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2015 Recipient of the American Book Award
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.
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #4424 in Books
- Published on: 2015-08-11
- Released on: 2015-08-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .90" w x 6.10" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 312 pages
Review
“Meticulously documented, this thought-provoking treatise is sure to generate discussion.”
—Booklist
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly
“From the struggles against the early British settlers in New England and Virginia to the final catastrophes at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, Dunbar-Ortiz never flinches from the truth.”
—CounterPunch
“[An] impassioned history.... Belongs on the shelf next to Dee Brown’s classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A must-read for anyone interested in the truth behind this nation’s founding.”
—Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, PhD, Jicarilla Apache author, historian, and publisher of Tiller’s Guide to Indian Country
“This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes US history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks. Here, rendered in honest, often poetic words, is the story of those tracks and the people who survived—bloodied but unbowed. Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
“Dunbar Ortiz’s . . . assessment and conclusions are necessary tools for all Indigenous peoples seeking to address and remedy the legacy of US colonial domination that continues to subvert Indigenous human rights in today’s globalized world.”
—Mililani B. Trask, Native Hawai‘ian international law expert on Indigenous peoples’ rights and former Kia Aina (prime minister) of Ka La Hui Hawai‘i
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States provides an essential historical reference for all Americans. . . . The American Indians’ perspective has been absent from colonial histories for too long, leaving continued misunderstandings of our struggles for sovereignty and human rights.”
—Peterson Zah, former president of the Navajo Nation
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History . . . pulls up the paving stones and lays bare the deep history of the United States, from the corn to the reservations. If the United States is a ‘crime scene,’ as she calls it, then Dunbar-Ortiz is its forensic scientist. A sobering look at a grave history.”
—Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations
“Justice-seekers everywhere will celebrate Dunbar-Ortiz’s unflinching commitment to truth—a truth that places settler-colonialism and genocide exactly where they belong: as foundational to the existence of the United States.”
—Waziyatawin, PhD, activist and author of For Indigenous Minds Only
“Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awarenesses, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers—settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing—to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence.” —Bill Ayers
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a fiercely honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement, one which has never been attempted by any other historian or intellectual. The presentation of facts and arguments is clear and direct, unadorned by needless and pointless rhetoric, and there is an organic feel of intellectual solidity that provides weight and trust. It is truly an Indigenous peoples’ voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz’s book direction, purpose, and trustworthy intention. Without doubt, this crucially important book is required reading for everyone in the Americas!”
—Simon J. Ortiz, Regents Professor of English and American Indian Studies, Arizona State University
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes a masterful story that relates what the Indigenous peoples of the United States have always maintained: Against the settler U.S. nation, Indigenous peoples have persevered against actions and policies intended to exterminate them, whether physically, mentally, or intellectually. Indigenous nations and their people continue to bear witness to their experiences under the U.S. and demand justice as well as the realization of sovereignty on their own terms.”
—Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and author of Reclaiming Diné History
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
161 of 181 people found the following review helpful.
A necessary catalog of toxic, hidden lies that linger on
By GregJS
Reading this book is not a pleasant experience. But it is a good experience. So many horrific wrongs committed in the past have been proclaimed as heavenly goods; and those of us alive today, as the unwitting inheritors of these distortions, build our homes on top of them, not realizing that the lush green grass beneath our feet just barely covers highly toxic waste only inches below. Then we wonder why we suffer from untold dis-eases. It is not pleasant to discover that we have been living on top of a toxic dump; but it is very good to be alerted to that fact. Only then can we begin to clean up the mess. And we must clean up the mess.
So while some may dismiss this book, saying, “That’s all ancient history now. It’s not like we can undo the past and give Native Americans their land back. Let’s just move on” - as if to say that this book’s topic is not relevant to our lives in the present - the truth is that this book can be approached as a catalog of the hidden, toxic lies that the dominant culture continues to tell itself, right up until the present moment and that are built into our current lives without our being aware of them. As such, this book is of great and immediate value to every one of us, right now.
In summary, Dunbar-Ortiz shows how European-Americans have continually reframed Native Americans’ role in our national myth-narrative - always with the purpose of maintaining the basic structure of that narrative. That myth-narrative, as she describes it, is the laughable notion of liberty-through-empire - the idea that it is America’s divinely appointed duty to violently impose free-market capitalism on the rest of the world’s peoples in order to lift them up and liberate them (even though only a relative few ever do well in this system). So, for example, we started off, in the 1700’s-1800’s blatantly framing Native Americans as sub-human enemies of God’s blessed nation and as obstacles to our Manifest Destiny. Then, we retroactively reframed them as virtually nonexistent - as if the pilgrims had arrived in a virgin New World. We then went on to frame them as helpless victims needing us to rescue them; as having been eliminated mainly by diseases; as having been equal belligerents in a “fair fight” who simply happened to come out the losers; and finally, as one of many valuable contributors and welcome citizens (right along with all other ethnic immigrant groups) to our “great society.” None of these narratives is true, however. The truth is simply that Native Americans composed many nations who became colonized peoples struggling to preserve their integrity and sovereignty against uniquely vicious invaders who, perversely driven by greed, used the most grotesque, dishonorable tactics of total, scorched-earth war in an attempt to exterminate them.
Each lie we made up to hide this simple truth served to make us feel good about taking indigenous peoples’ lands away from them. No matter which of these stories we told ourselves, the result was the same: America fulfilled her Manifest Destiny and became what we were always “intended” to become according to God’s divine plan, as His special, chosen people.
The thing is, these are not just lies told in the past about Native Americans. As the unwitting inheritors of that past, we continue to tell ourselves these exact same lies in countless situations today. We tell ourselves that certain peoples are sub-human, or are our enemies when they are not. We tell ourselves that people we victimize are “equal players” and are equally culpable. We tell ourselves that the wrongs we commit are justified by the fact that we are doing God’s work and fulfilling His plan or will. We treat people abusively and then say something nice to them, or give them trinkets, as if this cancels our guilt. We do this on the level of foreign policy, at the domestic/local level, and in our private lives and intimate relationships. We do this all the time. We do it to enrich ourselves at others’ expense and to ease our guilty consciences. Many continue to suffer and die because of these lies. But we do not see this clearly because we have hundreds of years of practice not seeing it.
What this book demonstrates, really, is that our “heroic forefathers’” most significant legacy to us may be an amazing capacity for self-deception. And unless we are willing to re-examine our history, we will continue passing that legacy down to future generations. Since self-deception cannot but cause endless problems and suffering, this is a legacy we should seek to terminate ASAP. But the self-destructive habit of repeating these lies will remain ingrained in us until we can make those lies conscious to ourselves.
There are so many wrongs that we have unknowingly inherited and that we unknowingly perpetuate. They must be righted. Every single one of them. For our own good, as well as for others’. But first, we have to be able even just to see them for what they are. Dunbar-Ortiz’s book allows us to take some crucial steps towards the worthwhile goal of “truth and rectification” (if not reconciliation).
(My one criticism: I had hoped for a bit more description of how Indigenous peoples saw/see the world. We do not learn too much about their actual lives. This is fairly straightforward, somewhat dry, academic, western-style “this happened and then that happened” history. But as such, it’s excellent quality.)
88 of 99 people found the following review helpful.
For the United States, the Past is Prologue
By brianmpa
Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz has laid out for all Americans and the world at large the true founding of this nation - one based on slaughter, land theft, and slavery. In the so-called 'clash of cultures' as some have deemed the European settlers' interactions with the settled Native nations across the continent, it becomes obviously clear who the civilized culture really was. I am of Scottish-Irish descent, and my forebears were the barbarians that took this land away from settled peoples, and tried to destroy their cultures by any means necessary. Scalping babies and children and women for bounties paid by local governments and rest assured the painful deaths of these innocents through infection far exceed what any of us know or have experienced today. Skinning human beings and tanning their skin to make reins for their horses was yet another act of barbarity. We all know of the continuous and complete breaking of treaties, even today, as in Canada in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta province where the First nation peoples are having their water poisoned, their fish contaminated and rare and frequent childhood cancers developing. As Shakespeare wrote over 500 years ago, "the past is prologue", we see this true saying even today as the delusional ideology of "Manifest Destiny" being carried out today across the world. The violence and barbarity, the hatred of 'the other', and the genuine fear generated by the actions of our forebears as they slaughtered millions of native peoples is with us today in the madness we see in this country of gun purchases, and the gun violence continuing unabated. The story of the founding of the United States told by Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz is a sad, disturbing one, the first step, perhaps, to dropping the delusions most Americans have about their country and to take an honest look at themselves and what we have become across the world.
82 of 94 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent scholarship, tedious narrative
By Paul Klipp
I really want to like this book. The scholarship is evident and I'm sympathetic to the author's purpose, but it represents the worst kind of historical writing for me. There are no people in this book. I'm almost half-way through, and I haven't met a single person I can recognise as a human individual. The book is a collection of events and dates, organized in chronological order, with no attempt to identify cause and effect or to explore options in historical context. It literally reads like "general socioeconomic trend X" led to "general set of policies Y" therefore "general socioeconomic trend Z". I could lift dozens of paragraphs from the text that fit that model, and I'm tired of reading them. I want stories, primary (or any) sources, discussion, explanation. I want to understand what happened, not to memorize dates. The closest thing to an explanation of early American Indian policy is that every person who had Scots-Irish blood in their veins inherited the evil that their ancestors generally wrought on Ireland.
I'm now looking for a book as well-researched as this one, but better-written. If I find it, I'll add it as a comment on this review.
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