The Finnish historian Pekka Hamalainen, currently teaching in Oxford, England specializes in US Native Americans and their history.  “Indigenous Continent” is his third book on the subject and he describes a “four-centuries-long war,” in which Native Americans “won as often as not.”

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
Pekka Hamalainen, 
Read by Kaipo Schwab 18h 44m
592 pages
Rating 10
(Both read and listened 2x) 
But this is my second read. 
*********

I find that after 15 months and with a nice slow read as well as a dob of thinking, I have no problems with Hamalainen’s almost over-arching main thesis,  but the necessary supporting points don’t quite hold up.  I still give the book a rating of 10.  

I think the take-over of what is now the US by European and American immigrants was inevitable BUT!!!! That certainly wasn’t foreseeable until 1848 .  

First -the Native American population in North America was already plunging and continued for many years due to disease spreading from European contact in South America. The declining population started before either the Massachusetts Bay Company or the Virginia Colony were first settled.  

Meanwhile, in Europe the population almost doubled between 1550 and 1700 due to increased food supply and health amenities (like sanitation). Not only that but in England the Enclosure Acts reduced public land.  

1890: Native population plunges
In the U.S., Native population falls to an all-time low. The 1890 census records 237,196 Native people—a decrease of approximately 95 percent from a population in 1491 that some historians estimate at more than 100 million.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/379.html#:~:text=The%201890%20census%20records%20237%2C196,at%20more%20than%20100%20million.

I think Hamalainen wants to recast the story of Euro- and Indigenous Americans in North American history,  portraying the Native American people NOT as victims, but as “powerful actors who profoundly shaped the course of events.”  According to him the conflict “was a four-centuries-long war,” in which “Indians won as often as not.”