An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Author	Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Cover artist	Gabi Anderson
Language	English
Genre	History
Publisher	Beacon Press, Boston, MA
Publication date	2014
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	296
OCLC	868199534

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a non-fiction book written by the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by Beacon Press. It is the third of a series of six ReVisioning books which reconstruct and reinterpret U.S. history from marginalized peoples' perspectives. On July 23, 2019, the same press published An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People, an adaptation by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese of Dunbar-Ortiz's original volume.

Synopsis

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States describes and analyzes a four-hundred-year span of complex Indigenous struggles against the colonization of the Americas. The book highlights resultant conflicts, wars, and Indigenous strategies and sites of resistance.

The book's contents across many chronological chapters challenge what Dunbar-Ortiz articulates as the founding mythology of the burgeoning country, bolstered in the 19th century by the concept of Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery. In the book, Dunbar-Ortiz seeks to show "how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them". It details how the myth rose out of the imperatives of settler colonialism and graphically depicts this as the seizure of the original inhabitants' territories and subsequent displacement and elimination of them through genocidal practices. One manifestation of the myth and expression of the genocide is identified as the movement to Kill the Indian, Save the Man. Also described is the predominance of anti-Indigenous practices and values celebrated in popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries through writers like James Fenimore Cooper, especially in his novel and the subsequent cinematic renditions of Last of the Mohicans; Henry David Thoreau; Walt Whitman; and in D.W. Griffith's enormously popular Birth of a Nation. Beyond popular culture, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States details how such policies, practices, and values were manifest through the ranks of the U.S. military to the highest offices of government.

Dedication

The book is dedicated to Jack D. Forbes, Vine Deloria Jr. and Howard Adams.

Table of contents

• Author's Note
• Introduction: This Land

In the introduction, Dunbar-Ortiz lays her task on the table:

"How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues."

"This book attempts to tell the story of the United States as a colonial settler-state, one that, like colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules. Indigenous peoples, now in a colonial relationship with the United States, inhabited and thrived for millennia before they were displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated."

Dunbar-Ortiz asserts that the reality of the history of US policies and actions toward Native peoples is a reality of settler-colonial imperialism, and that this reality is inherent in the national origin myth of the United States: Puritan settlers had a covenant with God to take the land, and the basis of the Columbus myth is in the discovery doctrine. She describes how the system of settler colonialism depends on force, violence, and genocide, and concludes that US history cannot be understood without addressing that fact.

In the introduction Dunbar-Ortiz also discusses the changing approaches taken by historical scholars in dealing with these facts, and concludes they have failed to understand that history because they have failed to apply a colonial framework in their approaches.

• One: Follow the Corn

Dunbar-Ortiz supports her assertion that "North America in 1492 was not a virgin wilderness but a network of Indigenous nations ..." with her description of the agricultural and technological accomplishments, governance structures, trade networks, and practices of land stewardship of the Indigenous nations' civilizations for centuries before the arrival of Europeans.

• Two: Culture of Conquest

Dunbar-Ortiz traces the development of the European culture of conquest and colonization during the centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Key to her analysis are the Crusades; the papacy directing mercenaries to crush domestic pagans, women, witches, and heretics; the emergence of the concept of land as private property by enclosure of the commons and privatization of land; the use of displaced populations to settle the British American colonies with the promise of land; the emergence of white supremacy ideology from the Crusades and the colonization of Ireland, and the use of that ideology to neutralize class conflict between the landed and landless by giving confiscated lands in the colonies to the landless. Other factors identified as contributing to the culture of conquest are the Protestant belief of being a chosen people founding a New Jerusalem, and the transition from religious wars to genocidal wars. In this chapter she also challenges history scholars' consensus terminal narrative.

• Three: Cult of the Covenant
• Four: Bloody Footprints
• Five: Birth of a Nation
• Six: The Last of the Mohicans and Andrew Jackson’s White Republic
• Seven: Sea to Shining Sea
• Eight: “Indian Country”
• Nine: US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
• Ten: Ghost Dance Prophesy: A Nation is Coming
• Eleven: The Doctrine of Discovery
• Conclusion: The Future of the United States
• Acknowledgments
• Suggested Reading (5 pages)
• Notes (19 pages)
• Works Cited (15 pages)
• Index

Reception

Reviews

Among the various reviews, early 21st century issues and tensions in the U.S. have been highlighted. Indigenous press and other press regularly inclusive of Indigenous news, too, have put forth reviews, such as the Tribal College Journal, and The Santa Fe New Mexican.

A reviewer in CounterPunch wrote that this book "will be of great value to those first learning about the Indigenous perspective as well as someone like me who has been reading and writing about native peoples for the past twenty-five years."

Publishers Weekly found the book comprehensive, noting that "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."

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the book was of comparable importance to Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and found that it "synthesizes a vast body of scholarship, much of it by Indians themselves, and provides an antidote to the work of historians who have rationalized the settling of the West and the “civilizing” of the Indians."

From a review in Summit Daily: “Imperialism,” “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “land theft” are all words that matter when writing and studying this history. Throughout her book, she repeatedly emphasizes the importance of being truthful and accurate when confronted with the often-ugly realities of this nation’s past.

Awards

Recognition of the book's value has also come in the form of praise and awards such as that from Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams, suggesting this is the most important book on the subject of U.S. history. In 2015, it received the American Book Award and the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

Reading lists and excerpts

The Human Rights Campaign recommended reading and discussing the book as one means of dealing responsibly with Thanksgiving. The book was also included in recommended reading lists by Business Insider, Patch, BookRiot, and Oxfam America.

Salon posted an excerpt about it on Columbus Day.