Indigenous resistance: They saw early on what was coming

With this book, as a member of humanity socialized in the GDR, I feel a bit like I did with Reemtsma’s Wehrmacht exhibition from 1995. Like most of my comrades from my origins, I didn’t need to make an effort to clear up the “legend of the clean Wehrmacht” in my head it was named as a quasi-pedagogical goal in the exhibition catalogue. We didn’t have this picture. We had read Dieter Noll’s “The Adventures of Werner Holt” (at least the first volume) or Hermann Kant’s “The Stay” and, for example, had grown up with Polish television series such as “Four Tank Soldiers and a Dog” or “Seconds Decide” in which The Wehrmacht didn’t fare well at all – but not with bestsellers like »Operation Barbarossa. The March to Russia,” as Paul K. Schmidt, first press chief of Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, then head of security at Axel Caesar Springer, brought it to the German people in the West under the pseudonym Paul Carell. In conversations with my father, I learned how much the experience of the war of annihilation against the peoples of the Soviet Union weighed on our souls. He was a 19-year-old soldier who had to go to Soviet Ukraine in 1944 and returned with a crippled right arm.

A privilege of advantage in political-cultural education and understanding of history also existed when it came to the indigenous peoples of North America, most of whose members and organizations still call themselves “Indian” to this day. Karl May’s hams with their noble savages à la Winnetou, which the SED Politburo decided to print in 1981, remained a minor matter and were consumed purely as entertainment goods. As Hermann Kant had already written in his century-old novel “The Aula” in 1965: “O glorious Saxon liar, praised be your much-reviled name! Thank you, you brilliant weirdo from Hohenstein-Ernstthal, thank you for a thousand and one nights full of gun smoke and the thunder of hooves.

Westerns that portrayed Indians as bloodthirsty barbarians had no chance at all. Rather, their image was shaped, and has been since 1951, by the realistic and entertaining books of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, who, as a historian and author, was as knowledgeable about classical Greece as she was about the culture of the Indians in North America. Defa used her novel “The Sons of the Great Bear” as the start of its successful series of Indian films with Gojko Mitić. These strips found their material predominantly in events of indigenous resistance against the genocidal activities that underlie the constitution of the United States of America. This is how great Indian politicians and military leaders like the Shawnee Tecumseh (1768-1813) made it onto the film screen for the first time or the Seminole Osceola (1804-1838) (there had been the western “Seminole” with Anthony Quinn as Osceola since 1953).

It is therefore without surprise that we encounter Pekka Hämäläinen’s voluminous history of the indigenous peoples of North America. But what does native mean? Let’s call them first settlers. The ancestors of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, etc., like their later white enemies, came from the Eurasian land plate. Except that they came from the west, or more precisely: from where the east ends according to the current agreement on the globe. Their immigration via the Bering Strait, later named after a Dane, became possible as a result of climate change that we call the Ice Age. The last major event of this kind, 2.5 million years ago, deprived the Bering Strait of water and the first migrants made their way to America on dry ground. Others sailed down the Pacific coast and also settled the southern half-continent down to Tierra del Fuego. Hämäläinen describes their circumstances to us and repeatedly mentions how climatic changes influenced the way of life – for example with the “Little Ice Age” around 1130 AD, which brought the first communities of Indian farmers to their knees.

But that’s just the 70,000-year prelude to the real action, the forced interaction of the Indians with the white invaders. Ignoring the Viking excursions across the Atlantic a good 1000 years ago, Hämäläinen begins with the mistaken appearance of Mr. Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Italian is followed in particular by the Spaniards, the British, the Dutch, the French and finally those foreigners who presumptuously call themselves “Americans”. The Indian tribes saw early on what was coming and recognized the “genocidal tendency” (Hämäläinen) of the white land grab. They countered this with a diverse range of instruments of their own intervention: clever diplomacy, in which women often played a prominent role, attempts at peaceful coexistence with change and trade, in which they usually exchanged beaver pelts for firearms and hardware, with alliances in which Indians were involved in the Seven Years’ War Tribes fought together with French colonial troops against their British enemies, while Indians of other origins went hunting for the French with the British.

For centuries, even after Columbus’ landing, the Indians dominated most of the land mass of the semicontinent and formed powerful alliances such as the Six Nations of the Iroquois, who ruled the roost in the Great Lakes area. They almost completely derailed the colonial aspirations of the British, Spanish and French. For a long time, the low mountain range of the Appalachians formed the western distribution limit of the whites.

The tide turned after 13 colonies on the Atlantic coast founded the United States in 1776. The militarily secured land seizure by European settlers assumed gigantic proportions. Violence, including in the form of horrific massacres, alcohol and especially epidemics, ended Indian dominance. The deportation of the individual tribes to “reservations” eventually even included the assimilated people such as the Chicksaw or the Cherokee in the south, who farmed and even owned slaves. By arguing that the Indians were not using the land appropriately, the whites made themselves feel good. The fact that Indians responded to the racism that saw them as lower-level human beings with anti-white racism should not surprise anyone and only shows how unsuitable general moral considerations are in this matter. Racial hatred, fresh on tap, to use a slightly modified phrase from Wiglaf Droste, also served as the ideological glue of indigenous resistance.

If Hämäläinen doesn’t offer everyone a new perspective, as the blurb promises, it does provide everyone with a compendial overview. I think his theoretical framework is shaky. The author does not speak of tribes, but of nations, as the Indians themselves do. This is misleading. The Finnish Oxford professor describes the Comanche empire in the southern United States in the 1840s as the “peak of indigenous power.” But we’re talking about 40,000 people here. According to Hämäläinen, there were no more. A nation that only has half as many people as Zwickau has today?

Thinking about formation history à la Marx is not fashionable, but it could help. In particular, it states: On the American continent, the Indian communities with a more primitive social level of development of the productive forces stood in the way of the dynamic spread of capitalist relations emanating from Europe with their unprecedented possibilities for producing goods. If they wanted to defend themselves against the invaders, they had to buy rifles from them. They couldn’t produce them themselves, including artillery, railways, and telegraphs. According to Hämäläinen, their resistance over the centuries has ensured the survival of the North American Indians. But for the USA (and not to forget Canada) to assume that the “indigenous continent” continues to this day sounds like wishful thinking. It wasn’t the Indians who wanted to bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age. They wouldn’t have been able to do it at all.

Pekka Hämäläinen: The indigenous continent. Another History of America. Ad American. English v. Helmut Dierlamm and Werner Roller. Verlag Antje Kunstmann, 651 pages, hardcover, €48.

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