![]() I wondered if this was an entirely fair picture: surely the Comanche were not just real-life orcs? While Gwynne certainly wasn't trying to demonize the Comanche, he did paint a picture of a people who were essentially violent plains marauders who lived for war and conquest, and had very little in the way of art or culture, or anything enduring once they were finally crushed by the U.S. Gwynne's book, which almost won a Pulitzer, focuses mostly on the late Comanche period, when they were known to Americans only as bloodthirsty savages. The Comanche Empire is the second book about the Comanche I have read, the first being S.C. This both whitewashes and does a disservice to the tribes who in many cases were not powerless, not hapless, and whose crushing defeat and eventual confinement to reservation life and poverty was perhaps not inevitable. Modern histories are a little more nuanced (usually), but there is still a tendency to portray Native Americans as universally victims of colonialism, doomed peoples who were just minding their own business on their own land until the European powers showed up. Then Europeans showed up and rolled across their lands, stomping everyone in their path and converting and genociding and shit, as wypipo do. There used to be a certain idealistic narrative popular in histories of Native Americans, which went something like this: once upon a time, indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature, stewards of the Earth, in mostly peaceful kinship groups that maybe every once in a while had a wee bit of a territorial dispute. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches' remarkable impact on the trajectory of history. ![]() Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico.
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