Violence, Culture and Resistance: New Directions in the Study of Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity

In her influential book Transit of Empire, Indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd has provocatively asserted, “The story of the new world is horror, the story of America is a crime.”¹ The line, to varying degrees, reflects an assumption and theme that courses through these works, two of which are edited collections and one that reenvisions North American history, putting Indigenous people at the center of the story. But if the colonization of the continent was indeed a crime, as many of the writers featured here might broadly agree, there is much disagreement over the nature of the offense. For certain, the history of settler colonialism has wrought devastation and violence, but it has also engendered resistance at every turn and, in the face of great obstacles, fostered new expressions of cultural vitality among the world’s Indigenous people.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous History of the United States, along with Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton’s volume, argues that the actions of some white settlers met the legal definition of genocide.² These two books emphasize the role of violence in shaping North American history since the late 1400s. Conversely, the collection of essays edited by Laura Graham and H. Glenn Penny demonstrate the creative ways in which Indigenous people have asserted cultural and performative autonomy, both highly symbolic modes of resistance amid the systemic disruptions that millions of men and women have endured for over five centuries of colonization. Taken together, these three works represent some of the latest and strongest scholarship coming out of Indigenous studies. At their best, the authors refashion our understanding of national histories and convey how colonialism remains a process deeply embedded in our present moment.

Dunbar-Ortiz rejects the classification of her ranging book as solely a work of Indigenous history. In fact, she states firmly from the outset, “This is a history of the United States” (14). In its stronger moments, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is even global in scope, offering fresh comparisons and linkages to settler colonialism in other contexts such as in Ireland, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. However, as a word of caution, this is a work of synthesis, so the reader should not expect to encounter wholly new insights or previously unknown sources. Instead, Dunbar-Ortiz mostly presents well-known and widely studied events. Still, the book challenges triumphalist accounts of US history based on the achievements of Great Men (presidents, frontier settlers, and cultural icons to name just a few). And while such top-down narratives have fallen out of favor among most academics, Dunbar-Ortiz’s book will further dislodge any lingering notions of a heroic past defined by brave frontiersmen who settled the continent in the name of liberty, justice, and equality. Hers is a more complex and darker story.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History first delves into the social and cultural arrangements of North America’s precolonial societies. Given the scope and breadth of the book, Dunbar-Ortiz cannot describe the nuances of these early civilizations in thorough detail, but she does bust the myth that they were inferior or more simplistic to European forms of social organization. People of the Pacific Northwest, for example, developed highly organized cultures based on abundant salmon and timber. Meanwhile, corn and wild game nourished millions of others in the heart of the continent. One could travel from the Pacific Coast, across the Rocky Mountains, and through the Mississippi watershed to the Atlantic via an extensive network of trade and migratory routes that included rivers, streams, overland trails, and treacherous mountain passes. Dunbar-Ortiz’s crash course on thousands of years of history “counteracts the settler-colonial myth of the wandering...