north america

Power Politics on the Indigenous Continent

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment

Professor Pekka Hamalainen wrote the book I was going to write. The book I had started research on in 2019 and planned to write since 2015. However, taking on lots of research and writing projects outside of this field slowed my normal breakneck speed for such things to a crawl. With the release of Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, however, it looks like I lost the race. You might think I am going to whine about this, but I am not. Hamalainen is possibly my favorite currently active historian and I cannot think of a person I would have rather lost this race to. I constantly recommend his work to people, especially The Comanche Empire, which I still regard as his best book. Additionally, and this I realized the day after I learned this book was going to come out, having the general meta-historical narrative out there and completed actually frees me to focus in the future on the real core of my specialty: the geopolitical theory of large Native American confederacies. My opening still exists, and may even be better by being more focused. No longer having to include as large a historical section means it might even end up being a very large article or book chapter rather than a whole book. So my options for publication increase.

I believe this background means I am one of the most qualified people to review this book. I would first like to start with the positive aspects, which are the largest number of reactions I have.

Hamalainen gives us a very 5,000 feet above and looking down view on Native American history from precontact until the late 19th Century and the final round of ‘Indian Wars.’ Works like this are inevitably going to avoid too much hyper-specific detail and focus instead on broader strokes, but despite this the book manages to be almost as complete a narrative as it is possible for such a work to be. This big picture focus is on the political power, autonomy, and dynamism of Native American actors even deep into the period when colonists began seizing land and becoming powers in their own right. As a theme, this focus is kept consistently throughout the text. In providing this service, Hamalainen gives us a macro-history that restores Native Americans to their rightful place as part of the continents balance of power rather than simply being either ‘savages’ or ‘helpless victims’, which is what the two dominant strands of hyper-ideologues in North American history tend to reduce them to. This recognizes the importance of understanding these polities in ways separate both from progressive and reactionary Eurocentric scholarship.

The geographic space covered is from the desert border separating Mesoamerica from North America (a major cultural divide that predates colonization in many ways) up to the Canadian arctic. The focus naturally tends towards the bigger and more geopolitically significant nations and alliance networks, such as the Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Comanche, Lakota, etc.

While it is apparent to anyone widely read in Native American history, particularly in niche specialist books about specific areas and time periods, that some of these confederations (especially the Haudenosaunee and Comanche) were most often the strongest powers in the region, general macro-historical narratives often ignore or downplay this despite their ability to outlast and defeat multiple European colonial projects. Hamalainen’s book’s primary contribution is showing how for the first century after colonization native powers were the strongest all over, and how even in the century after that both the Lakota and the Comanche still maintained dominance in particular regions. This is important and necessary work for the field. And long overdue in a generally accessible format like this work is.

I do, however, have some critiques.

The first and more minor one is that two major actors in this narrative still get a fairly short shrift. I do understand from personal experience one must always highlight some things and de-emphasize others. I did it quite a bit of this selection in my own book. But a person reading Indigenous Continent with little preexisting knowledge of the subject would definitely not quite get the power of the Blackfoot Confederacy at its height nor the uniqueness of the Tlingit experience. The second in particular would serve as a great example because of it mostly fighting the Russian attempt to colonize America to a stalemate, but more importantly because of its maritime and naval character. The Tlingit and Haida had canoes that were so large they were more like longships or small galleys and small cannon were often mounted on them. They wore body armor made of washed ashore Chinese and Japanese coins that was often bulletproof to musket fire. They lived what might have been the highest standard of living in the pre-Victorian world due to their ability to exploit the Pacific Northwest’s natural riches in such a way as to develop an extremely sophisticated material culture without having to engage in farming or urbanization.

A more substantial critique I have is that the (correct) fixation on Native power and autonomy in the book can sideline the very real existential dangers faced by native people from the start, and so once the tables turn against the native powers it can come across to the reader as extremely jarring and almost unexpected. A few paragraphs near the start really explaining why Natives were so disproportionately effected by Eurasian disease (it was because of there being far more domesticatable animals in Eurasia giving people who grew up around them for generations far greater disease resistance but also greater ability to spread them) would have helped the general reader. This would show clearly that these persistent and proportionally deadly outbreaks turned North America into a place of pure chaos and destruction from the 16th Century onwards. This was the single most post-apocalyptic setting human beings have ever found themselves on a hemispheric scale in recorded human history. Rather than diminish the narrative of Native power and autonomy it actually increases it by making the achievements of these countries that survived and for a time even thrived all the more impressive.

These events are of course talked about in Hamalainen’s book but not in a central way. This means that the constant background of irreplaceable losses among natives is sidelined along with the concurrent growth of the settler populations not only due to immigration but also a truly staggering and long lasting baby boom. This was something the more destabilized native powers could not replicate, and thus by the early 18th Century the tide really had turned against them and they were clearly headed towards perpetual underdog status through demographics. Yet in Hamalainen’s narrative settler advantage seems to only really appear about 50-100 years after this, which could throw a reader for a bit of a loop.

None of these critiques of mine sabotage the point of the book or its importance, however. I believe this is the correct book to introduce general audiences to the importance and awesomeness of Native American history and finally rewrite the focus of the narrative around North American history. The history of the peoples before the rise of what we now call modern North Atlantic society is every bit as important in understanding this continent and how to live on it as that which has come since.

‘Going Along’ with the Coyote Conquest

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

The Twentieth Century was not a great time for territorial conquest and overt annexation. The most successful nation of that century engaged in a far more sly method of co-opting its targets, while the next most successful power of the epoch, the Soviet Union, largely inherited its extra territories from its predecessor. The old colonial empires crumbled from their height to nothing in that time. The vast majority of new overt conquests were undone in the course of a single decade. A few outlasted this. Only things like Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara and Israel’s rule over the Palestinian territories, where the power imbalance was geographically immediate and overwhelming, seems to have truly lasting power. And those are still incomplete and contested takeovers. The Twenty-First Century seems even less promising, with few trying and those that do, such as Turkey in Northern Syria and the U.S. in Iraq, entering the most convoluted and embarrassing situations possible. The present disposition of forces has not been friendly to this type of direct takeover since the territorial swapping of League of Nations mandates showed clearly diminishing returns on the annexation project. The largest scale attempts to try to give it another go were touched off by Japan, Italy, and Germany and led to their total ruin.

This is, of course, only talking about the human world. Sure, we all know diseases and bacteria are the same as they ever were with Spanish Flu, AIDS, and Covid continuing in the path of Bubonic Plague, Smallpox, and the like. That is normal and to be expected. But in the Anthropocene, the time of unquestioned human dominance, it is interesting to note the larger animals that are not just succeeding but rising to dominate in a way that they didn’t before. I am not just speaking about the obvious candidates like rats and feral descendants of domestic pets, i.e. animals you would expect to increase in numbers as the human-heavy ecological imbalance teeters from growing cities, suburbs, and more anthropogenic land use conversion. Humans, domesticated livestock, and agricultural crops have become a truly disturbing proportion of terrestrial biomass. And we know the effects of it are extreme losses in biodiversity with resulting negative impacts on environmental sustainability. The general view is that wild mammals in particular, and the larger variants especially, are all on the wane.

But there is a big exception to this. More than one, in fact, but right now I am going to concentrate, as per theme of this site, on the most obvious and most tricksteresque one. The true troll of North America in mythology and real life, Old Man Coyote himself. Since human conquest started slowing, coyote conquest increased. Not only that, but it also seems to be happening at a far greater rate than most human expansion in the prehistoric era was, at least as far as we can tell from archeology. A species that normally stuck to the Great Plains and the Southwest has exploded in every direction, moving to the north and east coast and then down in an inexorable southern march since about 1900.

Taken from here

What is even funnier is that humanity at least partially caused this current colonization. The migration of coyotes out from their traditional ranges was greatly accelerated by attempts from farmers and ranchers to kill them off in huge numbers with traps and hunting bounties. It caused the species to scatter far and wide and adapt to new environments with great vigor. The eastern branch of this migration seems to be diverging from the norm and growing in size, likely due to admixture from breeding with both wolves and domestic dogs. The path of this side of the family tree went up to Canada, where the wolf admixture was likely introduced, and then into Maine. Since then it has been coming southward steadily and now if firmly entrenched in the southeast.

Coyotes set up shop in forests, plains, deserts, suburbs, farmland, and cities. They can ride the metro. They can go from pack animal to solo to small family units and back again depending on circumstance. The eastern ones even provide a valuable service by introducing a large predator to our over-populated deer problem, giving us the first chance in generations to see a proper return to flowers and flora in our stripped-bare-by-the-hooved-menace forests. They can live anywhere, they can live in any kind of social group or none, and they can eat anything. Truly, in a time of accelerating environmental and demographic changes, a species to look up to. As Darwin said, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, but the one most responsive to change.’

I grew up with a large amount of Native American folktales in my childhood. The ubiquity of trickster figures in those cycles was postulated by Paul Radin to be a response from the first people to populate North America as they reacted to a land where the weather behaved erratically, earthquakes were frequent, thunderstorms and tornadoes massive, and the rapid growth and melting of ice age glaciers in that migratory period caused sudden flooding and bizarre microclimates. This implied that the gods were mercurial and fickle towards the fate of humanity. Coyote is by no means the only one of these figures, but he is the most common in tales translated into English. And it is the species that inspired him that is currently the most ubiquitous of these trickster totemic animals out in the real world.

Coyote tales are the true chaotic neutral worldview distilled. There are stories which can be within the same tribe’s cycle of Coyote creating fire, saving the world, dooming humanity with mortality, embarrassing himself or getting himself killed due to foolishness, and defeating monsters through trickery and guile. He might boon the human race either intentionally or unintentionally. He might trick a mother into believing he is a reliable babysitter so he can eat her children. He might even eat a talking plant that says ‘He who eats me will defecate!’ on a dare thinking, ‘well, I am too strong, I will not defecate,’ and then be launched into the sky on a rocketing tower of his own feces. This is why the animal that provided a model for the mythological figure succeeds. It rolls with the times but is never merely of the times. Rebellion and adaptability rolled into one. Failures and even death do not seem to weaken or stop it in the long term. In one century, a whole continent fell to this expansion after the U.S. government instituted its most brutal and sustained wildlife killing program in history. It most likely took the first Native Americans longer to traverse the continent. We know for a fact it took four hundred years for the Europeans to become truly endemic across the land. And that’s with steel, gunpowder, compasses, and maps. They were still beaten by The Tricky One.

Coyote is the chaos agent. He exists to remind us that all the planning in the world cannot adapt to random circumstance. Stories about him often begin with the phrase ‘Coyote was going along…’ and sometimes they end with, ‘and Coyote went back to going along.’ Motion is perpetual, but it is not headed to any particular place. The destination might be as random as the outcome of running into such a figure. Perhaps it works because the way to adapt to an uncaring world is to cultivate a sense of bemused aloofness in turn. As Dan Flores, the author of the book ‘Coyote America’ put it:

‘But what, no moral code in these stories? No promise of eternal life, no salvation from death? Coyote stories offer up none of these things…It ought to be said that Coyote stories are not really for visionary dreamers who expect to change the world. Coyotism is a philosophy for the realists among us, those who can do a Cormac McCarthy-like appraisal of human motives but find a kind of chagrined humor in the act, who think of the human story as cyclical…Coyotism tells us that while we may long have misunderstood the motives of our behavior, we’ve also known how human nature expresses itself. And who better to illustrate that than self-centered, gluttonous, carnal Coyote?’

It is theorized that this current expansion of the coyote might not be the first time this has happened. The Red Wolf of the southeast might be a remnant population of coyote-wolf hybrids from a pre-recorded time. If so, it means the east was theirs before. But even if not, it is theirs now.

The part of Pennsylvania which I am currently based has had coyotes for decades now, but you rarely see the signs. My knowledge of their presence until recently was merely word of mouth and indirect indications. But last week I took a walk outside around midnight in this tree-shrouded hill country far from the desert origins of the coyote. Echoing in the darkness from a patch of thick woods around a creek valley not more than a mile to the southeast came a chorus of yips and howls from a pack of coyotes. Their calls bathed the trees in an echo not heard in these parts for possibly thousands of years, if ever.

That particular pack stayed for only a few days as it turned out. But it was obvious that the land is now claimed. There will be more.

The Rise of North American Atmospheric Black Metal

/ geotrickster / 5 Comments

In my previous post I wrote a speculative manifesto of sorts pining for a way out of our presently debilitating puritan-inflected culture wars and towards something new that drew more on a much neglected pre-christian, indigenous, and ecological cultural heritage of the the North American Continent. This was a plea to start something that has barely begun-if at all. A statement of future intent that is ambitious merely because of the many odds and long time scales of needed events it would need to even become viable as an underground movement.

But upon further review of this seemingly impossible but highly needed direction of cultural dialogue I did realize there is one field where the culture is already moving in this direction: Atmospheric Black Metal. And, surprisingly considering the majority of metal output in my lifetime, its core region seems to be North America. In particular the Cascadian region of the Pacific Northwest and the Applachians.

I took this photo in the Tracy Arm Fjord in Alaska. But it quickly became apparent to me it would make a great ABM album cover.

I am somewhat atypical to the story of how people get into heavy metal. For most it enters their life in the early teens and then captures their primary interests from them onwards or until they ‘grow out of it’. Often, as they age they like it a bit less and stop experimenting with new stuff. My appreciation, on the other hand, has only grown with time.

I liked heavier forms of music than average, but my teens were largely taken up by hip hop and the weirder side of alternative rock as well as (like now, still) 80s music. This was the late 90s and early oughts and metal was at its lowest point ever (as was popular culture in general imo). Both in exposure and in terms of quality, it was not a genre that was interesting in that time. Whatever I heard then turned me off and I gave little thought to it beyond that.

In college everything changed. I knew I needed more new music and the internet was finally becoming fast enough that you could really search on there with keywords and without any prior knowledge about the specifics of what you were trying to find. I had already slipped into the classics such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden by this point, but I wanted more, harder and weirder. This was around the time Lordi was making headlines for unexpectedly winning Eurovision, and that started me out looking more and more at Europe and away from my own culturally metal deficient country. It was the right call to make. Starting with Fintroll and expanding outwards I found a plethora of unique original and genre busting bands that took the best lessons of Norwegian black metal and left most of the cringier aspects behind for new and experimental places involving folkish paganism and historical eras. Right after this time I moved to UK (not a music related move) and got really into the thick of it. This coincided with some of the best releases for the new bands I liked across Scandinavia , Russia, Mongolia and the like. It also happened that right when I was living in Scotland I came across the truly exceptional Scottish band Saor that combined the hard hitting intensity of black metal, the traditional instruments of folk metal, and the atmosphere of post-rock and experimental bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Saor instantly clicked for me as that right combination I didn’t know I needed but had unintentionally been searching for all along.

It was at this same time that my general interests were combining to make me extremely receptive to Agalloch-a band that had been around since the late 90s but only started to leak into my life halfway through my time in the UK. The thing was-and at the time this was freakish to me-Agalloch was an American band. Indeed, a common thing heard when I introduced them to my friends in Scotland was ‘this doesn’t sound like an American band at all.’ Of course, it didn’t really sound like any European bands either.

It usually takes awhile for a new band I like to climb the latter of my musical hierarchy. But somehow, Agalloch shot up to about 2nd place band for me within about a month or two of discovery. I had a large-windowed city-center adjacent apartment in Edinburgh that I loved cooking and hosting people for whisky tasting sessions and it just seemed the perfect soundtrack for that. At this time I was also giving painting a go and nothing worked quite like Agalloch while I worked the canvas by the window with the inevitable Scottish rain just outside. No band I ever heard quite captured the moody numinous atmosphere of primeval forests and fog shrouded mountains, or sleeping gods just below the surface. Eventually, towards the end of my time in the UK, I moved towards giving music made in America another chance.

At first, it seemed like Agalloch was the outlier. But it was also an inspiration. While I broadened my horizons to all the cool new things happening with contemporary bluegrass music back in the states, it seemed that many new bands were coming online in Agalloch’s wake. Gradually, and a bit late to the party, I started discovering them. Right on time too, as it turned out Agalloch would end up breaking up a few years later.

Panopticon was my first big discovery. A Kentucky-based project with a variety of themed albums, a bluegrass tinge, and a focus on left wing environmentalism and labor activism (particularly in the Appalachian coal mining industry-the entire album Kentucky is about this). This was followed soon after by finding Appalachian Winter, another one man project of love, but this time from the mountain country of my own home state of Pennsylvania. At this point my particular historical interests led me to wonder if such a similar band existed but with Native American themes, and shortly thereafter I found Nechochwen, whose music I have posted in this blog at least once before if not more. Rounding out this select list of more recent discoveries is Alda, a band that seems to be flying under most people’s radar which quite possibly has already reached the point of being my second favorite band after Agalloch.

These and many other related bands are not all the same by any means. Still, there are certain soundscapes that are held in common, even with the clusters of bands tending towards regions almost on the opposite sides of the continent from each other. The dominance of forest and mountains in the lyrical composition, the sounds of wind in musical interludes, and the distant thrum of large groups of animals be it wolves, tree frogs, or flocks of birds comes through in many albums. The sky as a thematic topic comes up almost as much as it does in Mongolian music (contemporary or otherwise) and rivers seem a much larger focus than they would be in comparable European bands. The big and often still wild nature of North America is a perfect match for atmospheric black metal. It becomes almost shocking in retrospect that it took this long such a subgenre to take off here. And looming over all of it is the precarious danger of loss-that in our unregulated hyper-capitalist society all of this natural splendor and musical muse just a few steps away from being turned into a sterile clear cut with poisoned rivers.

The good black metal bands, and many of the good folk metal bands for that matter, and for the first time in history, seem to have migrated west. To the point that when I listen to Saor (still one of my top favorites today) I now say the inverse about what I used to about Agalloch when I was in Scotland, ‘Can you believe this band isn’t American? This is a state of affairs that would have been unimaginable a decade or more ago.

So, while the greater cultural project I would like to work on in North American discourse couldn’t be further from being relevant yet, and will probably require decades of work to even become a subculture, there is one field where this is already happening and it is growing. Atmospheric Black Metal is now entering a North American renaissance, and in so doing it is giving us a sound and aesthetic for seeing past our present quagmire of puritan culture war and decaying civil society.

The Black Longhouse

/ geotrickster / 6 Comments

“You’re feeling the oppression of Christian hegemony in conflict with native animism,” he said. “Self-righteous, puritanical men seized this land. You’re also feeling the eyes of the vultures evaluating the sweet texture of your skin. The eyes of many animals. Animals endure.’

~Laird Barron, ‘Worse Angels’

What follows is a symbolic manifesto of sorts. Take from it what you will.

In a world built on bones there is an entire hemisphere that is especially shattered by abrupt displacement. On the northern continent of that hemisphere is the seat of a degenerating world-empire. Within that empire are a people unmoored from the reality of the ancient land beneath their feet even as it dies because of them. They cling to the ideologies of a failing state despite these very beliefs having brought them to this point. The universal idealism of a simple moralistic world and one set of values to make sense of it has not just failed them-it has made everything worse for everyone. The ubiquity of their communications networks brings what was once left at the pulpit of the puritan into an unceasing daily bombardment of affirmation for collapsing monoculture.

But there was a time that lasted far longer before the coming of Christ and Cotton Mather when these lands had no such grifters. Tribes existed and fought each other as humans always do, but had no concepts of messianic religion, ‘biological’ race, or the glorification of victimhood. These many diverse peoples were wiped out by an unprecedented hemisphere-encompassing apocalypse where smallpox and plague took the majority as a prelude. Then came shattered bands of survivors still alive in a time where the recently dead outnumbered the living by multitudes and were forced to respond to an alien invasion of technologically advanced extremists. They went down in a hell of a fight that took centuries and their descendants are still live today, despite the odds.

In their place came a civilization that broke all contact with this past and rushed to fill the vacuum with their own inheritance…but not all these things were a sensible fit for the new locale. Despite the cultural disconnect of most of its inhabitants, its earthy chaotic gods sleep much closer to the surface than the long-buried and fully domesticated pantheons across the sea. This is not a land of mellow meadows and shires, but of earthquakes, blizzards, tornadoes, and towering thunderstorms. This is a land that scorns weakness.

The newcomers could breed to the point where they were immune to native syncretism-avoiding the natural fate of conquerors. This further cut off the northern reaches of the hemisphere even beyond that of the rest. We live in their world now. But now, in the early 21rst Century, we see their world view cracking under the strain of its own hubris and excess. The opportunity to build something new is opening before our eyes. Something that fits this place better. Something that can at least bridge some of the gap between the incongruous ideological imposition of today and the natural state of a beautiful and terrible land.

There are those of all backgrounds and persuasions who find no tribe amongst the degenerating postmoderns of our time. They find the amplification of faddish superficial issues a distraction, the busybodies of the commentariat and consumer as the front for a past-prime ruling class in crisis. Witch hunts are everywhere as the fearful and ostensibly secular descendants of those original puritan settlers and conquistadores blame heretics for their own inadequacies.

Those who reject this status quo may find themselves walking in the woods as they travel apart from the trends. Let us say in the northeast or Great Lakes region-though it could be anywhere. The new growth forest of the woodlands hacked down and re-grown is filled with underbrush and small trees. Ticks lurk everywhere as un-predated deer strip the biodiversity as they spread like locusts.

Eventually these travelers make their way to a place deep in the woods. Giant ancient trees tower above in the old growth grove. Here, the underbrush is lighter. Flowers bloom again. Sharp unseen eyes raise their hackles as they know the deer tread lightly in this place for fear of predation. At the center is a longhouse. Those redoubtable large bark clad structures that could house many people and supplies. But this longhouse is different. It is jet black and angled as only a modern construct could be. It draws from the forgotten past but is no slave to it. It would seem incongruous to those who came across it accidentally, but not to our band our travelers.

On the inside they find the interior lit only by the fire pits. The shadows cast about imply a structure far larger than seems from the outside. There wait for them masked figures-wooden shamanic grotesques with distorted and leering features. Beneath this they wear well-tailored suits. They tell the travelers that to accept the uncertainties of a new future is to draw strength from a different past. The pipe is passed around as the masked ones speak of a land people belong to, and not a land belonging to people.

‘Mankind sought the death of Coyote, an animal once confined to the plains and Rockies. His attempts to kill it made it breed and migrate outwards. A century after this campaign began it has unintentionally spread the animal over the entire continent. Here, in the east, it has bred with Canadian wolves up north before moving south. It has thus grown in size and pack mentality.

‘The coyotes were misfits, but they came together to survive and perhaps for revenge. Now, they thrive while we decline. Be like this beast. Adapt to the new by breaking old bonds of safety. Your mouth must be red with venison for the flowers to bloom again and the ticks to recede. Face your fears directly and make them your allies against your foes. Come together at decisive points in time and scatter when countered. Always help to sabotage the complacently powerful and their defenders.’

These travelers realize their personal differences do not need to be ironed out-the diversity strengthens them. Here they can debate the most taboo subjects openly, shrouded from view of the puritans by the walls of the Black Longhouse. They have something more important now: common enemies. The missionary, the financier, the complacent monoculture that upholds them all.

As the travelers dance around the fire they revel in being both distinct and as-one. They know that their odds are low but that such difficulties only increase the glory of the fight. The future they want is yet un-defined but by taking the first step away from a failed consensus the mere possibility to building something new has been created. All of them now carry the Black Longhouse inside them.

The travelers walk out of the old growth region, through the moat of the striplings, and back into the roar of modernity. But rather than be sad as before, they see now that within this degenerating world is an abundance of new opportunities. Every decaying town is a chance to rebuild not in some nostalgic way for what it once was, but a new way to that leans forward and draws from a different and much neglected past. Many peoples, gods, and cultures united against a common old order and its increasingly hysterical defenders. What were the covenant chains of past entities on this land before colonization but the agreement that difference and divergence was fine, and could all serve a struggle against a common enemy? Such was the thought of people who lived in older longhouses. Already, one can hear the sounds of this new synthesis of forgotten old and dynamic new if one listens.

Somewhere inside a tacky suburban home at night, a clergyman (either of faith or of human resources and professional management) spots something outside the window. He peers through the glass to see the leering face of a coyote with wolf-like dimensions. The lights go dark and he screams, fumbling to bring them back on. But against one who sees in the darkness as if it was its own form of light…

In a time of monsters be the biggest baddest monster of all. And bring your friends. This ancient land demands no less of you.

So Far, Only North America is a World-Island

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

north_a_satellite_orth_nasa

I always had two historical loves which won out over all the others. Sure, there isn’t a time and place I can’t not find interesting or even devote significant amount of time to reading up on, but my true loves that beat all the others are Eurasian nomads and Native American studies. So it has been since my teens, and remains so to this day. Just today I realized a concept I learned in the study of one might make more sense applied to the other.

When I made the transition into International Relations I became aware of geopolitics. There was a lot to disagree with as well as agree with and parsing through the gems from the coal became one of the purposes of this very blog. Even the founding article of the field, Mackinder’s ‘The Geographic Pivot of History’, is so full of holes a knowledgeable person can leap through with space to spare. But this first halting step did create new and interesting discussions in policy circles back in its original context of rampant Russophobia in Britain and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and Russo-Japanese War which was occurring at the time of its publication. Though that war would show that the Romanov Dynasty had feet made of clay and that Germany was Britain’s true rival, the core thesis had one very stark and obvious insight: that Eurasia was rich in population and resources and the closest thing we have to a super-continent right now. Thus if one power could dominate it, it would truly be unstoppable and quite possibly unassailable. If anything, Soviet defense in depth and being able to shuffle resources back and forth from frontiers with Germany and Japan in response to changing circumstances lent the theory some real world credit in the Second World War. It certainly interested Cold War strategists in the NATO world.

Nowadays, it has spawned a quite bizarre, almost theosophist-mystic form of geopolitics in Russia. Alexander Dugin, a kind of Blavatsky-Evola-Rasputin hybrid creature, waxes poetically about Russia’s need to directly annex a variety of countries and regions and apply them to some kind of fascistic definition of Eurasian solidarity that would have made the tolerant and flexible Mongols he claims to idolize sneer in contempt. But that is a different subject from this post. Brzezinski’s book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ shows the American take on the subject is still here as well. The point is, whether for good or ill, World-Island Theory (the term for Eurasia’s central role in geopolitics) is still strong. And while I hold the central observation of Eurasia’s massive importance to be largely correct, I dispute that it has yet to achieve its potential. North America, on the other hand, already has.

comanche_osage_fight

In a great irony of prehistory, the horse, which first evolved in North America, would end up going extinct there while the Eurasian migrated branches of the species would survive, thrive, and go on to play such an important role in human history. The Americas, by and large, are severely lacking in indigenous domesticated animals which can be put to human use. Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns Germs and Steel’ and Charles Mann’s book ‘1491’ goes further into detail into the science behind this observation, as do many other works. The point is, lack of such beasts hampered both mobility and disease resistance, as this is mostly acquired through close contact by living with domestic animals. As it was, when horses returned they quickly went wild, almost as coming home. The Plains tribes rose to a massive gain of power projection and living standards practically overnight in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries due in no small part to these creatures. All this despite already have suffered through waves of depopulating plagues. By that point it was too late to undo the effect of thousands of years of their absence, but the rise of the Comanche Empire, which would humiliate the frontiers of New Spain and then Mexico for over a century despite a calamitous demographic situation for the Native population speaks volumes.

Imagine, if you will, a world where horses never died out in the Americas before being reintroduced by the Spanish.The percentage of the land taken up by the Great Plains is far larger, proportionally, than the great Eurasian Steppe, where the nomadic people there did so much to spread trade and technology from one end of the land mass to the other. One suspects it would be a realm of large empires and thriving trade cities connecting the eastern forest and river peoples to groups far further afield than they otherwise would have direct contact with, such as the Tlingit, Haida, and other Pacific Northwest peoples who had probably the highest living standards of the pre-industrial world and (possibly) a few tenuous trade links to Asia. The greater effort of technology and commerce travelling north-south as opposed to east-west (due to more shifting climate zones) could be overridden by the massive interconnectedness of the Great Plains under nomadic empires. As it was, even with the tragic and utterly unnecessary genocide and driving to the periphery of the Native peoples of North America, a small collection of fractious colonies on the eastern seaboards of both the US and Canada would find a rapid expansion followed by an intense interconnections of resources and peoples-first through rail and then through interstate highways. Now, cheap domestic flight seals the deal.

As with all things geopolitics, this is not permanent. It is the interplay of social sciences with the physicality of geoscience and geography that really make the discipline when it is being thorough. One dominant state in the center of the landmass with cordial relations with its two neighbors is not a permanent situation…but it is so far the most ideal conjunction of forces for the wielding of great power politics on a global scale than has ever so far existed. Control of the North American world-island means the security to build bases and dominate trade routes around the entire planet. The British had no defense beyond their navy in a multi-polar Europe, the Mongols were a small minority who ruled with a relatively light hand, and the Spanish came into such a glut of wealth they suffered hyperinflation and became prey for other countries’ pirates. So far, out of this group, only the United States has equaled if not surpassed the Mongolian geopolitical achievement.

Good North American strategists see that it is the ocean that is both the highway and the fortification protecting this remarkably secure and wealthy apparatus from Arctic to Panama Canal, bad ones overextend themselves dangerously into Eurasia and Africa. For North America (specifically the United States as the core of this order) to re-learn the strategy it has lost through smug complacency since the fall of the USSR, some kind of American Maritime Focused Hadrian figure is necessary. Right now there is no such thing in the running for leadership…though Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard points to a distinct possibility for the future.

It seems such a waste for such a conjunction of positive forces to be squandered on nation building outside of core maritime connections. Not to mention the human cost of many of these ill-fought out interventions. Perhaps in the future I can write a post about what allies are actually critical to the American edifice. North American geopolitical thinkers also need not fear about Eurasian unification, it is much larger, much more divided (both geographically and culturally) and could only be unified under circumstances that do not presently nor could foreseeably exist in the near future. Eurasia, in the end, is actually a super-continent build for balance-of-power politics, not so much hegemony. After all, when various Chinese dynasties were the leading scientific and technological forces of the world, they still could not meaningfully exert this dominance too far afield. So long as powerful maritime states exist outside of Eurasia, they cannot make such an attempt in the future. The large populations of South Asia and East Asia are not coming together anytime soon, and even a demographically challenged Russia is still playing the game. And even a Eurasia-dominating empire would no longer necessarily be able to overtake a stable North America that retains its decisive role in South America. The cumulative sea-surrounded landmass of the Americas, no longer as hampered by climactic variation and choke-points as it once was, could verily be the real super-continent for strategist of the future to ponder on.

None of this is to say that North America will never split apart. The Washington DC hegemony splintering or becoming a Byzantine rump state is always a possibility, causing the political geography of North America itself to create its own states in the Northeast, Appalachia, Southeast, Plains, Rockies, and northern and southern West Coasts-to say nothing of Quebec, Mayan populated parts of Mexico, and all the many other possible conjunctions. States are like people, they have various and finite lifespans. And like the super-continent cycle itself, division and unification of landmasses under specific rule comes and goes from one to the other. This should make it all the more important that strategists in Washington, Ottawa, and Mexico City make the most of what they have now and not through it away on an altar of faddish economic and political theories which exist to self-congratulate the ruling class. The present order of world affairs is not a product of such forces, but rather of smart strategy applied to fortuitous geography. A world-island, if you can keep it.