I really liked Pekka Hämäläinen's Indigenous Continent. It's North American history but centering the indigenous people and their societies.
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in reply to @renkotsuban's post:
recommendation for Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. A well researched book documenting early Aboriginal Australians and dispelling a lot of myths about the supposed technological inabilities that were used to justify Terra Nullius, the legal doctrine that declared Australia functionally uninhabited so the British dispensed with even the pretense of treaty and land rights.
You are welcome! Some of these are quite expensive now so please check your library to see if they have them!
in reply to @lunarfox22's post:
I'd recommend Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America as well for a more nuanced (and Native-written) perspective! (Hämäläinen is Finnish and his work is…controversial among Indigenous American scholars)
here's a review by Ned Blackhawk on the book! https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen-review/
That's a good one! David Treuer also has one that basically says this isn't necessarily a bad place to start, but that a lot of what he does is seen from a more settler-focused lens: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/14/do-we-have-the-history-of-native-americans-backward-indigenous-continent
"The great value of Hämäläinen’s work is as a corrective polemic. …And yet the limitations of Hämäläinen’s approach are striking, too. Despite his avowed aim to tell the story of North America from an Indigenous perspective, the main history he relates largely follows the white settlers in their movements. We get conflict zones in the Appalachians, south of the Great Lakes, in the Ohio River Valley, and, later, on the Great Plains, but in each instance Hämäläinen replicates the very thing he has said he was writing against: a fundamentally east-to-west story of European colonial expansion."
