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ReVisioning American History #3
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.
With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 16, 2014
About the author
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
31 books757 followersRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,455 reviews
March 6, 2021
Warning: Only read this is you are prepared for just about your entire elementary-middle-high school education shattered.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has taken the history of the United States and told it through its very first residents - the Indigenous nations.
She begins by establishing what life was like pre-colonization: Irrigation, farming, healthy trade routes and fifteen million Native people who lived in relative harmony.
And she chronicles what happened to them.
Death. Destruction. And the systematic destabilization of millions.
No sugar coating of generous trading between pilgrims and Indians.
No rosy-colored glasses about buying and selling land.
And absolutely no sweeping the blatant racism and centuries-long genocide under the rug.
Men, Women, Children. All were fair game under the guise of the "American Dream."
And while I "knew" going into the book that the Native Americans were put into a rough situation - after all, how could you go through high school without being at least a little aware of the trail of tears or the re-education at state-run schools...I didn't really know until I read this book.
In high school, we regurgitated facts and interwove them with tales of the first Thanksgiving and a generous Columbus - never knowing the truth behind such horrific times.
It is heartbreaking and has made reevaluate just about every assumption I had about American History. I highly recommend this book.
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August 27, 2016
I'll keep this simple: if you read this exceptionally researched and beautifully written book and still think the United States is great or has ever been great, you need to take a long hard look in your mirror, then ask your god for forgiveness.
January 15, 2022
I got this book as a gift from a friend and I feel really grateful. I don't want to say I enjoyed the book per se because I didn't really. It was quite hard reading about all the ugly things we've done as a country to the indigenous people here and everywhere honestly. Most of these things I hadn't even heard of before so in that sense I'm really glad I read it and I know about all of it now. The thread traced between our initial colonization of this land and our ongoing militarism and imperial wars felt extremely relevant to today. I found the book to be helpful in contextualizing our history and the current day situation we find ourselves in. Might need to read something lighter now though.
December 17, 2015
Not so much a history of the Indigenous Peoples of North America as much as a re-telling of American history that actually includes their unfortunate role within it, which is way more prominent in ways you haven't imagined.
This is a succinct, powerful read whose basic premise, the US is a settler-colonial power, screams at you throughout.
The sections on the plight and horrific fate of the IPs are worth it alone, but the author does a helluva job revisioning America's history by showing the roots of militarism, racism, and warlust in the original Whitey conquest and slaughter of the continent's original inhabitants. Wonder why our culture is the way it is? You need not look too far back for the imperialist, militarist spirit informed pretty much our entire history. You might not know that, but it's only because this part of the tale typically gets left out. There's a reason why we're so good at killing people around the world: we had the Indigenous People to practice on first!
This is a succinct, powerful read whose basic premise, the US is a settler-colonial power, screams at you throughout.
The sections on the plight and horrific fate of the IPs are worth it alone, but the author does a helluva job revisioning America's history by showing the roots of militarism, racism, and warlust in the original Whitey conquest and slaughter of the continent's original inhabitants. Wonder why our culture is the way it is? You need not look too far back for the imperialist, militarist spirit informed pretty much our entire history. You might not know that, but it's only because this part of the tale typically gets left out. There's a reason why we're so good at killing people around the world: we had the Indigenous People to practice on first!
January 8, 2024
How to explode self-justifying mythologies with evidence. Wow, Dunbar-Ortiz gives an eye-opening narrative of the creation of the United States from the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants. In many ways, it's a "Trail of Broken Treaties," but more than that it's a deep dive into one side of what could be the two "original sins" of the founding of the nation - slavery and genocide. When Frederick Douglass asked, "what to a slave is the 4th of July?," and Arlo Guthrie sang "this land is your land, this land is my land", neither of them were including "black" or "red" or brown-skinned inhabitants in the patriotism heralded within the holiday or song. Without the land and resources of the original peoples, nor the labor of those enslaved toiling to build from them without earning the benefits of them, would the US be the power it is.
Dunbar-Ortiz's lens is narrow, but she is forthright about what she is doing and why. And it doesn't make it wrong. Who we call heroes, how our past drives our military policies and practices, how we justify intervention in the affairs of other nations - she makes us question these topics and much more. Her's is a version of history we need and should be added to our national discussion of who we are and how to reconcile with our past.
“The past is everywhere in us.” (Iain Pears)
Dunbar-Ortiz's lens is narrow, but she is forthright about what she is doing and why. And it doesn't make it wrong. Who we call heroes, how our past drives our military policies and practices, how we justify intervention in the affairs of other nations - she makes us question these topics and much more. Her's is a version of history we need and should be added to our national discussion of who we are and how to reconcile with our past.
“The past is everywhere in us.” (Iain Pears)
August 7, 2018
While I am in passionate agreement with the thrust of this book — that the United States is a “crime scene” founded on a systematic strategy of genocide — I found Dunbar-Ortiz to be an infuriatingly unreliable narrator. It’s unfortunate because I was excited to pick up this book and really, really wanted to like it.
Early in the first chapter she describes indigenous diets as “mostly vegetarian” and persists throughout the book to refer to various tribes as “indigenous farmers.” While it’s true that some of America’s native tribes possessed sophisticated systems of agriculture, it’s widely known that hunting was an integral part of life — animal protein was a prized and indispensable food source. Not only that, but many tribes were nomadic hunter-gatherers, something that the author scarcely acknowledges.
Is Dunbar-Ortiz trying to portray indigenous populations as more politically correct, thus sympathetic, for a liberal readership? Or trying to legitimize them as “civilized?” Whatever the case, one gets the feeling that the author is willing to play games with the truth in order to propagate her agenda.
Another eyebrow-raising moment comes later when she claims that Crazy Horse was killed trying to escape his reservation. On the contrary, it’s well-established that Crazy Horse was set up to be murdered by one of his own people — the culmination of a long-standing, petty, intratribal rivalry. He wasn't trying to escape.
If one were to do a thorough fact checking, I suspect one would uncover similar distortions, omissions, and revisions of the true history. It’s a real shame because this should have been an important book.
Criticisms aside, I found myself cheering Dunbar-Ortiz throughout for her unflinching, scathing condemnation of the lies that made, and continue to make, America.
Early in the first chapter she describes indigenous diets as “mostly vegetarian” and persists throughout the book to refer to various tribes as “indigenous farmers.” While it’s true that some of America’s native tribes possessed sophisticated systems of agriculture, it’s widely known that hunting was an integral part of life — animal protein was a prized and indispensable food source. Not only that, but many tribes were nomadic hunter-gatherers, something that the author scarcely acknowledges.
Is Dunbar-Ortiz trying to portray indigenous populations as more politically correct, thus sympathetic, for a liberal readership? Or trying to legitimize them as “civilized?” Whatever the case, one gets the feeling that the author is willing to play games with the truth in order to propagate her agenda.
Another eyebrow-raising moment comes later when she claims that Crazy Horse was killed trying to escape his reservation. On the contrary, it’s well-established that Crazy Horse was set up to be murdered by one of his own people — the culmination of a long-standing, petty, intratribal rivalry. He wasn't trying to escape.
If one were to do a thorough fact checking, I suspect one would uncover similar distortions, omissions, and revisions of the true history. It’s a real shame because this should have been an important book.
Criticisms aside, I found myself cheering Dunbar-Ortiz throughout for her unflinching, scathing condemnation of the lies that made, and continue to make, America.
February 7, 2017
This was a difficult read. The events covered are—of course--brutal, and there is so much to take in about the unimaginable cruelty of the white colonists of the Americas. Every time I read about colonization (which is ongoing), I learn it is somehow is even worse than I previously thought.
This was also difficult in the sense that it is a ton of information to fit into one book, including a lot of numbers, names, dates, etc. There is so much covered, but here are some of things I took away from it:
- Just how much the indigenous peoples of the Americas had shaped and changed the land before colonists arrived--Dunbar-Ortiz argues that had North America been the untouched wilderness that is part of the white myth of colonization, European colonists wouldn't have been able to survive. They didn't know how to conquer wilderness. What they did know how to do is conquer people, and steal their cultivated land, buildings, trade routes, roads, etc from them.
- It's incredible that scalping is now associated with indigenous people, when it was indigenous people's scalps that were collected by white people for reward (including women and children).
- Dunbar-Ortiz does a great job in showing how the colonization of the Americas is connected with the colonization of other parts of Europe (like Ireland) as well as Africa (and the resultant slave trade). For instance, white colonist small farmers couldn't compete with plantations that used slaves, so they kept pushing into and squatting on indigenous land.
- The reason that colonists won so many of the initial battles against indigenous people was because they used already existing conflicts between indigenous nations and temporarily allied themselves with one group before turning on them when the conflict ended (especially in Central America).
Those are just a few bits of things that really stuck with me, but the effectiveness of this book is because of its broad scope, and showing how each individual story fits into the greater narrative of injustice and resistance.
This was also difficult in the sense that it is a ton of information to fit into one book, including a lot of numbers, names, dates, etc. There is so much covered, but here are some of things I took away from it:
- Just how much the indigenous peoples of the Americas had shaped and changed the land before colonists arrived--Dunbar-Ortiz argues that had North America been the untouched wilderness that is part of the white myth of colonization, European colonists wouldn't have been able to survive. They didn't know how to conquer wilderness. What they did know how to do is conquer people, and steal their cultivated land, buildings, trade routes, roads, etc from them.
- It's incredible that scalping is now associated with indigenous people, when it was indigenous people's scalps that were collected by white people for reward (including women and children).
- Dunbar-Ortiz does a great job in showing how the colonization of the Americas is connected with the colonization of other parts of Europe (like Ireland) as well as Africa (and the resultant slave trade). For instance, white colonist small farmers couldn't compete with plantations that used slaves, so they kept pushing into and squatting on indigenous land.
- The reason that colonists won so many of the initial battles against indigenous people was because they used already existing conflicts between indigenous nations and temporarily allied themselves with one group before turning on them when the conflict ended (especially in Central America).
Those are just a few bits of things that really stuck with me, but the effectiveness of this book is because of its broad scope, and showing how each individual story fits into the greater narrative of injustice and resistance.
February 10, 2017
"An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a good overview of U.S. history from the perspective of the Indigenous Peoples of North America.
This is an important book. This is not a pleasant book to read.
Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates that the United States, since its founding, has been a colonial-settler empire. She discusses several popular, big concept myths that obscure the reality of the United States: The founding myth of the Thirteen Colonies breaking free from the British Empire; the myth of the Western Frontier; the modern myth of the ever more perfect union of multicultural, multiracial peoples living in a Melting Pot; the Nation of Immigrants.
Each of these myths obscures the reality that the founding and continued development of the United States coincided with (and continues to coincide with) the near complete destruction of North America's Indigenous civilizations and genocide of its peoples.
It's not a perfect book. It could have had some better editing to keep a tighter focus on the main topic - especially in the last third of the book.
The only complaint I have (and it's a minor complaint) is that Dunbar-Ortiz should have skipped the early section on Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, and the Crusades. She is out of her depth on those topics. For example, she has it backwards when discussing Spain. The Moors were the colonial-setters and Ferdinand and Isabella were the leaders of the Indigenous resistance. As I said, she should have skipped this section entirely - it wasn't needed for the focus of her book.
Overall, I think this is an important book about U.S. History. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in U.S. history, Indigenous Peoples, or colonialism.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Notes:
Audiobook:
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 10 hours and 18 minutes
Release Date: 2014-11-18
Publisher: Tantor Audio
This is an important book. This is not a pleasant book to read.
Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates that the United States, since its founding, has been a colonial-settler empire. She discusses several popular, big concept myths that obscure the reality of the United States: The founding myth of the Thirteen Colonies breaking free from the British Empire; the myth of the Western Frontier; the modern myth of the ever more perfect union of multicultural, multiracial peoples living in a Melting Pot; the Nation of Immigrants.
Each of these myths obscures the reality that the founding and continued development of the United States coincided with (and continues to coincide with) the near complete destruction of North America's Indigenous civilizations and genocide of its peoples.
It's not a perfect book. It could have had some better editing to keep a tighter focus on the main topic - especially in the last third of the book.
The only complaint I have (and it's a minor complaint) is that Dunbar-Ortiz should have skipped the early section on Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, and the Crusades. She is out of her depth on those topics. For example, she has it backwards when discussing Spain. The Moors were the colonial-setters and Ferdinand and Isabella were the leaders of the Indigenous resistance. As I said, she should have skipped this section entirely - it wasn't needed for the focus of her book.
Overall, I think this is an important book about U.S. History. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in U.S. history, Indigenous Peoples, or colonialism.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Notes:
Audiobook:
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 10 hours and 18 minutes
Release Date: 2014-11-18
Publisher: Tantor Audio
January 4, 2016
Not since David Stannard's "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World" have I read such a clear history of the United States. In no way do I want to diminish from the great work of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" but that text did not stay with me or speak to me in the same way that Dunbar-Ortiz's book has. It is readable enough to assign to a high school audience, so if you are a parent trying to supplement the nonsense that generally passes for US history consider assigning this to your son or daughter. I plan to come back to this book every Thanksgiving so that I can better commit to memory some of stories and facts Dunbar-Ortiz raises to our attention, such as the story of the Ulster-Scots ("already seasoned settler colonialists" by the 18th century) using techniques already practiced on the Irish (such as scalping) on Indigenous Americans and the refusal of the Sioux Nation to accept hundreds of millions of dollars awarded in a 1980 Supreme Court case as reparations given their belief that "accepting the money would validate the US theft of their most sacred land." In a political environment where US Americans can still use the term "illegal immigrant" without irony it would help to have as many people armed with the true facts of our settler colonial legacy as possible.
December 26, 2021
Such a disappointment. Did the people who gave this book five stars actually read it? Do they like reading? Have they actually read a well-written book before? Or do they just give the book five stars because they like its thesis? I like its thesis too. But this book is miserable. I finished it only because I felt I needed to read the whole thing in order to earn the right to pan it.
The beginning and end are occasionally entertaining, even thought-provoking, though deeply flawed. The middle is just a barrage of one damn thing after another, mostly battles. The writing is consistently bad and--worse--it's boring.
For someone who decries the militarization of our culture, she presents an mostly military narrative of Indigenous peoples in the area now occupied by the USA. For someone who questions very notion of property ownership, she presents history as if it were a football game--a story of territorial wins and losses. It's not that these ideas aren't important: the sustained and often unprovoked violence of settler colonialism is an important part of the argument of genocide; the loss of and alienation from homeland is the central feature of Indigenous trauma. And yet the presentation in this book reduces the narrative to "war is cruel." Yes, war is brutal. And the victors rarely present the other side as sympathetic. This is true regardless of whether the war was colonial or not, whether it was "fair" or balanced or constrained by mutually agreed-upon rules.
This is not a mere war story. The book very nearly makes it one.
Dunbar-Ortiz acknowledges that American colonialists created legal frameworks to suit their ends and revised them to further those ends. She points out that the legal frameworks often ignored native peoples altogether (eg. the doctrine of discovery); she argues that the laws are designed to support genocidal policy... but then she constantly smears the colonialists' actions as "illegal": illegal theft of land, illegal squatting, illegal, illegal, illegal... If the legal framework itself is inconsistent and illegitimate, what does it matter if people's actions are illegal? What matters is that they are immoral, that they conflict directly with the patriotic narratives they claim.
Dunbar-Ortiz hammers certain words over and over: genocide, squatter, illegal, colonial. I don't disagree with the terms, but I don't think you prove an argument by repetitive name-calling. I don't mind activist history, in fact I quite like it (my favorite is Detroit I Do Mind Dying), but Dunbar-Ortiz's history mostly serves to reinforce rather than unravel the colonialist structures and mindsets. I like activist history when it actually backs up its claims.
The beginning and end are occasionally entertaining, even thought-provoking, though deeply flawed. The middle is just a barrage of one damn thing after another, mostly battles. The writing is consistently bad and--worse--it's boring.
For someone who decries the militarization of our culture, she presents an mostly military narrative of Indigenous peoples in the area now occupied by the USA. For someone who questions very notion of property ownership, she presents history as if it were a football game--a story of territorial wins and losses. It's not that these ideas aren't important: the sustained and often unprovoked violence of settler colonialism is an important part of the argument of genocide; the loss of and alienation from homeland is the central feature of Indigenous trauma. And yet the presentation in this book reduces the narrative to "war is cruel." Yes, war is brutal. And the victors rarely present the other side as sympathetic. This is true regardless of whether the war was colonial or not, whether it was "fair" or balanced or constrained by mutually agreed-upon rules.
This is not a mere war story. The book very nearly makes it one.
Dunbar-Ortiz acknowledges that American colonialists created legal frameworks to suit their ends and revised them to further those ends. She points out that the legal frameworks often ignored native peoples altogether (eg. the doctrine of discovery); she argues that the laws are designed to support genocidal policy... but then she constantly smears the colonialists' actions as "illegal": illegal theft of land, illegal squatting, illegal, illegal, illegal... If the legal framework itself is inconsistent and illegitimate, what does it matter if people's actions are illegal? What matters is that they are immoral, that they conflict directly with the patriotic narratives they claim.
Dunbar-Ortiz hammers certain words over and over: genocide, squatter, illegal, colonial. I don't disagree with the terms, but I don't think you prove an argument by repetitive name-calling. I don't mind activist history, in fact I quite like it (my favorite is Detroit I Do Mind Dying), but Dunbar-Ortiz's history mostly serves to reinforce rather than unravel the colonialist structures and mindsets. I like activist history when it actually backs up its claims.
April 16, 2021
One of the (many) things that unsettles me in my regular engagements with US history is the near total absence of any discussion, or seeming awareness, of the country as a colony of settlement. The country’s indigenous peoples are barely considered in the national story or for that matter in most of the historical texts. We see it in the subtle (and not so subtle) language of US history – in the ‘settlement’ of the frontier; in the ‘opening up’ of the west, in the ‘last’ of the Mohicans, of the Californians and the overwhelming absence of images of indigenous Americans as contemporary figures in US popular culture (let’s leave aside their exploitative and in many cases frankly racist images in elite sport – baseball and football, notably).
Yet, as Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz shows in this engaging book, telling US history from ‘the native’s point of view’ (to misappropriate Clifford Geertz) casts the country in a whole new light. From the outset, she is uncompromising, stating that the “history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism – the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft” (p2) and making clear that this is not a happily-ever-after kind of history, and that this is only ‘a’ native history; there will be others. This then is a history of dispossession, of being made alien at home, of being made marginal in the only place your people have been – that is, it is a story of colonisation of a mind we have seen in many other places – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, The Philippines, South Africa as well as throughout Central and South America and so on and so forth. As any historian of any of those places will say, yes they are settler colonies but they are all distinct.
It is this distinctness that adds the unsettling and unexpected second strand to Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument: that the process of conquest and the military practice it spawned shaped and continues to shape not only its self-perception but also the contemporary form of US military engagement with the world. She paints the picture of conquest by total war centred on the targeting of civilians, the destruction of property and the basic requirements of life and continuing relentless assaults by both standing armies and ‘special forces’ (or Ranger patrols of irregular groups). It is a compelling case drawing on analyses of contemporary US military jargon and slang (where it remains common for enemy territory to be labelled Indian Country, or In Country) to reinforce the point. On reflection it is probably the sheer banality of contempt for the USA’s indigenous peoples that makes the blindness about settler colonialism so unsettling.
There is a third sense in which Dunbar-Ortiz’s narrative is unsettling. A key way that historian make sense of what we do it via periodisation, that is, our tendency to break the issues/period we study into distinctly labelled time periods – colonial, federal, ante-bellum, reconstruction and so forth through the 18th and 19th centuries in the USA. In the same way as other indigenous historians have shown (see, for instance, Ranginui Walker’s Ka Whauwhai Tonu Matou dealing with Aotearoa/New Zealand) this indigenous history of the USA proposes a profoundly different, native-derived periodisation – and therefore different ‘turning points’ and historical nodes. Not surprisingly, it also offers a profoundly different reading of many of the key historical myths, stories and analyses that dominate the received versions of US history.
Finally, the key to the book is Dunbar-Ortiz’s dual set of skills: first is her confidence with the material, with events and stories that are known well, those that are not, and her ability to marshal that material to build a compelling argument (which the best we can ask from any historian). Second, she does not shy away from labelling invasion, settler-colonialism and genocide for what it was – in a setting where the dominant view of settler society ranged between physical extermination of the indigenous (as encapsulated in the statement usually attributed to General Philip Sheridan, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’) to the 'humane' view, as seen in the programme of Richard Henry Pratt and the subsequent Indian Schools movement, to ‘kill the Indian and save the man’.
Most powerfully, she paints a picture of indigenous peoples who wish to continue to exist, whose struggles for economic self-determination on their own terms (not those under governance regimes imposed by the colonial state) are paying off and a setting where the narrative of dysfunction is offset by advances in indigenous self-defined struggles and improvements – although happening after the book was finished I can’t help seeing the struggles over the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016/7 as the kind of hopeful future Dunbar-Ortiz sees. Of course, any history from an indigenous point of view must also be highlight, as this does, the continuing adversarial context of, in this case, highly militarized settler-colonialism. In this world, where the state and phoney science is regularly arrayed against groups who have never surrendered their sovereignty there remains much that can go wrong. Dunbar-Ortiz is adept at highlighting these tensions, drawing on their historical foundation and contemporary circumstances.
This is a tale of nations constantly vying for land and power on the one hand and to defend their existence on the other; the boundaries are never consistent but in the long run there is a single narrative – the fundamental one written out of the received version of US history. In the blurb on the back, the historian of African-American struggle Robin D G Kelly describes this as probably “the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime”: I’m often wary of blurb’s marketing aspect, but in this case Kelly may well be right – and it he’s wrong, it is certainly in the top five.
This challenge to the orthodoxy is well crafted, elegantly argued and fundamental to any approach to US history that deals with past in the country’s present, and the oozing sores left by the unacknowledged costs of colonisation (usually benignly labelled nation formation). I cannot recommend this highly enough.
Yet, as Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz shows in this engaging book, telling US history from ‘the native’s point of view’ (to misappropriate Clifford Geertz) casts the country in a whole new light. From the outset, she is uncompromising, stating that the “history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism – the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft” (p2) and making clear that this is not a happily-ever-after kind of history, and that this is only ‘a’ native history; there will be others. This then is a history of dispossession, of being made alien at home, of being made marginal in the only place your people have been – that is, it is a story of colonisation of a mind we have seen in many other places – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, The Philippines, South Africa as well as throughout Central and South America and so on and so forth. As any historian of any of those places will say, yes they are settler colonies but they are all distinct.
It is this distinctness that adds the unsettling and unexpected second strand to Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument: that the process of conquest and the military practice it spawned shaped and continues to shape not only its self-perception but also the contemporary form of US military engagement with the world. She paints the picture of conquest by total war centred on the targeting of civilians, the destruction of property and the basic requirements of life and continuing relentless assaults by both standing armies and ‘special forces’ (or Ranger patrols of irregular groups). It is a compelling case drawing on analyses of contemporary US military jargon and slang (where it remains common for enemy territory to be labelled Indian Country, or In Country) to reinforce the point. On reflection it is probably the sheer banality of contempt for the USA’s indigenous peoples that makes the blindness about settler colonialism so unsettling.
There is a third sense in which Dunbar-Ortiz’s narrative is unsettling. A key way that historian make sense of what we do it via periodisation, that is, our tendency to break the issues/period we study into distinctly labelled time periods – colonial, federal, ante-bellum, reconstruction and so forth through the 18th and 19th centuries in the USA. In the same way as other indigenous historians have shown (see, for instance, Ranginui Walker’s Ka Whauwhai Tonu Matou dealing with Aotearoa/New Zealand) this indigenous history of the USA proposes a profoundly different, native-derived periodisation – and therefore different ‘turning points’ and historical nodes. Not surprisingly, it also offers a profoundly different reading of many of the key historical myths, stories and analyses that dominate the received versions of US history.
Finally, the key to the book is Dunbar-Ortiz’s dual set of skills: first is her confidence with the material, with events and stories that are known well, those that are not, and her ability to marshal that material to build a compelling argument (which the best we can ask from any historian). Second, she does not shy away from labelling invasion, settler-colonialism and genocide for what it was – in a setting where the dominant view of settler society ranged between physical extermination of the indigenous (as encapsulated in the statement usually attributed to General Philip Sheridan, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’) to the 'humane' view, as seen in the programme of Richard Henry Pratt and the subsequent Indian Schools movement, to ‘kill the Indian and save the man’.
Most powerfully, she paints a picture of indigenous peoples who wish to continue to exist, whose struggles for economic self-determination on their own terms (not those under governance regimes imposed by the colonial state) are paying off and a setting where the narrative of dysfunction is offset by advances in indigenous self-defined struggles and improvements – although happening after the book was finished I can’t help seeing the struggles over the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016/7 as the kind of hopeful future Dunbar-Ortiz sees. Of course, any history from an indigenous point of view must also be highlight, as this does, the continuing adversarial context of, in this case, highly militarized settler-colonialism. In this world, where the state and phoney science is regularly arrayed against groups who have never surrendered their sovereignty there remains much that can go wrong. Dunbar-Ortiz is adept at highlighting these tensions, drawing on their historical foundation and contemporary circumstances.
This is a tale of nations constantly vying for land and power on the one hand and to defend their existence on the other; the boundaries are never consistent but in the long run there is a single narrative – the fundamental one written out of the received version of US history. In the blurb on the back, the historian of African-American struggle Robin D G Kelly describes this as probably “the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime”: I’m often wary of blurb’s marketing aspect, but in this case Kelly may well be right – and it he’s wrong, it is certainly in the top five.
This challenge to the orthodoxy is well crafted, elegantly argued and fundamental to any approach to US history that deals with past in the country’s present, and the oozing sores left by the unacknowledged costs of colonisation (usually benignly labelled nation formation). I cannot recommend this highly enough.
February 28, 2021
Engaged history writing has the advantage of clarity, provided that the author indicates what he or she stands for. That is certainly the case with Dunbar-Ortiz. She is of Native American origin and was active in the Pan-Native American movement. From the beginning of the book she outlines what its theme is: that the fight against the indigenous nations in North America was driven by an imperialism and racism that is ingrained in Western culture since Roman times; and specifically that the wars against the indigenous peoples in what later became the United States, both by the British (colonizers) and especially by the US state (from 1776) was a deliberate genocidal policy aimed at complete eradication, p 2: "The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft."
Now, it really isn't evident to use the concept of genocide, which was coined in the 20th century (the Holocaust), also for prior periods (I just refer to the discussion about the Armenian genocide). Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the fight against the Native Ameriacan nations was a conscious effort to wipe the indigenous peoples of the planet. She has plenty of quotes from US Presidents (of course foremost Andrew Jackson, but also Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt ...) and commanders of the US military that seem to substantiate this view. I am unable to judge, but still I'm not sure you can use the very loaded term of genocide in this case. But without doubt, the eviction of indigenous peoples in the United States from their land and their treatment afterwards certainly has all the appearances of a fundamentally unjust historical process.
Let's take a further look at Dunbar-Ortiz' style of argumentation. That is obviously very focused on the upholstering of her own thesis, but so much so that she only cites facts and quotes that support her view. Nowhere in this book are cited elements that may indicate in the direction of other points of view, or at least nuance her own view. Take for example the pre-Columbian period: here Dunbar-Ortiz moves heaven and earth to show that the indigenous peoples across America were living an almost heavenly existence, with plenty of food, in harmony with their habitat and surrounding peoples, etc; repeatedly she cites Charles Mann and his very questionable views.
I made several attempts to check certain historical facts that she cites in her exposition on the US war against the Indians, and regularly it appears that her version is at least very selective. Take for instance the "Long March of the Navajos" in 1866, presented by her as an attempt to kill thousands of indians, but in other, respectable studies I read a much more nuanced story. And so I can continue for a while.
Furthermore, Dunbar-Ortiz constantly draws parallels with the US action in the world in recent history and today. She regularly cites the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. From her contention that US imperialism is inherently connected to the genocidal policy towards the Native Americans this perhaps is understandable. But she proceeds with so much zeal that this book sometimes reads more like a classic marxist review of US foreign policy than a work about the history of the United States through the eyes of its indigineous peoples.
Unilateralism and selective presentation are the main problems of this work. It is striking for instance how few indigenous sources the author cites. We get little or no insight into the organization of the Native American resistance, and in the internal dynamics on the side of the indigenous peoples themselves. Moreover, at times the historical narrative is very slovenly and confused. No, engaged historiography certainly is not served by this work. (rating 1.5 stars)
Now, it really isn't evident to use the concept of genocide, which was coined in the 20th century (the Holocaust), also for prior periods (I just refer to the discussion about the Armenian genocide). Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the fight against the Native Ameriacan nations was a conscious effort to wipe the indigenous peoples of the planet. She has plenty of quotes from US Presidents (of course foremost Andrew Jackson, but also Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt ...) and commanders of the US military that seem to substantiate this view. I am unable to judge, but still I'm not sure you can use the very loaded term of genocide in this case. But without doubt, the eviction of indigenous peoples in the United States from their land and their treatment afterwards certainly has all the appearances of a fundamentally unjust historical process.
Let's take a further look at Dunbar-Ortiz' style of argumentation. That is obviously very focused on the upholstering of her own thesis, but so much so that she only cites facts and quotes that support her view. Nowhere in this book are cited elements that may indicate in the direction of other points of view, or at least nuance her own view. Take for example the pre-Columbian period: here Dunbar-Ortiz moves heaven and earth to show that the indigenous peoples across America were living an almost heavenly existence, with plenty of food, in harmony with their habitat and surrounding peoples, etc; repeatedly she cites Charles Mann and his very questionable views.
I made several attempts to check certain historical facts that she cites in her exposition on the US war against the Indians, and regularly it appears that her version is at least very selective. Take for instance the "Long March of the Navajos" in 1866, presented by her as an attempt to kill thousands of indians, but in other, respectable studies I read a much more nuanced story. And so I can continue for a while.
Furthermore, Dunbar-Ortiz constantly draws parallels with the US action in the world in recent history and today. She regularly cites the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. From her contention that US imperialism is inherently connected to the genocidal policy towards the Native Americans this perhaps is understandable. But she proceeds with so much zeal that this book sometimes reads more like a classic marxist review of US foreign policy than a work about the history of the United States through the eyes of its indigineous peoples.
Unilateralism and selective presentation are the main problems of this work. It is striking for instance how few indigenous sources the author cites. We get little or no insight into the organization of the Native American resistance, and in the internal dynamics on the side of the indigenous peoples themselves. Moreover, at times the historical narrative is very slovenly and confused. No, engaged historiography certainly is not served by this work. (rating 1.5 stars)
November 13, 2022
Yet another example of how we have made calling everyone else racist the new goal of scholarship. Congratulations!
Spare yourself this tiresome pseudo-history and read something, anything by a true scholar on this subject. I recommend anything by this guy:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
This book should be called "White People Are the Root of All Evil in the World" because it has little to do with the history of America's indigenous peoples. To even call this book a "history" is being extremely generous with that word as it is mostly her opinions or opinions of other people she happens to agree with. To take only one example, she completely discounts the role that infectious diseases played in wiping out huge swaths of native people as European viruses entered into societies with no immunities. She takes the side of a few crack pots who claim that diseases only played a minor role and the true culprit was genocide. Unless you are saying that small pox was genocide which is completely stupid because European settlers didn’t have any idea of what small pox was nor did they know the first damn thing about any of the diseases they faced. The author takes this stupidity one step further by comparing the death of indigenous people from diseases to the Holocaust.
The author also tries to paint the pre-Columbian era as some sort of Eden in which “man lived in perfect harmony with nature.” This sort of mythology adds nothing to our understanding of Native Americans. I’ve already read A People’s History of The United States so I know that our forefathers were pirates and this book adds zero to any further explanation of these peoples.
Spare yourself this tiresome pseudo-history and read something, anything by a true scholar on this subject. I recommend anything by this guy:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
This book should be called "White People Are the Root of All Evil in the World" because it has little to do with the history of America's indigenous peoples. To even call this book a "history" is being extremely generous with that word as it is mostly her opinions or opinions of other people she happens to agree with. To take only one example, she completely discounts the role that infectious diseases played in wiping out huge swaths of native people as European viruses entered into societies with no immunities. She takes the side of a few crack pots who claim that diseases only played a minor role and the true culprit was genocide. Unless you are saying that small pox was genocide which is completely stupid because European settlers didn’t have any idea of what small pox was nor did they know the first damn thing about any of the diseases they faced. The author takes this stupidity one step further by comparing the death of indigenous people from diseases to the Holocaust.
The author also tries to paint the pre-Columbian era as some sort of Eden in which “man lived in perfect harmony with nature.” This sort of mythology adds nothing to our understanding of Native Americans. I’ve already read A People’s History of The United States so I know that our forefathers were pirates and this book adds zero to any further explanation of these peoples.
January 10, 2021
A wonderful historical book which demystifies a lot in American history. It goes without saying that victors and conquerors dictate how history remembers events, and the vanquished and colonized's version of events is hardly considered. So just as the title of the book suggests, this history is centered and told dominantly through the Indigenous Peoples of the United States.
The writer states:
"To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous Peoples are erased. But Indigenous nations, through resistance, have survived and bear witness to this history."
I truly learnt a lot through this book. One of the wildest discoveries was finding out that Colombus never set foot in the United States (or North America). A fantastic read recommended to anyone interested in history.
The writer states:
"To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous Peoples are erased. But Indigenous nations, through resistance, have survived and bear witness to this history."
I truly learnt a lot through this book. One of the wildest discoveries was finding out that Colombus never set foot in the United States (or North America). A fantastic read recommended to anyone interested in history.
November 15, 2017
The book paints a picture of US genocide and colonialism with broad strokes, but has almost no details on daily life, developments in culture and philosophy, or indigenous history in Alaska, Hawaii and US territories. Unfortunately indigenous history is presented as a tool to understand modern US militarism, rather than an exploration of indigenous agency and resistance.
August 7, 2020
So when my roommate, who says he doesn’t know everyone, saw I was reading this book, said, “I love her. She is such a wonderful person.” See, he does know everyone. I don’t know if she is a lovely person, but you should read this book.
Look, at least since Howard Zinn’s work and more recently with the 1619 project, people have taken issue with the presentation of the facts of American history. In other words, you change the narrative of a melting pot where everyone gets along and everyone is great, you get called all types of names, Marxist being the politest. Or even when the Supreme Court in a recent decision upholds a treaty, people like Ted “will not defend my wife or father” Cruz make it sound like it is the end of the world instead of the upholding of a legal and blinding documents.
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s book explains why.
My one complaint about this book it that I finished it and wanted more. Luckily there is a source listing at the end. I should also note that the complaint is perhaps unfair considering what the scope of the series and book is supposed to be.
The important thing about this book, the reason why you should read, is that Dunbar-Ortiz makes an excellent case for why the violence in the United States is the why it is, or at least one of the reasons why.
Part of the reason why some people get upset like Ted Cruz about rulings such as the Supreme Court decision regarding the Muscogee (Crow) Nation and the state of Oklahoma is that they were most likely taught, whether directly or by omission, that the United States kept all the treaties it made with the various Indigenous nations and tribes.
It didn’t.
I can’t think of one.
Additionally, some textbooks, less so today one hopes, make it sound like the Indigenous population basically gave the land to the white people and voluntarily moved to reservations. Maybe the Trail of Tears gets mentioned but then everything is fine until Little Bighorn.
Again, not the case.
Now, I knew that before reading this book. What Dunbar-Ortiz does in part is link the colonization of the United States and the myths about Colonization to international policy. After all, she points out, the treatment of the Indigenous population was international policy. Those were Nations. She is not the first one to link the US to violence as being in its bones, but the case she lays out in the book is compelling. You can also see the links between colonial policy and the rise of Trump.
The book’s title is accurate but in a less direct way. This is not a blow by blow account of the wars or what society was like before the arrival of settlers/colonizers/murderers, which, in part, I was hoping to read some of. It is an account of a colonization of Nations, where the colonizer has never truly acknowledged what happened. (Look, don’t mention Canada or Australia as places of other such actions, this book and this review are solely concerned with the US). We need to come to terms -and more importantly – acknowledge what happened in the past if we are going to be a country that we want to be, instead of a shadow of a myth whose reality discounted and abused over half our population.
Look, at least since Howard Zinn’s work and more recently with the 1619 project, people have taken issue with the presentation of the facts of American history. In other words, you change the narrative of a melting pot where everyone gets along and everyone is great, you get called all types of names, Marxist being the politest. Or even when the Supreme Court in a recent decision upholds a treaty, people like Ted “will not defend my wife or father” Cruz make it sound like it is the end of the world instead of the upholding of a legal and blinding documents.
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s book explains why.
My one complaint about this book it that I finished it and wanted more. Luckily there is a source listing at the end. I should also note that the complaint is perhaps unfair considering what the scope of the series and book is supposed to be.
The important thing about this book, the reason why you should read, is that Dunbar-Ortiz makes an excellent case for why the violence in the United States is the why it is, or at least one of the reasons why.
Part of the reason why some people get upset like Ted Cruz about rulings such as the Supreme Court decision regarding the Muscogee (Crow) Nation and the state of Oklahoma is that they were most likely taught, whether directly or by omission, that the United States kept all the treaties it made with the various Indigenous nations and tribes.
It didn’t.
I can’t think of one.
Additionally, some textbooks, less so today one hopes, make it sound like the Indigenous population basically gave the land to the white people and voluntarily moved to reservations. Maybe the Trail of Tears gets mentioned but then everything is fine until Little Bighorn.
Again, not the case.
Now, I knew that before reading this book. What Dunbar-Ortiz does in part is link the colonization of the United States and the myths about Colonization to international policy. After all, she points out, the treatment of the Indigenous population was international policy. Those were Nations. She is not the first one to link the US to violence as being in its bones, but the case she lays out in the book is compelling. You can also see the links between colonial policy and the rise of Trump.
The book’s title is accurate but in a less direct way. This is not a blow by blow account of the wars or what society was like before the arrival of settlers/colonizers/murderers, which, in part, I was hoping to read some of. It is an account of a colonization of Nations, where the colonizer has never truly acknowledged what happened. (Look, don’t mention Canada or Australia as places of other such actions, this book and this review are solely concerned with the US). We need to come to terms -and more importantly – acknowledge what happened in the past if we are going to be a country that we want to be, instead of a shadow of a myth whose reality discounted and abused over half our population.
December 24, 2014
The epigraph and concluding quote in the final chapter of this book sum up why it's such an important read:
"That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within - and yet continuously obscured by - what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy...[T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'être."
- Jodi Byrd
"The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the
memory will
Be there: eyes will become kind an deep, and the bones of
this nation
Will mend after the revolution."
- Simon Ortiz
"That the continued colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within - and yet continuously obscured by - what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy...[T]he status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'être."
- Jodi Byrd
"The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the
memory will
Be there: eyes will become kind an deep, and the bones of
this nation
Will mend after the revolution."
- Simon Ortiz
![Profile Image for laurel [the suspected bibliophile].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1645808644i/7494844._UX200_CR0,6,200,200_.jpg)
June 7, 2019
A brief history of the United States, as seen through the lens of the American Indians who were thoroughly slaughtered, removed and erased from their own lands.
This is a must-read, and should be mandatory reading for all high school students and general readers of American (US) history. It unravels the layers of propaganda, misinformation and erasing American Indians faced, and debunks many common myths about the lands and peoples of the United States before European colonization.
The first myth is that the Americas were not the blank slate of opportunity, resources and freedom that has been taught in history books, and that American Indians were not the dirty, savage people in need of "civilizing," which has been used as colonizer justification for the actions of the Spanish, French, English and American colonies in systematically enslaving, invading and eradicating indigenous lands.
Various American Indian communities did much to shape, alter and cultivate the landscape to suit their needs, and in many cases American Indian cities and communities were more populated than many European cities (and had better infrastructure, organization and hygienic practices than their European counterparts).
Dunbar-Ortiz does a fantastic job pointing out American culture wasn't homogenous, but incredibly varied, unique and intricate (and often more advanced and egalitarian than European cultures). She also slices through a common interpretation that germs undid the indigenous population, but rather it was a systematic invasion from a peoples well used to subjecting and enslaving other people (see: the English with the Scotts and Irish; the Spanish and the Inquisition, the Jews and the Moors; the general entrapment of land-holding serfs and peasants, the rise of the landed nobility and the take-over of the commons; etc. etc. ad nauseam).
Misconceptions over the American Revolution (and how much of the occupation of North America was conducted by squatters breaking US treaties with various indigenous communities), the various Indian Wars throughout the 19th century, and the concentration and subjugation of American Indians onto reservations (and the forced removal of their culture, language and traditions), are addressed as well, along with how the United States government commonly used the military (specifically: Black soldiers) to pacify the West after the Civil War as a way to use one marginalized, problematic group to destroy another marginalized, problematic group. And of course, the entire 20th century, the Civil Rights movement, and the slow two-steps-forward-one-step backward way of addressing restitution for centuries of genocide and invasion.
There is so much more I could talk about and go on, but essentially: Read (or listen) to this book.
It really is essential reading, particularly as the history of the United States continues to be reshaped into patriotic propaganda for conservative (and also liberal) objectives.
However, it is definitely a brief overview of events and different peoples, and as the author states, if you want to learn more, read what indigenous historians have been writing about individual communities. The history of American Indians is vast, complicated and so much richer than we were taught in school.
This is a must-read, and should be mandatory reading for all high school students and general readers of American (US) history. It unravels the layers of propaganda, misinformation and erasing American Indians faced, and debunks many common myths about the lands and peoples of the United States before European colonization.
The first myth is that the Americas were not the blank slate of opportunity, resources and freedom that has been taught in history books, and that American Indians were not the dirty, savage people in need of "civilizing," which has been used as colonizer justification for the actions of the Spanish, French, English and American colonies in systematically enslaving, invading and eradicating indigenous lands.
Various American Indian communities did much to shape, alter and cultivate the landscape to suit their needs, and in many cases American Indian cities and communities were more populated than many European cities (and had better infrastructure, organization and hygienic practices than their European counterparts).
Dunbar-Ortiz does a fantastic job pointing out American culture wasn't homogenous, but incredibly varied, unique and intricate (and often more advanced and egalitarian than European cultures). She also slices through a common interpretation that germs undid the indigenous population, but rather it was a systematic invasion from a peoples well used to subjecting and enslaving other people (see: the English with the Scotts and Irish; the Spanish and the Inquisition, the Jews and the Moors; the general entrapment of land-holding serfs and peasants, the rise of the landed nobility and the take-over of the commons; etc. etc. ad nauseam).
Misconceptions over the American Revolution (and how much of the occupation of North America was conducted by squatters breaking US treaties with various indigenous communities), the various Indian Wars throughout the 19th century, and the concentration and subjugation of American Indians onto reservations (and the forced removal of their culture, language and traditions), are addressed as well, along with how the United States government commonly used the military (specifically: Black soldiers) to pacify the West after the Civil War as a way to use one marginalized, problematic group to destroy another marginalized, problematic group. And of course, the entire 20th century, the Civil Rights movement, and the slow two-steps-forward-one-step backward way of addressing restitution for centuries of genocide and invasion.
There is so much more I could talk about and go on, but essentially: Read (or listen) to this book.
It really is essential reading, particularly as the history of the United States continues to be reshaped into patriotic propaganda for conservative (and also liberal) objectives.
However, it is definitely a brief overview of events and different peoples, and as the author states, if you want to learn more, read what indigenous historians have been writing about individual communities. The history of American Indians is vast, complicated and so much richer than we were taught in school.
April 21, 2015
Reading this book was a life changing experience. So much history of which I was ignorant explained and documented. My mind was blown on every page. For instance: "Scalping" was a practice brought to the colonies by the Ulster Scots who had practiced it first on the Irish, and then on the Indigenous peoples occupying the colonies.
August 9, 2018
Ahhh...I'm sad. This is nonfiction and because this was incredibly sad...it hurt my heart. I struggle with this topic, even when it is brushed over in fictional stories. I'm half native american and half European. So this book was about my people....both the massacred and the ones with guns. Every book has a slant and that is what I struggle with the most. I want this part of history in whatever story I'm reading the way I want cheesecake.....I want the whole thing and not just a piece.
I'm glad this book wasn't longer, but even with that said, there was still so much to be said. My ancestors left the reservation in the very late 1800's and early 1900's, and entered white society. Neither option was easy. This is an important part of U.S. history and I don't think enough can be said about it. So 4 stars.
I'm glad this book wasn't longer, but even with that said, there was still so much to be said. My ancestors left the reservation in the very late 1800's and early 1900's, and entered white society. Neither option was easy. This is an important part of U.S. history and I don't think enough can be said about it. So 4 stars.
September 7, 2015
This book is based on an important big idea. That is, that we need another way of segmenting our understanding of US history that reflects the history of indigenous people in the United States rather than accepting a narrative of denial that has been reinforced through centuries of US history through different variations (outright denial of the survival of indigenous people today, the manifest destiny narrative that poses that atrocities against indigenous people were indeed atrocious and yet inevitable, or post-modern narratives that claim to embrace diversity but also constitute a form of denial). For this reason, I would say this book is worth reading for those who are interested in gaining a better understanding of US history.
That said, despite the potential of this interesting idea for a history and the importance of this topic, I am not sure Dunbar-Ortiz nailed it. I believe this book is intended to be an overview and so you don't delve too deeply into any specific segment. The book is repetitious in more than a few places, some of what is presented does not seem adequately researched, there are some outright misinterpretations based on questionable assumptions and other cases in which she presents theories that do not seem well-supported or fully worked out. Dunbar-Ortiz frames this as a history rather than an advocacy text or a sociological text, which is why I may be judging it a bit more harshly in the historical frame. I accept that telling the history of indigenous people through written sources is difficult, but I think some books have explained this better and done a more effective job of showing how sources (of different kinds) lead to different conclusions and different ways of understanding history.
All that said, it's not too long given the scope of the topic, and think it's worth a read for anyone with an interest in US history. I don't think the aspects of the text which are not strong detract from the main purpose of this book, which is to encourage resegmenting or reinterpreting our current understanding of US history so that we don't continue the harm of perpetuating the strategies of denial that are so tied up with our historical narrative as it stands.
That said, despite the potential of this interesting idea for a history and the importance of this topic, I am not sure Dunbar-Ortiz nailed it. I believe this book is intended to be an overview and so you don't delve too deeply into any specific segment. The book is repetitious in more than a few places, some of what is presented does not seem adequately researched, there are some outright misinterpretations based on questionable assumptions and other cases in which she presents theories that do not seem well-supported or fully worked out. Dunbar-Ortiz frames this as a history rather than an advocacy text or a sociological text, which is why I may be judging it a bit more harshly in the historical frame. I accept that telling the history of indigenous people through written sources is difficult, but I think some books have explained this better and done a more effective job of showing how sources (of different kinds) lead to different conclusions and different ways of understanding history.
All that said, it's not too long given the scope of the topic, and think it's worth a read for anyone with an interest in US history. I don't think the aspects of the text which are not strong detract from the main purpose of this book, which is to encourage resegmenting or reinterpreting our current understanding of US history so that we don't continue the harm of perpetuating the strategies of denial that are so tied up with our historical narrative as it stands.
June 26, 2018
I've been having this feeling lately about anti-immigrant xenophobia: that if you were to dig past the hate and into the fear, and then even past the fear -- you'd find shame. A rotting, festering shame of what white settlers did and do to native people. An unacknowledged knowing: our ancestors were murderers, rapists, terrorists, thieves. Instead of speaking the words, we lash out violently against others who immigrate to this land, fearing they'll do what we've done and keep doing. We use the words for them that would rightfully be used for our ancestors and ourselves. I've been feeling that maybe healing only comes with a reckoning with history.
So books like this one feel very important.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is up against an impossibility: to write all of U.S. history from the perspective of all of the indigenous nations it abused. And do it in 230 pages. So of course, everything is summarized and glossed-over. This book is no substitute for deeper study of any region, event, or people. But it's still a remarkable achievement.
It's not a history of indigenous people, but rather a retelling of the popular founding narratives from the perspective of indigeneity. I was surprised by the effort she makes to clarify that the weapons of settler colonialism were first used against the peasantry of what is now Great Britain. She also explores how the tactics sharpened in wars and massacres against the Indigenous people of this continent have been used by the U.S. to bludgeon people all over the world.
To give one tiny example: when John Yoo wrote the "torture memos" (which justify torture and prisoner abuse) he found legal precedent in the way the U.S. tortured and abused Indians. They were the first "unlawful combatants," without even the minimal rights given to prisoners of war.
And still after all the history of horror, she ends with these lines by Acoma poet Simon Ortiz:
The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the memory will
Be there: eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of this nation
Will mend after the revolution.
So books like this one feel very important.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is up against an impossibility: to write all of U.S. history from the perspective of all of the indigenous nations it abused. And do it in 230 pages. So of course, everything is summarized and glossed-over. This book is no substitute for deeper study of any region, event, or people. But it's still a remarkable achievement.
It's not a history of indigenous people, but rather a retelling of the popular founding narratives from the perspective of indigeneity. I was surprised by the effort she makes to clarify that the weapons of settler colonialism were first used against the peasantry of what is now Great Britain. She also explores how the tactics sharpened in wars and massacres against the Indigenous people of this continent have been used by the U.S. to bludgeon people all over the world.
To give one tiny example: when John Yoo wrote the "torture memos" (which justify torture and prisoner abuse) he found legal precedent in the way the U.S. tortured and abused Indians. They were the first "unlawful combatants," without even the minimal rights given to prisoners of war.
And still after all the history of horror, she ends with these lines by Acoma poet Simon Ortiz:
The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the memory will
Be there: eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of this nation
Will mend after the revolution.
January 3, 2017
The NODAPL struggle in North Dakota over the last year has encouraged me to revisit and deepen my understanding of what it means to be indigenous in the US. Reading this book, wading through a history of genocide, offered a number of important reorientations for me. As far as I know, there aren't other comprehensive histories of the US from the perspective of indigenous people's, however this could have been much better. If anyone has any recommendations I'd be excited to look into them.
A few significant problems I had with the text:
-Early on in the book there is a brief summary of life before colonization. The author presents an argument against the idea that Native Americans were savages without civilization, government, etc , instead arguing that they constituted state-like structures and forms of organization in some ways different, but equally intelligent compared to those of the colonizers. Fundamentally, this form of argument is flawed since it is not a level of sophistication in governing men and "nature" that makes one unsavage, but how one relates to the world (i.e. not committing genocide on people and destroying the world). From this perspective, Native Americans were not inferior, but in so far as they did not reproduce the forms of power of Europe, were ethically far greater. (This is by no means meant to reduce all nations to the same, since they were not and many were also had their problems, but on an altogether different level than their colonizers).
-Too much of this history focuses on victimhood and horrific defeat, which in some way is part of the same reasoning behind the elders at Standing Rock hiring non-violent civil disobedience advisors and encouraging only non-violence actions in response to violence. Perhaps at Standing Rock this is primarily a strategic decision, but one must question why the warrior and resistance does not get as much space within this book and why a discourse of recognition and rights does.
-There's very little or no criticism given of seeking recognition and rights, especially given the history of broken treaties.
There were a number of interesting themes and concepts that are explored in depth despite the shortcomings. One is that the US military continues to refer to being in enemy territory as being in "Indian Country", which has more recently been shortened to "In Country". The book makes the argument that the genocidal war against the first nations forms the foundation of how the military has operated as an imperial power throughout the rest of the world (especially in terms of counter-insurgency). Another is that the settler mentality, beating back the wild frontier, continues to form the core of American's idea of individual freedom and the idea of what it means to be American.
America has never been great. It's been hell from the beginning.
A few significant problems I had with the text:
-Early on in the book there is a brief summary of life before colonization. The author presents an argument against the idea that Native Americans were savages without civilization, government, etc , instead arguing that they constituted state-like structures and forms of organization in some ways different, but equally intelligent compared to those of the colonizers. Fundamentally, this form of argument is flawed since it is not a level of sophistication in governing men and "nature" that makes one unsavage, but how one relates to the world (i.e. not committing genocide on people and destroying the world). From this perspective, Native Americans were not inferior, but in so far as they did not reproduce the forms of power of Europe, were ethically far greater. (This is by no means meant to reduce all nations to the same, since they were not and many were also had their problems, but on an altogether different level than their colonizers).
-Too much of this history focuses on victimhood and horrific defeat, which in some way is part of the same reasoning behind the elders at Standing Rock hiring non-violent civil disobedience advisors and encouraging only non-violence actions in response to violence. Perhaps at Standing Rock this is primarily a strategic decision, but one must question why the warrior and resistance does not get as much space within this book and why a discourse of recognition and rights does.
-There's very little or no criticism given of seeking recognition and rights, especially given the history of broken treaties.
There were a number of interesting themes and concepts that are explored in depth despite the shortcomings. One is that the US military continues to refer to being in enemy territory as being in "Indian Country", which has more recently been shortened to "In Country". The book makes the argument that the genocidal war against the first nations forms the foundation of how the military has operated as an imperial power throughout the rest of the world (especially in terms of counter-insurgency). Another is that the settler mentality, beating back the wild frontier, continues to form the core of American's idea of individual freedom and the idea of what it means to be American.
America has never been great. It's been hell from the beginning.
January 5, 2015
The United States understands genocide to be a terrible thing that other countries have done, or are doing. The eradication of an entire population—civilian women, men, and children—along with their culture and national sovereignty—is something we condemn in our media. When we see genocide happening elsewhere, we debate if and when we should step in with economic sanctions or military action—when it is time to put a stop to a crime against humanity. Rarely, if ever, do we examine our own history long enough to understand that the United States was created by people who committed genocide against the people who were already living here. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, gives us this truth in its fullness, showing us the history we have attempted to deny. She does so “…not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous peoples are erased (p. 7).”
A book of this nature could easily become so mired in pain that healing is impossible or so lost in names and dates that we forget it was—and is—lived in flesh and blood. Dunbar-Ortiz does neither: history lives in her words, as she unearths what we do not know and connects it to what we have learned. Our history is charted for us as our ancestors lived it, stolen territory by stolen territory. At a little over two hundred pages, this book is not only vital and revelatory, but a relatively quick read.
The author sets the stage by dispelling a colonialist myth—when we speak of Indians, we are not speaking of a monolithic culture: “Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples—hundreds of nations—not as a racial or ethnic group (p. xiii).” She also dispels the notion that Indians were uncivilized: “In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them (p. 46).”
Ah, but what about all those stories of Indians sneaking into settlers’ villages in the night and wreaking havoc? If the colonists were murdering, so too were the Indians, the story goes. Dunbar-Ortiz puts the story in perspective: “Settler colonialism, an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical process (p. 8).”
Dunbar-Ortiz walks us through that historical process: from the Northwest Ordinance to the Louisiana Purchase, from the Monroe Doctrine to the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, from the Long Walk to Wounded Knee. She exposes the heroes of our national lore—Kit Carson chief among them—as the leaders of a “scorched earth” approach to Indigenous peoples in which women, men, and children were massacred town by town, food sources were confiscated and eliminated, and nations of people were force-marched from their homes. She also discusses the pivotal role that authors played in the formation of our national myths, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper: “Cooper’s reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel The Last of the Mohicans has become the official US origin story (p. 103).”
As Dunbar-Ortiz replaces our mythical past with the real one, she describes the concrete forms and consequences of genocide, including broken treaty after broken treaty. Recognizing the validity of treaties shows us a path forward: “The central concern for Indigenous peoples in the United States is prevailing upon the federal government to honor hundreds of treaties and other agreements concluded between the United States and Indigenous nations as between two sovereign states (p. 203).”
Native activism, from the seizure of Alcatraz in 1969 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 to many legal battles over land rights and broken treaties, has centered on this one idea: sovereignty. Dunbar-Ortiz details this activism, and what sovereignty means to specific nations: for example, the Sioux have sought the return of the Paha Sapa, or the Black Hills, since their seizure in 1876.
Dunbar-Ortiz’s history of the United States asks us to face facts and move forward, respecting the goals of Native activism as we do so: a future that acknowledges the past must, by its very nature, be transformative. If we are to create this future, we must have a full understanding of our past—and I can think of no better way of gaining that understanding than reading Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, which should become required reading in all US history courses.
A book of this nature could easily become so mired in pain that healing is impossible or so lost in names and dates that we forget it was—and is—lived in flesh and blood. Dunbar-Ortiz does neither: history lives in her words, as she unearths what we do not know and connects it to what we have learned. Our history is charted for us as our ancestors lived it, stolen territory by stolen territory. At a little over two hundred pages, this book is not only vital and revelatory, but a relatively quick read.
The author sets the stage by dispelling a colonialist myth—when we speak of Indians, we are not speaking of a monolithic culture: “Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples—hundreds of nations—not as a racial or ethnic group (p. xiii).” She also dispels the notion that Indians were uncivilized: “In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them (p. 46).”
Ah, but what about all those stories of Indians sneaking into settlers’ villages in the night and wreaking havoc? If the colonists were murdering, so too were the Indians, the story goes. Dunbar-Ortiz puts the story in perspective: “Settler colonialism, an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical process (p. 8).”
Dunbar-Ortiz walks us through that historical process: from the Northwest Ordinance to the Louisiana Purchase, from the Monroe Doctrine to the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, from the Long Walk to Wounded Knee. She exposes the heroes of our national lore—Kit Carson chief among them—as the leaders of a “scorched earth” approach to Indigenous peoples in which women, men, and children were massacred town by town, food sources were confiscated and eliminated, and nations of people were force-marched from their homes. She also discusses the pivotal role that authors played in the formation of our national myths, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper: “Cooper’s reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel The Last of the Mohicans has become the official US origin story (p. 103).”
As Dunbar-Ortiz replaces our mythical past with the real one, she describes the concrete forms and consequences of genocide, including broken treaty after broken treaty. Recognizing the validity of treaties shows us a path forward: “The central concern for Indigenous peoples in the United States is prevailing upon the federal government to honor hundreds of treaties and other agreements concluded between the United States and Indigenous nations as between two sovereign states (p. 203).”
Native activism, from the seizure of Alcatraz in 1969 and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 to many legal battles over land rights and broken treaties, has centered on this one idea: sovereignty. Dunbar-Ortiz details this activism, and what sovereignty means to specific nations: for example, the Sioux have sought the return of the Paha Sapa, or the Black Hills, since their seizure in 1876.
Dunbar-Ortiz’s history of the United States asks us to face facts and move forward, respecting the goals of Native activism as we do so: a future that acknowledges the past must, by its very nature, be transformative. If we are to create this future, we must have a full understanding of our past—and I can think of no better way of gaining that understanding than reading Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, which should become required reading in all US history courses.
March 4, 2022
This is a very difficult book to read - for two reasons.
First, of course, is the content. I pretty much knew before I started that the history we are fed in school in America about the "discovery" of our country and the subsequent colonization is totally whitewashed. I was looking for a more detailed understanding and hoped this book would give me that. It does - somewhat - but I really wanted almost a side-by-side comparison of the legend with the truth. That, it does not do. Still, it is difficult to absorb just how ruthless, evil, greedy and cold the Europeans who immigrated to North America were. It hurts to try and comprehend what the Native people went through as we established this nation.
But even more difficult was trying to wade through the horrendous structure of this book. To me, a good history needs to have some sort of chronology to it. This book felt random in its timeline and I got lost many times as I tried to get through it. I suppose if I was an academic historian or student I might appreciate it more. It seems thoroughly researched and literally half of the book is an extensive set of notes, source material, suggested readings and an index. Yes, half! But the author's expansive discourses on colonialism, economics, politics and European traditions took me so far out of my interest in the topic of the title, that I kept flipping forward to see how many more pages I must endure to the chapter's end. Not at all the experience I want to have when reading a book.
As I said, what I wanted was a debunking of the patriotic legends we are told and a honest portrait of the many "heroes" we revere, who essentially were nothing more than greedy, murderous, genocidal sociopaths. OK, that's perhaps a bit extreme, but in some cases, not. I came away from reading this book feeling that my knowledge of the topic really didn't grow in any way. I'm convinced its many accolades are due totally to the subject, since we are in a new era where challenging the established order of things gets you a free pass to the front of the line. I wonder if any of the people who praise this book actually read it - or simply made their assessment based on the title.
First, of course, is the content. I pretty much knew before I started that the history we are fed in school in America about the "discovery" of our country and the subsequent colonization is totally whitewashed. I was looking for a more detailed understanding and hoped this book would give me that. It does - somewhat - but I really wanted almost a side-by-side comparison of the legend with the truth. That, it does not do. Still, it is difficult to absorb just how ruthless, evil, greedy and cold the Europeans who immigrated to North America were. It hurts to try and comprehend what the Native people went through as we established this nation.
But even more difficult was trying to wade through the horrendous structure of this book. To me, a good history needs to have some sort of chronology to it. This book felt random in its timeline and I got lost many times as I tried to get through it. I suppose if I was an academic historian or student I might appreciate it more. It seems thoroughly researched and literally half of the book is an extensive set of notes, source material, suggested readings and an index. Yes, half! But the author's expansive discourses on colonialism, economics, politics and European traditions took me so far out of my interest in the topic of the title, that I kept flipping forward to see how many more pages I must endure to the chapter's end. Not at all the experience I want to have when reading a book.
As I said, what I wanted was a debunking of the patriotic legends we are told and a honest portrait of the many "heroes" we revere, who essentially were nothing more than greedy, murderous, genocidal sociopaths. OK, that's perhaps a bit extreme, but in some cases, not. I came away from reading this book feeling that my knowledge of the topic really didn't grow in any way. I'm convinced its many accolades are due totally to the subject, since we are in a new era where challenging the established order of things gets you a free pass to the front of the line. I wonder if any of the people who praise this book actually read it - or simply made their assessment based on the title.
October 1, 2014
Couple of interesting facts, very bad writting. The theme of the book certainly deserved better.
July 14, 2020
Required reading. My only criticism is that it was a bit redundant at times but I think that's because horrible things were in fact done to indigenous peoples over and over and over again.
January 9, 2016
If you’re looking for a history of Native Americans in North America, this is not it.
If you’re looking for a bitter, one-sided, biased, political rant against white America, that meanders all over time around the globe, then you’ve found your book.
It’s hard to voice how frustrating I found this book. I really want to learn about the Native Americans and their civilization prior to European colonization and US expansion. Instead I got an ass-whipping. In the introduction, the author explains that if you want a history of the various native american nations, then you can go consult references from each group to get their own history. You won’t find it here.
Instead you get a lot of rants against American domestic and foreign policy and a smear campaign against a list of historical American figures. In one breath, we’ll read about the Delawares or the Cherokee and in the next read about Tripoli or the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Did you know the Vietnam War was actually a racial war of Americans trying to kill Asians? It is apparently modeled after the genocide of the peace-loving native americans and had nothing to do with helping South Vietnam fight communism.
There is plenty of name calling and extreme adjectives. Kit Carson was a blood-thirsty mercenary. The Alamo hosted legends such as the alcoholic Sam Houston, the mercenary Davy Crockett, the slave-owning William Travis, and other white supremacists. What the defense of the Alamo against the Mexicans has anything to do with Indigenous People history is beyond me, but it enables the author to do a little mudslinging.
I am 98% white with a small trace of Cherokee. I am extremely interested in learning more on this topic, but the author alienated me from the Introduction forward. She accuses the reader of ignorance and still believing in Manifest Destiny. She is still angry over the Columbus landing at Hispaniola. She rants over topics such as American concentration camps and the Final Solution.
The word “genocide” is used an average of once every 5 pages. I agree with the message, but felt beaten over the head. I’m sure getting a rise out of the reader was the author’s first intention, but it became a distraction.
The final chapters discuss modern activism by Native Americans and I did learn quite a bit there. It’s a sensitive topic and I wish I could have learned more in this book. The book is also filled with facts, but they are disorganized and most are found in others better written books.
If you want to learn about the genocide of the Native Americans during American western expansion, I encourage you to read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. If you want to learn about what all the various nations were doing prior to European colonization, then look elsewhere. I’d like to read that book too, if I could find it.
If you’re looking for a bitter, one-sided, biased, political rant against white America, that meanders all over time around the globe, then you’ve found your book.
It’s hard to voice how frustrating I found this book. I really want to learn about the Native Americans and their civilization prior to European colonization and US expansion. Instead I got an ass-whipping. In the introduction, the author explains that if you want a history of the various native american nations, then you can go consult references from each group to get their own history. You won’t find it here.
Instead you get a lot of rants against American domestic and foreign policy and a smear campaign against a list of historical American figures. In one breath, we’ll read about the Delawares or the Cherokee and in the next read about Tripoli or the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Did you know the Vietnam War was actually a racial war of Americans trying to kill Asians? It is apparently modeled after the genocide of the peace-loving native americans and had nothing to do with helping South Vietnam fight communism.
There is plenty of name calling and extreme adjectives. Kit Carson was a blood-thirsty mercenary. The Alamo hosted legends such as the alcoholic Sam Houston, the mercenary Davy Crockett, the slave-owning William Travis, and other white supremacists. What the defense of the Alamo against the Mexicans has anything to do with Indigenous People history is beyond me, but it enables the author to do a little mudslinging.
I am 98% white with a small trace of Cherokee. I am extremely interested in learning more on this topic, but the author alienated me from the Introduction forward. She accuses the reader of ignorance and still believing in Manifest Destiny. She is still angry over the Columbus landing at Hispaniola. She rants over topics such as American concentration camps and the Final Solution.
The word “genocide” is used an average of once every 5 pages. I agree with the message, but felt beaten over the head. I’m sure getting a rise out of the reader was the author’s first intention, but it became a distraction.
The final chapters discuss modern activism by Native Americans and I did learn quite a bit there. It’s a sensitive topic and I wish I could have learned more in this book. The book is also filled with facts, but they are disorganized and most are found in others better written books.
If you want to learn about the genocide of the Native Americans during American western expansion, I encourage you to read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. If you want to learn about what all the various nations were doing prior to European colonization, then look elsewhere. I’d like to read that book too, if I could find it.
June 19, 2021
Had to return to the library before I finished. Strong research and important history. I do wish there was more about individual nations. The first half didn’t really go into depth.
September 30, 2017
As I commented while I was reading, I agree with the overall thesis of this book: that the US acted as a colonizer to the Indigenous nations of North America, and perpetrated a campaign of genocide against those nations. That said, I found this book immensely frustrating in execution.
When talking about Native history specifically, Dunbar-Ortiz was quite strong. My problems with this book were twofold, both related:
-The low-key liberal antisemitism that cropped up, especially in descriptions of Israel (most notably comparing it with the Afrikaaner apartheid in South Africa, which completely disregards the very distinct historical circumstances of those two nations, and the complicated history of Israel's founding.
-The tendency to play loosely with historical fact for rhetorical force.
The description of Obama as a "typical descendant of settlers" also made me raise my eyebrows a little, considering that "mixed-race and half Kenyan" does not exactly describe the "typical settlers" Dunbar-Ortiz was referring to.
I wanted to like this book. I'm very interested in being more informed about Native American history and discussions of US usurpation of Native lands continues to be incredibly relevant - the "Indian wars" are not over. But I cannot recommend this specific book as a good place to find that information.
When talking about Native history specifically, Dunbar-Ortiz was quite strong. My problems with this book were twofold, both related:
-The low-key liberal antisemitism that cropped up, especially in descriptions of Israel (most notably comparing it with the Afrikaaner apartheid in South Africa, which completely disregards the very distinct historical circumstances of those two nations, and the complicated history of Israel's founding.
-The tendency to play loosely with historical fact for rhetorical force.
The description of Obama as a "typical descendant of settlers" also made me raise my eyebrows a little, considering that "mixed-race and half Kenyan" does not exactly describe the "typical settlers" Dunbar-Ortiz was referring to.
I wanted to like this book. I'm very interested in being more informed about Native American history and discussions of US usurpation of Native lands continues to be incredibly relevant - the "Indian wars" are not over. But I cannot recommend this specific book as a good place to find that information.
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