The Indians Won (novel)

First published in 1970 and long out of print, The Indians Won is a stunning work of speculative fiction that imagines that, following the defeat of Custer and Benteen at the Little Bighorn in 1876, the many Indigenous tribes of America formed an alliance to sweep the whites out of the center of the country and form a new nation, bounded on both coasts by the United States. One hundred years later the two nations, having taken very different paths toward stewardship of the land and resources, are on the brink of war again, as the five hundred million wasichu of the United States eye the vast, open center of the continent, just as they had prior to their expulsion in the nineteenth century. The difference is, now they are both nuclear powers.

Imaginative, enthralling, rich in historical detail, and written from the perspective of a Native American writer, The Indians Won is an emotionally charged novel that asks the question: What if the Indians had won?

Review by Anita Comeau:
This book, “The Indians Won” was originally written back in the 1970’s and with some of the terminology used, a person could tell. I found “The Indians Won” very interesting because I like an off the wall fiction. The book caught me in the first chapter. Kinda funny kind of sad kind of the same yet also prophetic. The story moves back and forth between centuries. The premise of “The Indians Won” is that all Native Nations banded together after some serious negotiations and defeated the United States army and government in the 1800’s. It also claimed the entire Great Plains as the Indian Nation and how would the history of the United States change if the Indian Nations had won their fight against encroachment, corruption, greed, and the use of Tribal Nations against each other. In addition, the book gives a good portrayal of the history of Indian Nation and of the other individual nations in what it would be like after the victory controlling the center of the country while the States have the east and west coasts.