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

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz condenses much of the latest Native American Studies scholarship in her new volume, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Rather than attempt to detail the histories of individual nations, Dunbar-Ortiz frames her project around Jodi Byrd’s critique of the U.S. as a settler-colonial state in which the ongoing dispossession, erasure, and murder of Native Americans sets the precedent for U.S. militarization and imperialism. Also marking various forms of Indigenous resistance over the last six centuries, Dunbar-Ortiz calls on a coalition of “descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations” (236) to radically transform the nation through Native reparations and restoration of sacred lands. Explicitly refuting “trendy postmodern” (5) articulations of Indigenous agency, she establishes the U.S. as a calculating and untiring settler state. However, Dunbar-Ortiz does not address the more nuanced poststructuralist critiques of agency by Native scholars such as Joanne Barker, who argues that tribal councils can’t effectively confront colonial structures without first acknowledging structural inequalities within their own tribes.

As a history, An Indigenous Peoples’ History follows up Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee with the “historical reality” that U.S. history doesn’t make much sense “unless Indigenous people are erased” (7). The book is also a recovery project, confronting the perennial narrative of the vanishing Indian, depicted in artworks such as James Earle Fraser’s 1915 sculpture, “End of the Trail” (161), as well as official colonial documents. She argues, with Martin Luther King, Jr., that “our nation was born in genocide” (378), by which she means that the U.S. developed its modern counterinsurgent strategies through Native American genocide. The text follows key events, chronologically and thematically, beginning with depictions of the land, which early colonizers settled under the “Doctrine of Discovery” notion that the scattered, unorganized Indigenous people who occupied it were not using it. In protest, Dunbar-Ortiz describes a complex, pre-existing network of interlocking, self-governing city-states bound to one another by language and extended families. Natives built the world’s largest gardens, herded buffalo into easily accessible hunting/grazing areas and traded on a system of roads that they build. An extensive U.S. highway system, was in fact, she notes, built on original Indigenous trade routes (29).

Dunbar-Ortiz sources this “culture of conquest” in the Crusades to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, the privatization of the “commons” (34-35) in England, and the invention of “whiteness” (38-39) in the British takeover of Scotland and Ireland. The transfer of common land into private hands created an indebted working class and a dependent lower class, both which later became a settler class, deployed to break up Indigenous alliances and force them off their land. Foremost among these settler-pawns were the Ulster-Scots (or Scots-Irish) from Northern Ireland (32-35), whose descendants include at least six U.S. presidents, including Andrew Jackson, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barak Obama (53). Jackson, the “Indian killer,” remains the most notorious of them in this volume, with a whole chapter dedicated to his ideological conspiracy with James Fenimore Cooper. Dunbar-Ortiz credits Cooper with creating the myth of the vanishing Indian, which Jackson picked up to justify his vicious campaign against Indigenous people. Later in the book, she also indicts nearly the full canon of nineteenth century American literature in this project to identify the “true American” through western expansion—Whitman, Emerson, Poe, Longfellow, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville (130).

Dunbar-Ortiz wrote the short volume (coming in just under 300 pages) for a general, largely non-Indigenous readership, while placing academia within the settler-colonial discourse, beginning with the very first lines of her author’s note: “I did not gain the perspective in this book from … professors or studies” (ix), she writes. Instead, her point of view is...