This article first appeared in Counterpunch on September 4, 2023.
The Contested Americas: Strait Talk
by John Kendall Hawkins
The crossing of the Bering Strait from Asia to North America is the stuff of legends. Geographically, it's a strait between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, separating the Chukchi Peninsula of the Russian Far East from the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. Supposedly, it was all frozen over up there, many thousands of years ago, allowing so-called paleo-Indians to cross over -- nicknamed Beringia -- and disseminate throughout the North and South American continents. They established ancient civilizations; and became what we would later refer to as the Indigenous nations.
A couple of years ago, I was looking into the origins of the state of California, the state where I was born. Take away -ornia and you got Calif. As in Caliph? Yeah. This led me to eventually read Edward Everett Hale's California 1864 Atlantic origin account, "The Queen of California." The state's name was conferred by Cortes, who took it from a 1510 chivalric romance tale, "The Adventures of Esplandian." Moors and Christians. Indeed: a place "peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they lived in the fashion of Amazons. They were of strong and hardy bodies, of ardent courage and great force." I immediately thought of Angela Davis as Queen Califia, thinking, Imagine a whole state filled with take-no-sh*t stupidly beautiful black woman-warrior types. Yowser. How we could change the world!
So, I set out to write an epic poem that reflects what I'm reading in this romance. I bring it up here because of Beringia. The ancient tale makes references to proto-Chinese and proto-Russians having set up coastal encampments after crossing the strait. I have them killed by griffins in my poem because they are caught perving on the ideal feminine warriors as they bathed. No male gaze wanted. Although, let's face it, I wrote the bathing scene in and lived to tell about it.
More recently James A. Oliver has examined the Beringia phenomenon in his witty and ironic prose, The Bering Strait Crossing: A 21 Century Frontier between East and West (2006). It includes forays into the ancient past and discusses the possibilities and plans for bridges and tunnels and new airways and swims and the long-held desire to make the strait a grand new high speed lane that would revolutionize shipping. It would require a melting Arctic, but it appears they have that under control with the serendipitous climate change gift of the Arctic thawing and oilmen already there salivating in the tundra and the military already planning for new war over the goodies there. I picture: Ice Station Zebra, starring Patrick McGoohan, star of the cult classic (and prescient) The Prisoner. Check out Oliver's cheek:
A super virus might yet have its way with us - in which scenario the global pressures on fresh water - water, especially - food, arable land, and energy resources . . .will all cease to be concerns. Since it is now thought that virus may have triggered the whole process of life on this planet in the first place, then the virus will have only reversed what it started.
Alas, one can't linger as one might, as this is to be a review of another book. A new one. By a Finnish historian.
I'm referring to Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen. The author begins by bringing the reader through the peopling of the Americas by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers that took place from Siberia to Alaska around from 26-19 kya, when, it is thought, the sea-level fell and an intercontinental bridge was temporarily established. These migrations continued down through South America and east to the Atlantic sea coast and the Caribbean. These are our beloved Ind'gens of today. Still looking for a guarantee that their vote will count in the presidential elections. (h/t Greg Palast)
Indigenous Continent is divided into eight parts, including the Dawn of the Indigenous Continent, Appear at a Distance Like Giants, The Contest for the Great American Interior, The Indigenous Backlash, The Enduring Indigenous Continent, The Heart of the Continent, American Revolutions, and, The Age of Equestrian Empires. These headings give a fair idea of the focus of each section. What I liked about Hämäläinen's approach is his decision to design the narrative around the migrations and movements of peoples, not just Indigenous but European. We see how human restlessness and the search for material gain and political power all came at each other like competing circles in a Venn diagram -- indigenous nations intersecting, and European nations competing for new turf. While interested in the nature and doings of each nation, Hämäläinen opts to not overfocus. He describes his concern:
Each nation comes across as unique, embedded in its own microworld. Multiply this by five hundred, and the problem is plain to see. Examining Indigenous America in this way is like looking at a pointillistic painting from mere inches away: it overwhelms; it loses coherence; the larger patterns are impossible to discern.
The author takes the middle course "between the general and the specific." The effect is lots of movement, of the contestation that is being argued by the book. Hämäläinen writes of the narrative that Indigenous Continent is "a biography of power in North America."
The narrative of contestation begins with the Bering Crossing and follows the hunter-gatherers into the New World. Hämäläinen paints picture:
The melting of glaciers started in North America roughly twenty-one thousand years ago. As the mile-high ice caps slowly melted into the oceans, a narrow ice-free corridor opened on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains. Groups of people began moving southward through the passage around 11,000 BCE, eventually arriving in the great continental grasslands that were swarming with huge mammals: imperial mammoths, six-ton mastodons, eight-foot-tall bison, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, camels, horses, and several species of antelope.
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