"All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans ed. by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker (review)

ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ AND DINA GILIO-WHITAKER'S "All the Real Indians Died Off" is a helpful intervention to both the stereotyping of Native Americans and their (often) invisibility. This slim and easy-to-read volume stands on its own as either a quick reference book or a book that one would read cover to cover. Alternatively, it can be used to supplement Dunbar-Ortiz's earlier An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. As the title implies, "All the Real Indians Died Off" covers twenty-one different myths about Native Americans plus a useful, though U.S.-centric, timeline of Native American history and events. The authors tell us that they selected these myths, at least in part, because of their "lived experience of being Native" and just how often they have encountered them. The goal of the book is to promote a better-informed public and, through that knowledge, social justice.

The authors' introduction does a good job of grounding and contextualizing the myths that they will later cover. They argue persuasively that the little that most people do know about Native Americans is inaccurate or distorted and that most of what they know they learned either in elementary school or through popular culture. This may not seem like a big deal to some people, but it has real impacts on the everyday lives of Native Americans. The authors use the concept of structural violence—"social arrangements that cause harm to people as they are embedded in the social and political structures of society"—to analyze these impacts (3). The structural violence committed against Native Americans is pervasive and takes a wide range of forms, from the use of stereotypes like the Washington Redsk*ns to the depiction of Native Americans as alcoholics to the erasure of Native Americans from history textbooks when the narrative enters the twentieth century. The end results of this structural violence range from harm by actual physical violence to harm through neglect.

It is entirely appropriate that "All the Real Indians Died Off" is the first and perhaps the most important of the twenty-one myths that the authors cover. The vanishing or vanished Native American has long been a central trope to understanding Indigenous/non-Indigenous interactions. The vanishing or vanished Native Americans myth also assumes that Native Americans are trapped in the past, are unable or unwilling to adopt new technologies, are resistant to modernization, and have ceased or will cease to exist. As the authors note, these myths have more to do with what non–Native Americans think (or wish?) than with Native American reality. It is clear that the settler state often celebrated ancient and dead Native Americans even as it denigrated living Native Americans while seeking to displace, erase, and/or transform them. Some of the other myths, such as the idea that Columbus discovered the Americas and that Native Americans welcomed the Pilgrims, as evidenced by Thanksgiving, seem, at least to me, to be areas where we have made some significant progress. Others, such as the claim that the United States planned genocide against Native Americans, are still being hotly debated. At first glance, some of the myths might appear to contradict others, but this is due to the wide-ranging forms of structural violence aimed at Native Americans. In some cases, two seemingly contradictory myths can both be held to be true even though the holding of these contradictory beliefs makes no logical sense.

"All the Real Indians Died Off" is part of a larger trend, being one of a series of books aimed at general audiences that try to undermine common myths about a range of historical and contemporary topics. These include the already popular Aviva Chomsky's They Take Our Jobs, about immigration; James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, about the Eurocentric approach to teaching history...