Book Review — Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear

Thursday 15, June 2023

Oh dear, I had read this book once before, but could not remember anything about it. After a couple pages I quickly came to the conclusion that my foggy memory was from actively trying to forget it. Such a dull writing style! Every chapter felt like proofreading a highschool essay that needed work. I persisted and made it through, and Lear made an interesting enough claim to not regret finishing it, but this was not a leisurely book that I looked forward to picking up after work.

The book centers on the Crow Nation mostly under the leadership of chief Plenty Coups (b.1848-1932) and its reaction to a very quickly changing world as US foreign policy looked to decimate the Native American populations.

Chapter 1 fixates on a quote from Plenty Coups “After this nothing happened”. Which in its context is a bit harrowing:

“I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little signing anywhere. Besides, you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.”

I understand where Lear was going in his analysis, but it felt contrived and in one paragraphs says he can’t pretend to know what Plenty Coups meant, and then follows up with myriad “what if” questions to justify the rest of the chapter trying to add meaning at any rate. It’s fair to question what Plenty Coups could have meant by “after this nothing happened”, it’s a bizarre thing to say and summarily describes the end of the Crow way of life as they knew it, but the line of reasoning in this section felt conjectural.

Much of the book centers around the assumption that tribal warfare, “planting the coup stick”, and “counting coups” (which are a handful of courageous acts associated with warfare) were the structural supports of Crow society. The nomadic and hunting aspects were discussed as well, but seemed to be secondary or direct consequences of the warring ways. It felt reductive and almost exclusively focused on the acts of men. Cooking (a traditional female role in this tribe) was contextualized as a means to prepare the male warrior for a fight and when the tribes ceased to fight with each-other it had lost its meaning. I just generally don’t think there was strong enough support for Lear to claim that the culture lost all meaning from the cessation of fighting, and it felt like a mis-characterization to disregard huge parts of culture from the assumption that any meaning they got was from one activity.

Contentious points aside, I think Lear did effectively discuss the death of a culture and how people reacted to having to re-define the meaningful acts in their lives. Being forced to rethink what it means to be courageous, and what the identity of the nation was post-reservation resulted in a huge cultural upheaval. Many of the anecdotes are interesting, infuriating, or both: the pressures exerted by the US government are some of its worst transgressions, even if US-Crow relations were generally more amicable than with other tribes.

I truthfully have no intention of reading this book again. I don’t regret it, but it was just really poorly written. The overall thesis was argued fine enough, if making some assumptions that I don’t think were totally justified, but boy howdy it was boring.