Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America
Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota AmericaLakotas had stopped a large railroad survey expedition on the Yellowstone, visited Washington, D.C., and negotiated hard with the U.S. president and his cabinet. They had stared down local government agents across their domain, making certain that they knew their role, which was to ensure that the United States honored its promises to the Lakotas. In the spirit of the distinctly modern iwáštegla policy, Lakotas were gradually adjusting to a reality where coexistence with the wašíčus was a fact of life. And yet their most pressing concerns centered on issues that were fundamentally Indigenous: securing access to bison, protecting vital riverine habitats, and preserving a technological edge over rivals through trade. Lakotas had grown to depend on American support—goods, guns, political backing—in their struggles with Native rivals, but that did not make the Americans essential: Americans were to them as much a solution as they were a problem. Americans would abandon the Lakotas only gradually, one betrayal at a time, but when they finally did, the shock of it was all the more terrible [...] The federal government had abandoned its obligation to protect Indigenous
property for a distinctively colonial land policy. This was the dark side of the post–Civil War liberal order: the anxious, relentless impulse to absorb nonwhite people—blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians—into the nation’s racial fabric as individuals detached from their native cultures, while silencing the dispossessed in the name of progress. Lakotas had become captive people, divided, weakened,
and confined to reservations that often seemed less homelands than prisons. In the long aftermath of Wounded Knee, the federal government no longer considered the Lakotas a military threat, and the Indian Office received a broad mandate to manage them as wards.