INDIGENOUS CONTINENT: The Epic Contest for North America (Liveright, 592 pp., $40),

 Book review! I want to read this.

In INDIGENOUS CONTINENT: The Epic Contest for North America (Liveright, 592 pp., $40), Pekka Hämäläinen asserts that the war for control of the continent was “one of the longest conflicts in history,” lasting some four centuries. Hämäläinen, a prizewinning historian at Oxford University, recasts the history of North America from a Native American, or Indian, perspective. (He uses those two terms interchangeably.) In the process, he has produced the single best book I have ever read on Native American history, as well as one of the most innovative narratives about the continent.

One of his running themes is how limited the Europeans were in their range of action. Essentially, for most of the time, the English, French and Spanish did nothing without approval from one or another Native American tribe or confederation. The Iroquois, who were the dominant economic, military and diplomatic power in the Northeast in the late 17th century, once had a tribal representative respond to a French official’s threat of war with the dismissive comment, “Let us see whether his arms be long enough to remove the scalps from our heads.”

Westward expansion, the author says, was led not by European colonists but by the Sioux, who perceived the huge advantage in migrating with the horse, an animal new to the Western Hemisphere, into the grasslands of the Great Plains. There, armed with muskets and gunpowder given to them by the French as tribute, they became the second Native American superpower, dominating the Upper Mississippi Valley.

In the Southwest, the Comanches used the same combination of the gun and the horse to rise to a dominant regional position. Soon all of their buffalo hunters were mounted, enabling them to reap a bonanza of protein that fueled the rapid expansion of the tribe. By the 1840s, Hämäläinen notes, Comanches may have grown to become 10 percent of the total Native American population on the continent.They found the Spanish useful and made them their “junior allies,” he writes.

While the Indians succeeded for centuries in maintaining control of the continent, Hämäläinen writes, they began to lose conclusively in the mid-19th century, when the United States turned to “a genocidal regime” to deal with them. California was founded, he adds, on “murderous American aggression.” When the Gold Rush began in 1848, there were about 150,000 California Indians. By 1860, there were just 35,000 remaining. Meanwhile, on the Great Plains, the railroad and the rifle enabled white Americans to wipe out the buffalo herds that had sustained the big tribes there.

In the great sweep of history, he concludes, the Native tribes controlled the continent for millenniums. By contrast, “it was only 130 years ago, a brief span when compared to the long precontact history of Indigenous America, that the United States could claim to have subjugated a critical mass of Native Americans,” he writes. “On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck.”