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This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen 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.
The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking 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. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 22, 2019 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781977357533
- File size: 506416 KB
- Duration: 17:35:01
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Joe Barrett's narration of this Lakota history is more measured than engaging. However, the larger issue with the audiobook is how white it is. The author is a white Finnish professor; the narrator, a white man who some would argue should not be trying to pronounce words in Indigenous languages. Furthermore, the audiobook imposes a dry, academic approach upon a people for whom that framework does not apply. The author does portray the Lakota people as complex, powerful, and adaptable in the face of colonialism and genocide. But the cold distance with which white historians often talk about war, conquest, and power is very much present here, both in the content and the narration. Neither voice nor material seems appropriate for the broader narrative. S.N. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
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