Lakota America : a new history of indigenous power

Book

Lakota America : a new history of indigenous power / Pekka Hämäläinen.

Hämäläinen, Pekka, 1967- (author.).

Summary:

This account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hamalainen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then -- in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion -- as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations.

Record details

ISBN: 9780300215953
ISBN: 0300215959
Physical Description: ix, 530 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, [2019]
Copyright: ©2019

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Contains bibliographical references (pages 399-505) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Introduction: Dark matter of history -- A place in the world -- Facing west -- The imperial cauldron -- The Lakota meridian -- The call of the White Buffalo Calf Woman -- Empires -- War -- Shapeshifters -- Upside-down soldiers -- Epilogue: The Lakota struggle for indigenous sovereignty.