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

In a 2015 study on K–12 education, researchers found that 87 percent of grade school curricula on Native American culture only focused on Indigenous history before 1900, and more than half of US states did not even mention a Native American individual by name.¹ These findings may come as no surprise to educators who have long been aware of this oversight in history textbooks and who have experienced frequent censorship of American Indian literature in their classrooms. As it stands now, most K–12 education in the US limits instruction about Indigenous peoples to slanted versions of the Thanksgiving story and the Trail of Tears.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People seeks to change that. Childhood educators Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese adapted Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's classic 1998 text into a readable substitute for the current inadequate K–12 curriculum. The book begins in pre-European North America and journeys through to the present, ending with a chapter that covers the recent activism at Standing Rock. The revised text emphasizes Dunbar-Ortiz's main argument, which is that previous narratives on Native American history have given the impression that Indigenous peoples have been eliminated when in fact they remain a key driver in the continued unfolding of US history and politics.

A key contribution of this book is that it reframes US origin stories by telling them from the Indigenous perspective. For instance, the book teaches students to refer to individuals by their specific nation or tribal membership. This approach encourages students to consider the diversity among Indigenous peoples rather than thinking that all Native Americans are the same (as they have often been portrayed in television, film, and, unfortunately, US textbooks). Additionally, US maps have been redrawn to illustrate tribal regions rather than colonial states. Further, the traditional stories about Columbus and the Pilgrims are retold without the typical European mythologizing. But the work's most important contribution is that it fills in the gaps of American Indian history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the attempts by the US government to force Native Americans to assimilate.

The first example of this is the discussion of the Dawes Act, which allowed the president to impose notions of private property on Native Americans by carving up tribally held land into individually owned plots and then selling off their land to white settlers (155–156). The second example is the discussion of the Civilian Fund Act (referred to in the book as the Indian Civilian Act), which forced American Indian children to attend boarding schools intended to "educate" them according to white colonial standards (159–164). The inclusion of these histories is important not just because they are rarely discussed in existing curricula, but because they both expose how the US government used legislation as a means of controlling Indigenous peoples. These examples demonstrate the insidiousness of settler-colonialism, where economic and legal measures combine to forcibly alter a population's culture and values. It is this perspective, in addition to the basic Indigenous history, that is lacking in contemporary US education.

Another important aspect of this work is the extended discussion of Indigenous activism, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Discussion of Native American history during the twentieth century is practically non-existent in the current education system. In this book, however, the authors have taken care to cover a wide range of Indigenous movements and organizations from this era, such as the creation of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), the formation of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the passing of the Indian Self-Determination Act, the seizure of Alcatraz, and the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) (176–92).

Because this book functions as a corrective for current US educational standards on Native American history, a few parts tend to romanticize...