Excerpt: Over the last two decades, scholars have rethought the history of empire and colonization in North America. Epitomized by Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, historians have used the term “empire” to turn the tables on traditional assumptions about European power. They instead posit that Native empires maintained or increased control over the heart of the continent into and beyond the eighteenth century.1 At the same time, theorists of Native and Indigenous studies have used the framework of “settler colonialism” to identify the continuous drive for the erasure of multiple Native groups from North American landscapes from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.