Native American History, or the End of Anthropology? (Review Article)

Focusing on two books that seek to renew the study of Native North American history, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen (2022), and The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (2023), this review article offers an opportunity to survey the current state of the field. Both authors raise two of the major questions that animate the scholarship: that of Native Americans’ agency, widely acknowledged and accepted by the historical community, and that of their rationale for action, for which contrasting visions divide historians. Here, I consider the extent to which Blackhawk’s and Hämäläinen’s emphasis on Native agency may in fact have the effect of obscuring reflection on those logics. Although Hämäläinen, unlike Blackhawk, insists on the risks of teleology and strives to highlight the variety of modes of colonial intrusion, the two historians are united in their renouncement of a form of anthropology that once sought to render the cultural integrity of Native Americans. The analytical lexicon they propose (for example, the term “empire”) sometimes leads to an erasure of cultural difference and a distortion of history. This article therefore argues for a renewed complementarity between history and anthropology.