TITLE: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
AUTHOR: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
296 pages, Beacon Press, ISBN 9780807057834 (softcover, also available in hardcover, e-book, audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): 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.
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Squeezing the entire documented history of all the Indigenous Nations of North America, from pre-colonization through the present, into a single book is a daunting, perhaps impossible, task. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz does about the best job achievable, I think, hewing as close to a chronological account as one can when trying to cover a large swath of overlapping peoples, events, causes, and effects. The book is a mostly high-level look at several hundred years’ worth of history, concentrating on the “big events” (including but not limited to the Trail of Tears, Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee) and the various declared and undeclared wars against Indigenous nations right up to the end of the 1800s, while still paying attention to the effect of those wars, as well as genocide and relocation, on Indigenous populations.
The book covers a lot of material I remember studying in elementary school, high school, or both (I feel like the colonial period was covered more generally in elementary school, but then with a greater focus on New York State history at some point) in the 1970s and early ‘80s, but from the point of view of indigenous peoples rather than the white/Eurocentric prevailing view. I know I learned about the Iroquois Confederacy and its influence on the United States Constitution; I know we studied the events of the Trail of Tears, Little Big Horn, and Wounded Knee (although I guess I’m just young enough that the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation wasn’t something I was aware of until reminded about it here), as well as the Plymouth and Jamestown settlements. I recall learning about the Navajo “code-talkers” contributions to Allied efforts during World War Two. What I don’t remember learning about at all is the systematic shrinking of the reservations and the horrors of the residential school system. To me as a kid/teen, the reservations were some kind of weird “nations with our nation” with unknown boundaries, and I don’t think I knew anyone of actual Indigenous descent until I was well into adulthood. Dunbar-Ortiz’s work has just confirmed for me that there’s a lot I never learned about the Indigenous people of even the area where I grew up (the lower Hudson Valley), never mind the rest of the country.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is not just a history book. It is also a critique: of the Doctrine of Discovery, of the way the legend of the founding and growth of the United States glosses over, if not outright erases, the destruction of autonomous Indigenous nations, of how our current military’s language and methodology continues to place Indigenous peoples as “the other”/the enemy. The last few chapters are light on history and heavy on sociopolitical commentary regarding the then-current US (published in 2014) and its near-future, and of how reparations are/are not being made equitably to the Indigenous nations that still survive.
If nothing else, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s work has inspired me to read more about the Indigenous populations of the areas I grew up, went to college, worked, and currently live: the lower Hudson Valley, western New York state, Roanoke Virginia, and northwest New Jersey. This book also made me want to read the rest of the titles in Beacon Press’s “Revisioning History” series.