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

I. INTRODUCTION

As part of the ReVisioning American History Series published by Beacon Press, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides a valuable addition to the growing number of works inspired by Howard Zinn's A Peoples' History of the U.S.¹ She discredits the US origin myth with an extraordinary compilation of evidence documenting centuries of sustained effort to eliminate Native Americans. The author, whose mother was part Indian, does not regard that label as a slur and uses the terms "Indigenous," "Indian," and "Native" interchangeably.

US school history texts nurture a false narrative which explains how European settlers discovered a largely uninhabited, primeval wilderness. According to the majority view, essentially a civil religion, brave pioneers fulfilled their manifest destiny as God's chosen people in a promised land enriched by their exceptional industry. Scholar-activist Dunbar-Ortiz offers an alternative Native American perspective that indicts brutal settler colonialism as genocide.

II. CONQUEST

Instead of the glorious triumphalism celebrated by US Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz depicts a sordid colonialism commonly practiced by European settlers around the globe. English settlers invaded Northern Ireland, engaged in scalping the natives, and forced their removal. French, Dutch, Spanish, British, and Portuguese colonial settlers conquered indigenous peoples from Australia to South Asia to Africa and the Americas. Europeans bearing the "white man's burden" developed the Doctrine of Discovery, legalizing the acquisition of unpopulated lands and the forced civilizing of inferior natives beyond the protection of western legal norms.

An Indigenous Peoples' History begins with pre-colonial political systems, agrarian practices, and cultural achievements of the Indians living on what became US territory. The litany of European settler atrocities that followed makes for difficult reading. The author details the longstanding scorched earth, total war policies that date from the founding: settler rangers terrorizing indigenous peoples by burning crops, demolishing homes, and paying bounties for the scalps of men, women, and children. The description of how US army personnel skinned Indian victims to make bridles for their horses offers a shocking alternative to the Hollywood western portrayal of the Indian Wars. General Jeffrey Amherst practiced germ warfare against the Pontiac.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the US would benefit greatly from illustrations depicting the original Indian lands and their steadily shrinking reservations. Excellent maps are available, such as one showing the original Southeastern locations of five "civilized nations" forcibly removed to a vast Oklahoma territory. Similarly, lists and or tables providing names, places, and dates would greatly help the reader understand a highly complex narrative of terms, persons, places, and things.

Quotations from presidents, generals, elected legislators, renowned authors, and religious figures call for annihilation, extermination, removal, and conquest of Native Americans. General George Washington began his military career fighting Native Americans; when they refused to sell native land to settlers he commanded scorched earth practices:

to lay waste all settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed . . . [Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected. . . . Our future security will be in their inability to injure us. . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.²

James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans romanticized white relations with Indians and contributed to the myth of their final "disappearance." When the US annexed half of Mexico, Walt Whitman gave wholehearted support, noting:

The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history. . . . A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out. . . . What has miserable, inefficient Mexico . . . to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race.³

Dakota territory settler and author of Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum, editorialized after the Wounded Knee massacre in 1891: "our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged...