"When [John] Donne exclaimed ‘O my America! My new-found-land’ to his latest girlfriend, he was oblivious to the long history of that territory so painstakingly mapped by Pekka Hämäläinen in Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America."
- Paul Muldoon - The Times Literary Supplement,
"[M]agisterial . . . the pace and the scope of the book have a force of their own: Hämäläinen makes it clear that America’s past is crazily, energetically, tumultuously crowded with incident; that Indigenous power has affected everything about America . . . I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand. It would have helped me see that there was indeed a larger story: that my civilization hadn’t been destroyed; that my tribe’s contribution to the past wasn’t merely to fade away in the face of history; that Native peoples—for better or for worse—made this country what it was, and have a role to play in what it now struggles to be."
- David Treuer - The New Yorker,
"T]he single best book I have ever read on Native American history, as well as one of the most innovative narratives about the continent."
- Thomas E. Ricks - The New York Times Book Review,
"[A] towering achievement. By gathering the experiences of multiple Native peoples—across an astounding expanse of time and space—Indigenous Continent explodes the view that American history unfolded inexorably according to European and American des"
- Andrew Graybill - The American Scholar,
"The author, an Oxford historian, recasts the history of North America from a Native American perspective, making clear that Native tribes controlled the continent for millenniums (‘On an Indigenous time scale, the United States is a mere speck’). One of t"
- The New York Times Book Review,
One of The New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2022
Best Books of 2022—The New Yorker
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
A prize-winning scholar rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States