Response to
In the latest issue of the London Review of Books under the title of 鈥淩ed Power: Indigenous Political Strategies,鈥� Thomas Meaney has written a review of three recent award-winning books by historians of Native North America: Pekka H盲m盲l盲inen鈥檚 Indigenous Continent; Ned Blackhawk鈥檚 The Rediscovery of America; and Nick Estes Our History is the Future. In some ways, the review is impressively learned. Meaney uses the occasion to canvass a generations-spanning array of scholarship on the history of Native North America and engages figures, events, and historiographic questions of which only a very small body of Native and non-native scholars on these topics are even aware.
Marks of erudition aside, Meaney is out to weave together a broader narrative that extends beyond the historical bona fides of these books. The key moment in setting up this narrative comes after Meaney has raised his readers鈥� hopes by opening with a quite historically literate summary of European settler expansionism and Indigenous peoples鈥� responses to it. In the paragraph that then really begins the substance of his review, Meaney pivots: 鈥渂ut recent roadmaps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonized mindset for progressivist one.鈥� This is where Meaney divides the three books under review into three categories of political and historical errors: H盲m盲l盲inen鈥檚 revisionist history overstretches the notion of 鈥渆mpire鈥� in his account of 鈥淚ndigenous power鈥� by labeling the Lakota (and in earlier work, the Comanche) as such. (I agree with this critique, so I leave it aside in this review). Blackhawk represents a trend of scholars of Native history and federal Indian law who 鈥渉ave so thoroughly internalized constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalized by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society.鈥� And finally, 鈥渁 nominally [!] left-wing Native scholarship鈥� that romanticizes Indigenous experiences, engaging in a politics of authenticity. The latter is how Meaney represents the work of Lakota scholar Nick Estes.
After establishing these categories, Meaney argues that these various limitations are 鈥渁ll the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.鈥� This is a strange thing to assert at the outset, given that there was no recognizable anticolonial 鈥渓eft鈥� in the US settler colony that Native nations could possibly have 鈥渃ooperated鈥� with in the 19th century. The consensus on the necessity and inevitability of land dispossession and structural predation cut across almost all categories of white society, including almost all of those on the far left of the political spectrum. Moreover, this included, as many others have noted, some key figures in the history of African-American political thought such as Douglas and Du Bois. What these historians鈥攑articularly Blackhawk and Estes鈥攁sk us to do is to suspend some assumptions about what constitutes the commitments of 鈥渢he left鈥� at all, given the deep investments of American republicanism and many later iterations of US leftism (let alone the liberalism of the Democratic Party) in colonial dispossession or just racialized indifference.
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