An indigenous peoples' history of the United States

Review by Choice Review

Roiling beneath the picture-perfect myth of the US is the truth of genocide and colonial dispossession of the continent's Indigenous population. In her no-holds-barred historical rundown of the Indian experience, Dunbar-Ortiz (emer., ethnic studies, California State Univ., Hayward) lays out this disturbing history, moving from European colonization as it supplied the formational motifs of the US on the East Coast and progressively west to California. Summarizing the lethality of militias and formal armies as they gutted Indigenous nations under the mysticism of Manifest Destiny, the author provides a valuable ongoing discussion of the official military permutation of "Indian Country" from the actual Indian Territory into the "In Country" of subsequent imperial adventures from Vietnam to Iraq. Puzzlingly, however, Dunbar-Ortiz places the initializing Doctrine of Discovery at the end of the book. In giving the same number of chapters to eastern Woodlanders as to west-of-the-Mississippi peoples, the author attempts to achieve balance, but the populous Woodlands had a complex, 300-year face-off with invasion; the race to the Pacific involved a mere 90 years. Thus, the book's treatment of the East feels like a whirlwind "top ten" review to anyone knowing the full and fraught history of the Woodlanders. Nevertheless, as a primer, this book is a worthwhile purchase. Summing Up: Recommended. All public and undergraduate levels/libraries. --Barbara Alice Mann, University of Toledo

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

Dunbar-Ortiz, Native American studies scholar and longtime American Indian Movement member, offers a radical rewrite of traditional U.S. history up to and including the five wars waged since WWII, a history, she explains, based on settler colonialism, or 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. As part of the long-­established Columbus myth, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a worldwide system of colonization, while, simultaneously, land in this country went from being sacred as it was for the indigenous to being a commodity to be bought and sold. Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't end her litany of violence against the indigenous as part of this land grab with the Sand Creek Massacre or Wounded Knee, as do some postmodern surveys of U.S. history. Instead, she argues that the same strategies employed with the indigenous peoples on this continent were mirrored abroad in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan, and Iraq again in 2003. Meticulously documented, this thought-provoking treatise is sure to generate discussion.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

American Indian activist and scholar Dunbar-Ortiz (The Great Sioux Nation) launches a full-bore attack on what she perceives as the glaring gaps in U.S. history about the continent's native peoples. Professional historians have increasingly been teaching much of what Dunbar-Ortiz writes about, yet given what she argues is the vast ignorance of the Indigenous experience, there still remains a knowledge deficit that needs to be rectified. She describes the U.S. as "a colonialist settler state, one that, like the colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules." The conventional national narrative, she writes, is a myth that's "wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence." What is fresh about the book is its comprehensiveness. Dunbar-Ortiz brings together every indictment of white Americans that has been cast upon them over time, and she does so by raising intelligent new questions about many of the current trends of academia, such as multiculturalism. Dunbar-Ortiz's material succeeds, but will be eye-opening to those who have not previously encountered such a perspective. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Dunbar-Ortiz (Outlaw Woman) undertakes the immense task of reframing the history of the United States in the context of "-settler-colonialism." Despite prevailing myths about Native peoples, Dunbar--Ortiz provides example after example of how flourishing, rich cultures and societies were systematically destroyed through forced re-education, massacre, occupation, relocation, and total disregard for diplomatic treaties. After building her case for the genocide of Native peoples by settlers, she draws distinctions between foreign policy in the 19th and 20th centuries to today's ongoing conflicts, painting a clear picture of the United States' myopic vision for itself. While initially narrator Laural Merlington sounds a bit dry and detached, further listening reveals her subtleties in tone and rhythm. VERDICT Though devastating at times, this work is well worth the investment of time and emotional energy. Be prepared for the inevitable change in perspective that accompanies hearing these stories.-Jeremy Bright, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism. Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz's (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn't been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while "Indian" isn't bad, since "[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider Indian' a slur," "American" is due to the fact that it's "blatantly imperialistic." Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a "colonialist settler-state" (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis--vis the Palestinians today) and then "displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated"after, that is, having been forced to live in "concentration camps." Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this bookundergraduates, mostly, in survey coursesprobably won't question Dunbar-Ortiz's inaccurate assertion that the military phrase "in country" derives from the military phrase "Indian country" or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were "gold-obsessed." Furthermore, most readers won't likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term "Anasazi") sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn't entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe. A Churchill-ian view of native historyWard, that is, not Winstonits facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Introduction This land We are here to educate, not forgive. We are here to enlighten, not accuse. -Willie Johns, Brighton Seminole Reservation, Florida Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America--"from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters"--are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today. It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself--the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties. What historian David Chang has written about the land that became Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: "Nation, race, and class converged in land." Everything in US history is about the land--who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity ("real estate") broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market. US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed "racist" or "discriminatory," are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism--settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, "The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life--or, at least, land is necessary for life." 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. Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society. Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples' perspective requires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth we've been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues. Teaching Native American studies, I always begin with a simple exercise. I ask students to quickly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained independence from Britain. Invariably most draw the approximate present shape of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific--the continental territory not fully appropriated until a century after independence. What became independent in 1783 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic shore. When called on this, students are embarrassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call this a Rorschach test of unconscious "manifest destiny," embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming inevitability of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent had previously been terra nullius, a land without people. Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" celebrates that the land belongs to everyone, reflecting the unconscious manifest destiny we live with. But the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country's founders. "Free" land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. Many were slave owners who desired limitless land for lucrative cash crops. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory ("Ohio Country") on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763. In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state's intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: "However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws." This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century. Origin narratives form the vital core of a people's unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. That part of the origin story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the "Doctrine of Discovery." According to a series of late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European nations acquired title to the lands they "discovered" and the Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it. As law professor Robert A. Williams observes about the Doctrine of Discovery: Responding to the requirements of a paradoxical age of Re- naissance and Inquisition, the West's first modern discourses of conquest articulated a vision of all humankind united under a rule of law discoverable solely by human reason. Un- fortunately for the American Indian, the West's first tentative steps towards this noble vision of a Law of Nations contained a mandate for Europe's subjugation of all peoples whose ra- dical divergence from European-derived norms of right conduct signified their need for conquest and remediation. The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence onward, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a world system of colonization. "Columbia," the poetic, Latinate name used in reference to the United States from its founding throughout the nineteenth century, was based on the name of Christopher Columbus. The "Land of Columbus" was--and still is--represented by the image of a woman in sculptures and paintings, by institutions such as Columbia University, and by countless place names, including that of the national capital, the District of Columbia. The 1798 hymn "Hail, Columbia" was the early national anthem and is now used whenever the vice president of the United States makes a public appearance, and Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on any territory ever claimed by the United States. Excerpted from An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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