Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. By 1776, various European colonial powers together claimed nearly all of the continent for themselves, but Indigenous peoples and powers controlled it. The maps in modern textbooks that paint much of early North America with neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial claims for actual holdings.
From the beginning of colonialism in North America to the Lakotas’ final military triumphs, a multitude of Native nations fought fiercely to keep their territories intact and their cultures untainted, frustrating the imperial pretensions of France, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, and eventually the United States. When American history is detached from mainstream historical narratives that privilege European ambitions for power, European perspectives, and European sources, the record shows instead—time and time again, and across centuries—that Indians blocked and demolished colonial projects, relying on sophisticated political systems of kinship that allowed for flexible diplomacy and war-making, continuously reshaping borders on the continent and thwarting colonial ambitions.
Both Red Cloud’s War and the Battle of Little Bighorn—in which the Lakota Indians and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies defeated the U.S.—have entered the history books as flukes, blamed on poor leadership and on a canny enemy familiar with the terrain. Seen from the Native American perspective, however, Red Cloud’s War and Custer’s Last Stand appear not as historical anomalies, but as the logical culmination of a long history of Indigenous power in North America. They were more expected than extraordinary.
There are many examples of similar inversions that occurred with other notable battles: the Pequot and Raritan massacres of 1637 and 1644, respectively, seemed to mark the sweeping collapse of Indigenous power in the Northeast. In truth, the massacres exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule. The wars with the far more numerous and larger Native nations stretched the colonists near their breaking point. At midcentury, colonial settlements in North America consisted of some two dozen seaside towns and a handful of forts of little consequence on the coastal plains; curbed by Indigenous power, the English colonists had spread up and down along the Atlantic coast, latching onto its sheltering estuaries and managing only fleeting inroads into the continent’s interior. The Appalachians and the lands west of them remained largely unknown to white people.