Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

A Rorschach test of unconscious manifest destiny the author calls the idea that America was always supposed to span form sea to shining sea; a puritan covenant.
The author has been criticized for the usage of the term colonial capitalism when, in fact, colonial mercantilism would have been appropriate. After having identified the passages in question, I concluded that the issue is not clear-cut. Indeed, the author's usage and identification of instances of colonial capitalism strikes me as a bit broad in range, yet as certain aspects of capitalism and mercantilism do quite a bit overlap, I hardly feel an unforgivable error had been committed.… (mehr)

I started this book several years ago and misplaced it until I moved some bookshelves and found it behind. I had to reread what I had read before in order to fully grasp the whole book, which tells the story of the United States as a "colonialist-settler state", which, much like the European colonial states, subjected the original civilizations that were already on the North American continent and that it now rules. It challenges the standard tale we are taught in our American schools that European settlers "discovered" America and provides different indigenous peoples' perspectives on key historical events. Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the indigenous peoples who were and still are in a colonial relationship with the United States inhabitant this land and thrived for millennia before they were "displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated," and therefore requires restitution of over a hundred million acres of land and reparations. There is a lot of rich and useful information here, but I think Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz overstates the case glosses over some other facts in order to present a purportedly idyllic world before the Europeans arrived, e.g., that some tribes were predatory and violent, and this continent was hardly the Garden of Eden before European settlers arrived. I also found her descriptions of the Indigenous Peoples' lives to be simplistic and inaccurate. She described the nations as agricultural, but that is not entirely the case. Many nations were hunter-gatherer societies that involved the killing of animals for food. Nevertheless, Mr. Dunbar-Ortiz adds new voices to our collective history.… (mehr)