An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonial settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people to possess their land. This trend of extermination became common in the twentieth century as the United States seized military and economic control of the world, capping five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism. The canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor (1871-90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, "The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world." Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.

I remember learning about Indian boarding schools in high school--places where Native American children were sent to be stripped of their identity and assimilated into white society. I count myself lucky for that; as the graves of abused children continue to be discovered throughout the United States and Canada, I get to be slightly less shocked than most. I learned about the Trail of Tears, too, though I guess everybody does, and I was fortunate not to get the Saturday Evening Post version of the Thanksgiving story. But I wonder now about the things I never learned. I didn't learn--or don't recall learning--that the population of North America was about 80% that of Europe (though the majority of that were clustered in the Aztec Empire of central Mexico). I didn't learn that most of the continent the Europeans "discovered" was carefully cultivated and maintained. I didn't learn that the Pilgrims were only able to set up shop at Plymouth because a disease brought by white settlers had cleared the shore of Wampanoag for them. I didn't learn that the white-on-white fighting of the Civil War was a relative blip in a century-long campaign pitting the Army against Native nations. And though I knew about boarding schools I never learned about allotment, termination, or that anyone ever went back to Wounded Knee.

What does the history of America look like when you foreground the perspective of indigenous peoples? This is the project of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, which traces the experiences of the various Native nations who live in the land now called the United States from the advent of white settlers to the present day. In my schooling experience, Native Americans have tended to be bit players who waltzed onto the stage a few times--once at Jamestown, then Plymouth, and then the Trail of Tears, right before intermission--and disappeared into the wings. When the perspective shifts, a new story emerges, one of various nations at the edge of a white frontier that moves violently across the continent under the banner of "manifest destiny," a sanitizing belief in its own inevitability.

Dunbar-Ortiz's thesis, more or less, is that the extermination of Native peoples is not merely incidental the story of the United States, but integral to it. This claim may seem rather radical, and the prose is certainly incendiary (see the "final solution" language in the blurb above?), but it's hard to argue in the face of the narrative assembled here. Extermination, Dunbar-Ortiz notes, was the official policy of every president until 1890, and though the violence largely, arguably ended with Wounded Knee, the same ideology is behind the allotment and termination periods, which first attempt to turn Indians into capitalist homeowners, and then "regular Americans." And Dunbar-Ortiz shows how the past, as they say, is present, tracing the ways in which the myths that justified genocide are still part of the ideologies that bolster American identity today: the noble frontiersman, manifest destiny, the multicultural state. 

The United States of America, as Dunbar-Ortiz describes it, does not merely have its origins in a settler colonialist project, but remains one. The endemic and reinforced poverty of Native nations is a part of that. But America's global militarism, too, has its roots in the Indian wars: did you know, for example, that the Army uses the term "Indian Country" to mean "behind enemy lines?" This is not merely an anachronism. Dunbar-Ortiz seizes on Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier" thesis--more or less, the idea that American identity and democracy are uniquely shaped by the frontier--to examine the ways in which the frontier's "closing" at the end of the 19th century provoked U.S. adventurism abroad. What would it mean, for example, to see the Vietnam war as a kind of colonial assault on indigenous people like the Black Hawk War or the Seminole War?

One of the strengths of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is how deftly it extends the context of this history forward and backward, as well as outward. It's helpful to think, for instance, of how colonialism as a project has its roots in the Crusades, as well as the English Acts of Enclosure, and its immediate antecedent in the English conquest of Ireland. Did you know that the Scots-Irish are the descendants of Scottish planters granted Irish land by the English crown? I have heard this term literally all my life and did not realize that's what it referred to. It's these Scots-Irish who become, according to Dunbar-Ortiz, the "foot soldiers" of settler colonialism in the U.S., doing the dirty work of "opening up" the frontier as they are displaced by larger plantations. It's no coincidence, she points out, that many of the 19th century's most notorious Indian-killers, are the descendants of these Scots-Irish, like Andrew Jackson, or legendary frontiersmen like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. I always thought it was a funny coincidence that so many Tennesseans ended up in Texas that they call Tennessee the "Volunteer State," but seeing the frontier as an anti-indigenous movement makes it all make sense--when the frontier moved, so did the frontiersmen, though the indigenous people they had to move out of their way may have changed.

I found this book vital and sobering, especially at the beginning and the end, when it covered much of the historical territory that I know less about. My only criticism--and perhaps I don't read enough popular history to compare--is that it seems awfully short to cover so much ground. It was disarming, in a way, to see the bits I know better passed over in a few sentences. (Someone should show the three-sentence summary of the Nez Perce War to William T. Vollmann; it would have saved him a lot of time.) But in the end, it does what it sets out to do: inform and unsettle. I felt visceral disgust, and quite a bit of helplessness, reflecting on how central genocide is to the story of our country. But, as Dunbar-Ortiz notes in the book's final pages, the future is not written, and there is still hope that with a tremendous effort, this place can be "radically reconfigured, physically and psychologically."