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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2026

Gilles Havard
Translated by
Geoffrey Kimball  and
Chloe Morgan
Gilles Havard*
Affiliation:
CNRS gilles.havard@ehess.fr
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Abstract

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.

L’évaluation de deux ouvrages récents sur l’histoire des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America de Pekka Hämäläinen (2022) et The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History de Ned Blackhawk (2023), qui se veulent rénovateurs, offre l’occasion d’un état des lieux. Les deux auteurs soulèvent deux des grandes questions qui animent le champ, celle de la capacité d’agir des Amérindiens, reconnue et acceptée de façon consensuelle par les historiens, et celle de leur raison d’agir, pour laquelle des visions contrastées se font jour. Dans cette note critique, nous nous demandons dans quelle mesure l’importance accordée par N. Blackhawk et P. Hämäläinen à la capacité d’agir des Autochtones n’a pas précisément pour effet d’enfouir la réflexion sur leur raison d’agir. Si P. Hämäläinen, à la différence de N. Blackhawk, insiste sur l’écueil de la téléologie et s’efforce de valoriser la variété des modes d’intrusion coloniale, les deux historiens se retrouvent dans leur renoncement à une forme d’anthropologie qui, par le passé, a été soucieuse de restituer l’intégrité culturelle des Autochtones. Le lexique analytique choisi, à l’exemple du terme « empire », conduit parfois à un effacement de la différence culturelle et à une torsion de l’histoire. Cette note plaide ainsi pour une complémentarité retrouvée entre histoire et anthropologie.

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Type
The End of Anthropology?
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 2026 , pp. e1 - e19
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Les Éditions de l’EHESS

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Footnotes

This article was first published in French as “L’histoire amérindienne, ou la fin de l’anthropologie ? (note critique,” Annales HSS 79, no. 3 (2024): 393–411, doi 10.1017/ahss.2024.61. It was translated by Geoffrey Kimball and edited by Chloe Morgan.

*

On Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (New York: Liveright, 2022), and Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

References

1. Both Hämäläinen and Blackhawk use the term “Indian,” as well as “Native,” “Native American,” and “Indigenous.”

2. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); translated into French as L’Empire comanche, trans. Frédéric Cotton (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2012).

3. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

4. Ned Blackhawk, “A New History of Indigenous America that Replicates Old Myths,” The Washington Post, October 4, 2022.

5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, review of William Cowan, ed., Papers of the Fifteenth Algonquian Conference (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1984), L’Homme 26, no. 99 (1986): 143–44, here p. 144.

6. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, ix.

7. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 3.

8. Ibid., 2.

9. Ibid., 3.

10. Lévi-Strauss, The View From Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

11. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 6.

12. Ibid., 3.

13. Ibid., 1.

14. Ibid., 52.

15. Ibid., 152.

16. Ibid., 276.

17. Let us simply cite, from a vast bibliography: Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976); Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983); Gregory E. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

18. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).

19. Vine Deloria Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 39.

20. James Axtell, “Colonial America Without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” Journal of American History 73, no. 4 (1987): 981–96.

21. Denys Delâge, “L’histoire des autochtones d’Amérique du Nord : acquis et tendances,” Annales HSS 57, no. 5 (2002): 1337–55, here p. 1340.

22. Ned Blackhawk, “Look How Far We’ve Come: How American Indian History Changed the Study of American History in the 1990s,” OAH Magazine of History 19, no. 6 (2005): 13–17.

23. See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

24. See Daniel K. Richter, “His Own, Their Own: Settler Colonialism, Native Peoples, and Imperial Balances of Power in Eastern North America, 1660–1715,” in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-Diaz (New York: Routledge, 2017), 209–33; Allan Greer, “Settler Colonialism and Empire in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2019): 383–90.

25. The (false) prophecy that Native Americans were doomed to imminent extinction—sometimes tinged with nostalgia, as evidenced by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826)—developed in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. See Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

26. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 5.

27. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

28. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 80.

29. Ibid., 80–81.

30. Cornelius J. Jaenen, Les relations franco-amérindiennes en Nouvelle-France et en Acadie (Ottawa: Direction générale de la recherche, Affaires indiennes et du Nord Canada, 1985).

31. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 52.

32. A number of inaccuracies regarding the history of New France can be noted in The Rediscovery of America: Champlain supposedly spent “a decade circumnavigating the Great Lakes” (p. 77), whereas he only visited the Pays d’en Haut once, in 1615; the Dakota and Lakota are said to have participated in the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701 (p. 103), which is incorrect; the town of Saint Louis is said to have been founded under and named after Louis XIV (p. 104), whereas the town was not established until 1764 and the toponym was given in honor of the saint of the same name; the Natchez are said to have destroyed a French colony in 1731 (p. 115), whereas this famous attack, the beginning of this people’s misfortunes, actually took place in 1729.

33. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 85.

34. See in particular chapters 8 to 10.

35. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 118.

36. Concerning the concrete effects of colonialism, in various American contexts, see Guillaume Boccara, “El poder creador: tipos de poder y estrategias de sujeción en lafrontera sur de Chile en la época colonial,” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos (2005): https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.597; Denys Delâge, “Les principaux paradigmes de l’histoire amérindienne et l’étude de l’alliance franco-amérindienne aux xviie et xviiie siècles,” Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 12 (1995): 51–68; Gilles Havard, Empire et métissages. Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715 (2003; Quebec/Paris: Septentrion/Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2017); Claudio Saunt, “‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 61–76.

37. This probably explains some factual errors. For example, in relation to the 1660s, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is presented as an “Englishman” (p. 116), whereas the French explorer was only naturalized as English in 1687. Governor Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre is described negotiating with the Iroquois in Montreal in 1674 (p. 123), although he did not travel to Canada until 1682.

38. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 13.

39. Ibid., 104.

40. Ibid., 230.

41. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 32 and 90.

42. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 190 and 201.

43. Ibid., 408.

44. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 414.

45. This did not prevent the führer from simultaneously admiring the Native Americans in Karl May’s novels, whom he fantastically associated with the ancient Germanic peoples. See Frank Usbeck, “Representing the Indian, Imagining the Volksgemeinschaft: Indianthusiasm and Nazi Propaganda in German Print Media,” Ethnoscripts 15, no. 1 (2013): 46–61, as well as the following reviews of James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017): Jean-Frédéric Schaub, “Racines américaines du droit nazi,” and Rainer Maria Kiesow, “Le spectre de la comparaison,” both in Grief 7, no. 1 (2020), respectively pp. 99–106 and 107–16.

46. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 293–95.

47. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 461.

48. Ibid., 208.

49. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997); Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

50. See Élise Marienstras, “Guerres, massacres ou génocides ? Réflexions historiographiques sur la question du génocide des Amérindiens,” in Le Massacre, objet d’histoire, ed. David El Kenz (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 275–302; Gary Clayton Anderson, “The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2016): 407–34. Concerning California, see Emmanuel Désveaux, “Le génocide et l’amnésie ou les Indiens de Californie,” Ethnies 14 (1993): 107–16. For a rigorous analysis of the notion of genocide, see Jacques Sémelin, Purifier et détruire. Usages politiques des massacres et génocides (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2005).

51. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture [2005], trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 87; Emmanuel Désveaux, review of Karl Jacoby, Des ombres à l’aube. Un massacre d’Apaches et la violence de l’histoire, trans. Frédéric Cotton (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2013), Annales HSS 71, no. 1 (2016): 247–49, here p. 249.

52. See Alexandre Surrallés, La raison lexicographique. Découverte des langues et origine de l’anthropologie (Paris: Fayard, 2023).

53. Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (1949; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021); Emmanuel Désveaux, Spectres de l’anthropologie. Suite nord-américaine (Paris: Aux lieux d’être, 2007), 83–103.

54. Note a brief mention of linguistic diversity in Hämäläinen (p. 8), and these passages in Blackhawk: “California was actually one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world” (p. 265); “Language loss, ongoing environmental destruction and the countless aftereffects of colonialism persist” (p. 445).

55. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 39.

56. Ibid., 257.

57. See Amelia Rector Bell, “Creek Ritual: The Path to Peace” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1984); Emmanuel Désveaux, Quadratura Americana. Essai d’anthropologie lévi-straussienne (Geneva: Georg, 2001); Raymond J. DeMallie, “Hommes-élans, femmes-cerfs : sexe et genre dans la culture lakota,” in Éros et tabou. Sexualité et genre chez les Amérindiens et les Inuit, ed. Gilles Havard and Frédéric Laugrand (Quebec: Septentrion, 2014), 97–153.

58. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 306.

59. See Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, “The Unsteady Comancheria: A Reexamination of Power in the Indigenous Borderlands of the Eighteenth-Century Greater Southwest,” William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2023): 251–86.

60. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 319.

61. Ibid., 18–19.

62. Ibid., 105.

63. Ibid., 48.

64. Nancy Shoemaker, “2019 Presidential Address: Sameness and Difference in Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 67, no. 4 (2020): 537–49, here p. 538. We can recall the title of one of the works of Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

65. Désveaux, Spectres de l’anthropologie, 31–81.

66. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology Volume 2 [1973], trans. Monique Layton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 51.

67. William N. Fenton, “Ethnohistory and Its Problems,” Ethnohistory 9, no. 1 (1962): 1–23; Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570 [1971], trans. Ben and Siân Reynolds (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977).

68. Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Emmanuel Désveaux and Gilles Havard, “Fourrure,” in Dictionnaire historique et critique des animaux, ed. Pierre Serna et al. (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2024), 295–99.

69. Raymond J. DeMallie, “‘These Have No Ears’: Narrative and the Ethnohistorical Method,” Ethnohistory 40, no. 4 (1993): 515–38; Toby Morantz, The White Man’s Gonna Getcha: The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec (Montreal: McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 2002).

70. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, California, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), was the first volume to be published. This project, headed by the anthropologist William C. Sturtevant, updated that of the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico published from 1907 onward under the direction of Frederick W. Hodge.

71. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

72. Richard White, “Using the Past: History and Native American Studies,” in Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects, ed. Russell Thornton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 217–43.

73. Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 9–14; White, The Middle Ground, xi–xiv.

74. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Sahlins, How “Natives” Think; Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

75. See Désveaux, Quadratura Americana, 195–96.

76. Raymond J. DeMallie, “Community in Native America: Continuity and Change Among the Sioux,” Journal de la Société des américanistes 95, no. 1 (2009): 185–205, here p. 200.

77. See, for example, Christine DeLucia, “The Vanishing Indians of ‘These Truths,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 10, 2019.

78. David J. Silverman, “Living with the Past: Thoughts on Community Collaboration and Difficult History in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020): 519–27, here p. 527. Already in 1998, White (“Using the Past,” 236) lucidly observed: “If historical knowledge is made simply tactical, then the past becomes valued only as a tool in present struggles.”

79. See, in this regard, the controversy that recently divided the American historical community following the reflections of Africanist and president of the American Historical Association James H. Sweet on the danger of “presentism”—and what is at stake for society—in the writing of history: “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present,” Historians.org, August 19, 2022, https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present-september-2022/. This controversy is set out in Richard Frum, “The New History Wars,” The Atlantic, October 30, 2022.

80. Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 374.

81. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent, 457.

82. Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78 (Washington, 1925).

83. See John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 337 (Washington, 1946). On the Creek, see also Benjamin Balloy, Les Indiens Creek au xviiie siècle. Mythologie, guerre, hiérarchie (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2023), which draws extensively on the work of Swanton.

84. Concerning Archie Sam, a traditionalist Natchez who sought to perpetuate the cultural heritage of his people, see Gilles Havard, Les Natchez. Une histoire coloniale de la violence (Paris: Tallandier, 2024), 366 and 381–82.

85. DeMallie, “‘These Have No Ears,’” 525.

86. Ibid., 534.

87. Rivaya-Martínez, “The Unsteady Comancheria”; Rivaya-Martínez, “Indigenous Borderlands: State of the Field and Prospects,” in Indigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, and Power in the Americas, ed. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023), 15–34.