Polypotamia and the Ochethi Sakowin

 

Fleeing the Axe of Progress.

Your humble narrator began last fall a new job as editor of the Indiana Magazine of History. My statement of editorial and historical philosophy appeared in the March 2021 issue, free of paywall. The essay's title, "The View from Polypotamia," evokes an uncomfortable truth about the Hoosier state and the Midwest generally: white policy makers viewed Indiana as tabula rasa, as a featureless "flyover country," long before it became a place most Americans flew over or drove through. Officials imposed new names on the landscape and divided up the land and resources as they pleased, in pursuit of their own vision of socioeconomic development, and woe betide anyone they considered incompatible with that vision, like Native Americans or white subsistence farmers. To replace this blank-slate assumption with a view of the state as a mosaic of stories, what Lakota activist Mary Crow Dog would call "one vast winter count," is to pursue a more human course of scholarly inquiry and social development.

 

Apropos of Lakotas, my review of Pekka Hamalainen’s Lakota America (2019) appeared in the online journal Reviews in History at the end of April. Modern Lakota writers and NAIS scholars aren’t terribly happy with Professor Hamalainen’s book, and there’s much in it to make one unhappy. The book valorizes an expansionist, high-consumption warrior elite without fully accounting for the ecological and social damage they wrought, both within and outside the Lakota homeland. Nor does it consider the alternative paths of survival and survivance that Lakotas and their neighbors created in the twentieth century. Conceptually, it is also a somewhat lazy book. The author is a gifted researcher and writer, but at bottom his thesis is “Remember what I wrote about the Comanches in Comanche Empire (2008)? Well, the Lakotas were just like that.” I guess there’s a market for familiar stories.