the Comanche empire in the southern Plains. The Lakotas had shapeshifted more radically than any of the other Council Fires, becoming “the nomads and bison hunters of the prairie.” “Iktómi was guiding the Lakotas through a precarious metamorphosis, shifting shape with them in the vast new world in the West.” This, to the point of threatening their ties with the other Sioux: while the eastern Council Fires wanted peace with the Crees, the Lakotas attacked them as rival hunters. “Yet the Sioux endured as one people,” a “colossal force in the deep interior” of North America, precisely because they possessed their “startling malleability and ability to shift shape.” They ruled “a vast territory stretching from the upper Mississippi to the Missouri Valley” as “a central people who commanded attention and refused to be ignored.”

Disastrously for the Sioux, the French lost the war, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris ruined their empire in North America, dividing the continent into Spanish territories west of the Mississippi, British territories to the east—all ‘over the heads’ of the Indians. The Lakotas continued to push west, fighting Crows and Pawnees and discovering the valuable Black Hills in 1776. Now, it was the British who saw them as an ally “who could deliver interior Indians behind Britain,” even as the Sioux “saw in the British an ally who could deliver guns for a fight against common enemies.” American colonists’ successful revolt against the British Empire freed Lakotas from any status as British cat’s paws, and they continued to win victories in the West against the Mandans and Arikaras, forcing them to abandon ancestral homelands. They also added another trade system, the St. Louis-New Orleans corridor, to their existing ties with Hudson Bay and Montreal; in both areas, they dealt with foreign merchants backed by imperial powers, enhancing their status as “a major center of geopolitical power” on the continent. In this, Lakotas and Dakotas alike could pool their knowledge; “the seven fires accumulated an exceptionally broad understanding of North America’s imperial and Indigneous landscapes,” with a “360-degree panorama of the continent and its peoples.” 

But a new empire now loomed. The 1783 treaty ending America’s War of Independence had granted the United States rule over the Ohio Valley, confining the British to Canada. Americans now “claimed vast tracts of Indian lands, which settlers were filling with such fervor that [George] Washington believed nothing ‘short of a Chinese wall’ could restrain them.” It should be observed that the U.S. federal government enjoyed nothing like the power over mass immigration it would later acquire (even more than two centuries later, that power remains unsteady). What is more, for European powers and their former colonists to redraw lines on the map was one thing, actual control another. The Mississippi “was the master key to the continent, feeding everything—people, ambitions, commerce, violence, power—toward the center,” a “trunkline of an enormous system of naturally navigable tributaries” connecting “1.5 million miles of the interior to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic circuits,” but it was hardly a secure boundary, especially since Spain, on its side “was an absentee landlord at best.” Recognizing this, the Spanish encouraged American settlement and trade in Louisiana, including the crucial city of New Orleans, hoping that they could make the emigrants “into loyal subjects who would defend Spanish Louisiana against other Americans.” In retrospect, the policy seems laughable, but at the time the Appalachian mountain range stood as a barrier to travel, threatening to split West from East, even as the slavery controversy nearly split South from North in the next century. The Spanish were counting on the United States remaining a country tethered economically to the Atlantic coast, with American emigrants tethered to the Gulf of Mexico. 

As for the Lakotas, the Spanish considered them as the Americans of the north, potentially a buffer against encroachments on their territory from that direction. The Anglo-Spanish War of 1796 induced the British, in Canada, similarly to appeal to the Lakotas, hoping to send them down the Mississippi against the Spanish. The Spanish, controlling the Mississippi trade route, had the upper hand, however, and the Lakotas never invaded. “Lakotas needed the Spanish Empire to last.” Ally with the weakest; don’t ‘bandwagon’ with the strongest unless you have no realistic alternative: they understood this as well as any other people in the history of the world. “The late eighteenth-century Spanish Empire was weaker and more distracted than the French Empire had ever been, but if it survived, it could serve Lakotas well.”

But it couldn’t, and so it didn’t. France’s soon-to-be emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, retaliated against the rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain, solemnized in the 1793 Jay Treaty, by purchasing Louisiana from Spain. He hoped to retake the trans-Appalachian region, or at least turn those American states into French allies. This also gave him the chance to reestablish their rule in Saint Domingue, to which he sent an armada of 50,000 soldiers, “the largest naval invasion force ever to cross the Atlantic,” to overthrow the rebel government headed by the ex-slave, Toussaint Louverture, who had exterminated the French colony there. In exchange, the Spanish would have French troops and settlers as a buffer against American expansion. Although the Jefferson Administration detested the thought of French rule over Louisiana, it feared slave rebellion in its own southern states, and therefore supported the French assault in the Caribbean.

Foreshadowing the outcome of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions elsewhere, the ambitious plan collapsed in the face of yellow fever and Louverture’s army. Jefferson gave up on him, offered to take New Orleans off his hands (remarking to one correspondent that any foreign power controlling the port/chokepoint was ipso facto an enemy of the United States); knowing that the British still wanted to contain the United States to the eastern section of the continent, Bonaparte threw the rest of Louisiana into the bargain. “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it,” the French negotiator, wily Talleyrand, accurately observed. Häkäläinen remarks that the Indians of the Louisiana territory thought it all “ludicrous,” but they proved mistaken, as American settlers overwhelmed them in a generation. Events in the South foreshadowed events elsewhere.

For now, however, the Lakotas prospered. They “seemed to be everywhere in the upper Missouri country, trading, parleying, raiding, dancing,” “carrying countless men, women and children into captivity” as they sought to assimilate nearby nations. “Unable to contain Lakotas, smaller groups sought protection under their auspices.” The Lakotas had “shifted shape once again, now bending to the contours of the river that bestowed them with unprecedented power.” One important chief intoned, “We are seven bands and from now on we will scatter over the world, so we will appoint one chief for each band,” an ambition Häkäläinen is pleased to call “a distinctive intermesh of the sublime and the practical in the Lakota way of being.” A less charitable soul might call it a distinctive intermesh of the sublime and the ridiculous, but it would not have seemed so at the time, to the Lakotas and those they had conquered.

President Jefferson was not done with continental expansion, sending Mssrs. Lewis and Clark on their expedition into northwest in 1804. “They were to inspect the flora and fauna” (very much in line with Jefferson’s scientific interests), “pioneer an all-water passage to the Pacific” (the dream of the Northwest Passage died hard), “end British dominance of the inland trade” (Jefferson’s Democrats had come to dominate national politics partly on anti-British sentiment), “harness the Missouri for U.S. commerce” (as part of the Mississippi-centered riverine system he had just acquired), “and project U.S. sovereignty into the West” (lest the continent continue to be a cockpit of warring nations, as it had been for millennia and as Europe would continue to be). Jefferson wanted friendship with the Indians, but under American sovereignty; the struggle for regime change was on. 

More immediately, as he recognized, Lewis and Clark “must stand well” with the Sioux and the still-powerful Osages, “because in their quarter we are miserably weak”. But make no mistake, “Lewis and Clark were harbingers of empire”—specifically, what Jefferson called “the empire of liberty,” what Häkäläinen describes as “a new rational order [that] could be inscribed through a new science of remaking people and worlds”—James Madison’s “new science of politics” in tandem with the new, experimental science of Francis Bacon. “Jefferson, a republican purist who loathed the idea of a robust federal government, had launched a massive projection of state power into the North American West to mold its people into his model of an enlightened man—such was the hold of the Louisiana Territory on his imagination.” More precisely, such was the hold of the republican politics of the American branch of the Enlightenment on his mind. He was quite willing to see the future states of Louisiana and, by extension, the northwest territory, break off from the federal government, so long as they were organized as republican regimes that would maintain peace with the Mother Country.

“Without fully realizing it, Lewis and Clark had stepped into a dynamic Indigenous world where power rested on rivalry,” as indeed power so often does. Such rivalry persisted not only between Lakotas and the other nations but within the Lakota regime itself, as in “times of crisis the entire Lakota society could realign around new political coordinates.” The explorers recognized one tribal chief at the expense of another, inadvertently ruining prospects of trade with a tribe that already enjoyed a solid place in the St. Louis commercial system. They thus took the slighted tribe as a barrier to their expedition, and were saved only by the Arikara nation, which wanted to get out from under Lakota dominance. An Arikara chief made it clear that “if Americans wanted peace and trade to flourish along the Missouri, they would have to first contain the Lakotas.” For their part, the Lakotas saw that an alliance among the Americans, the Arikaras, and the neighboring Mandans and Hidatsas might indeed contain them, and they wanted none of that. By building Fort Mandan, Americans “won entry into the greatest trading citadel of the northern Great Plains.” “Lewis and Clark wanted the Mandan trade for the United States, and to have it they needed Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras to form an alliance—and denounce the Lakotas.” As the Lakotas responded by tightening their hold on the Missouri Valley, the two rival empires readied themselves for conflict. Lakotas “welcomed America’s merchandise but not its paternal embrace; they had accepted the Americans as traders and potential allies,” initially, “but not as their sovereigns.” Indeed, “no Indian nation had done more to undermine the Jeffersonian vision than Lakotas.” Lewis and Clark completed their expedition, having “learned much more about the flora and fauna” of the region “than about Lakotas who remained a specter-like menace to them,” misunderstanding their new rivals as “an organizationally shallow robber regime that preyed on weaker, less mobile, and less capacious people who lacked their propensity for swift violence.” They did in fact so prey, but organizationally shallow they were not. They were an empire, not an empire of liberty in the natural-rights sense but an empire securing independence from other empires and of rule over the small. “Lakotas had transformed the Missouri’s longitudinal section into an imperial valley through diplomacy, persuasion, and raw military force. Almost all the people Lewis and Clark tried to win over were already in Lakota orbit as allies or dependents. Instead of delivering Native peoples into the U.S. fold, Lewis and Clark muddled through the Lakota Meridian as also-rans.” After they departed, the Lakotas treated with the Blackfoot Confederacy on their ever-flexible western boundary, beginning a shift towards “the vast animal-rich plains around them,” far beyond their imperial core.

They also made overtures to the British in Canada, offering an alliance to “confront the new white nation now encroaching on Our Lands,” as one chief put it. Americans countered with the Zebulon Pike expedition, which went up the Mississippi River in order to find its source, to “clear British traders from the area, and negotiate land sales with Indians.” Pike didn’t find the source of the Mississippi, but he did find the other main Sioux Council Fire, the Dakotas, who hunted for British markets and fought with the Chippewas over beaver trapping stakes. Dividing in order someday to rule, Pike allied with the Mdewakantons, a subset of the Dakotas, built a fort, promising a trading post nearby, and established U.S. sovereignty to his satisfaction. Americans would soon find that fur traders were welcome, U.S. government forces not so much. The Lakotas continued to consolidate and extend their own empire, under their own regime.

In the War of 1812, the Dakotas allied with the British, their trading partners, while the Lakotas remained neutral, taking care not to ride the wrong horse. As it happened, “Britain would never again seriously interfere with American ambitions of continental expansion.” Lakota prudence enabled them to resume their empire-building as soon as the war was over, fighting the Crows in the west, negotiating with Pawnees and Kiowas in the south, and keeping watch on the formidable Comanches, horse-warriors whose nomad-imperialism resembled their own. The Lakotas still “did not feel safe out in the open,” but they continued to foster their horse herds while envying the Crows and Cheyennes, who used the Black Hills in the same way the Lakotas used the Missouri Valley, as a safe hub for expansion into the plains. 

Not to be outdone on the diplomatic front, Americans invited the western Indians to a parley at a site just north of St. Louis in the summer of 1815. There, they made treaties with six nations, including the Lakotas, making them all American protectorates. Or so the Americans supposed. The Sioux delegates “probably” understood the treaty “as a confirmation of the prewar status quo whereby Americans traded with them without dictating to them.” The United States established Pike-founded Fort Snelling along what is now the Minnesota River as their military and economic hub. This redounded to the economic benefit of the Lakotas, as settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee came into the lower Missouri Valley, displacing the Osage traders there and inadvertently pushing Amerindian commerce upriver, “delivering a bonanza for Lakotas,” as American fur companies competed with each other for their trade. This enrichment better armed them to fight Crows and Hidatsas, and by 1832 the Lakotas had eliminated the Arikaras from the upper Missouri. A further boon from the Americans came that year, the smallpox vaccine, which Congress had ordered to be distributed among the Indians to save them (in the words of the legislation) from “the destructive ravages of that disease.” This further detached the Sioux from British traders and agents, and it enabled them to maintain their population at approximately 20,000, while more westerly tribes declined in the wake of the epidemic. 

More ominously from the Lakota perspective, Americans also built Fort Pierre in 1831, after a flood had shifted the channel of the Missouri River. It would later become the capital of the state of South Dakota.