An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

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Synopsis

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.

Synopses source: Goodreads

Review

Genre(s): Nonfiction, History, US History, BIPOC
HB&W Rating: 4 stars
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I went into this book knowing of the grave injustice that’s been perpetuated by the United States against indigenous people going as far back as colonial days. But there’s knowing and then there’s knowing. I don’t count myself in that second category because I’m not of native descent, so I will never “know” to that extent, but if I had been peering at the truth before, this book blew my eyes wide open.

It’s common knowledge that there are two sides to every story. It’s also commonly spoken though not commonly acknowledged that it is the winners who write history. My American education as it related to indigenous people focused primarily on the idyllic view of the first pilgrims sharing a meal with Native Americans, a brief overview of the Trail of Tears, Sacajawea guiding Lewis and Clark, and Disney’s movie, Pocahontas. More effort was put into teaching us how great our country was, how it amassed power under its credo of “manifest destiny” as was our God-given right. I remember thinking back then how proud I was to be a citizen of the most powerful nation on earth. Then on Thanksgiving one year, I remember thinking yes, we are very grateful that the native people helped the pilgrims and settlers, but look how they were repaid for their kindness. This started my search for native stories and points of view.

Dunbar-Ortiz walks us through a comprehensive telling of this nation’s (and others’ by association) history as was experienced by indigenous people, giving us the other side of the story, the one that’s been suppressed, swept under the rug, and largely ignored. It’s much easier to ignore any poor behavior than to take ownership of it, after all. Murder, manipulation, systematic genocide, theft of lands, historic and religious sites, and property, broken treaties and promises, and systemic racism that continues today, the author doesn’t shy away from any of it. She gives us the facts, cut and dried, undeniable.

Now that my eyes are open, I can’t help but see how prevalent this treatment still is. This book was written 10 years ago, but you’ve only got to read the latest in the news to see the same patterns reemerging with our current administration. Just look at the name change of Alaska’s famous mountain from Denali (a local Alaskan indigenous word for “the great one”) to the moniker Mt McKinley, placed on it by a white gold rusher in honor of President McKinley (whose annexations of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii were further examples of the US policy of expanding its territory at the expense of native populations) and became officially adopted by the federal government in 1917. President Obama changed the name back to Denali in 2015, but President Trump has changed it back again. Additionally, President Trump renamed The Gulf of Mexico, which borders more Mexican shoreline than American but which was actually named for the ancient indigenous city of Mexico, to the Gulf of America. Whether intentional slights or just entitled white people being entitled white people, these are tiny examples of the systemic racism toward indigenous people evident today.

Comprehensive, enlightening, heartbreaking, this book will make you rethink everything you were ever taught in an American history classroom.

Until next time,

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