Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizRezensionen

(4.75 Stars)

This book is researched and interesting and informative. It reads like a schoolbook, one that should have been required reading inAmerica.

If you think it is just about Indigenous Americans, you are only partly right. It is about colonialism, it is about white supremacy, it is both sobering and prescient considering when it was written.

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.

It’s a harrowing read. Should be required reading

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.

I feel sick. I want to drink….a lot, but that won’t help. I want a soul hug and to hug others. I want to cry and scream. I am thankful for even more information, no matter how painful. So much makes more sense.

There were times when the prose in this book read like a conservative's parody of liberal academic writing. And yet if you focus solely on the facts presented, it is hard to escape the conviction that colonialism, racism, genocide, and total war are the only appropriate terms to apply. In the current climate in which so many people want to invalidate any historical perspective that would make them feel uncomfortable, guilty, or complicit, it is perhaps all the more important to challenge ourselves and our received cultural perspective with a different narrative.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5 (minor issue in the library copy, where footnotes in chapter 4 got misnumbered by 10 and it took me a second to square up sources). Dunbar-Ortiz makes a persuasive argument that "nation of immigrants" is a misnomer that overlooks the genocide of indigenous populations and how in actuality, the United States is a settler-colonial state, with various populations either adhering to the settler state in the name of assimilation (Irish and Italian Catholics) and self-indigenizing (New Mexican Hispanos, Appalachian Scots Irish) or being considered a Perpetual Foreigner and not permitted to settle (Asian laborers and refugees).

There's also a strong lambasting of how Hamilton: The Musical falsely portrays some founding fathers as abolitionists when above all else they were capitalists (Alexander Hamilton himself in particular), creating a fiscal-military state to perpetuate war on indigenous populations and then copy those war efforts to imperialist efforts both on the continent with the annexation of Mexican territory and meddling in overseas governments.

Unfortunately, the people whom I think need this most aren't partial to reading academically focused books (and I'd consider this an approachable, popular audience survey on settler colonialism)- thinking in particular of an Irish American work colleague in Knights of Columbus who very much wraps himself up in Catholicism & patriotism even though he has far more in common with the "illegals" he rails against with facebook memes. Very much worth a read, though, to challenge the framework in which you view the United States. For me, it's recognizing the discomfort from belatedly realizing the depth of indigenous erasure when discussing "Americanness" (for I can speak from experience about Perpetual Foreigner, but how am I perpetuating systemic genocidal frameworks in doing so?)

From the conclusion:
“This book is a call for all those who have gone through the immigrant or refugee experience or are descendants of immigrants to acknowledge settler colonialism and the Americanization process that sucks them into complicity with white supremacy and erasure of the Indigenous peoples. It’s a call too for descendants of original settlers to understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers who were instrumentalized to reproduce white supremacy and white nationalism.”

Should be required reading.

An interesting book that contends that, far from being freak accidents or aberrations, guns have always been tied to violence, genocide, and white supremacy and that these are inveterate aspects of American history and culture. Without going into detail, this is a fresh and intriguing perspective on a debate we've grown all too familiar with, it's not a complete history of guns in America or the second amendment but rather it offers a framework for exploring and researching these subjects.

Wow. Challenging, both personally and socially.
I have to admit to never having considered the "land purchases" of the early US as being an agreement between two polities without ever consulting the actual nations being impacted.
This book made me think. and mull my own place in society. High praise.
On top of that, I learned so much about historic events.

parts of this were 5 stars and parts 1 star, honestly. it was so up and down for me, but there is definitely enough here to really make this worth reading.

i've never felt particularly patriotic, and now i just feel disgusted. at every turn we choose wrong, we choose harm, we choose to make things worse.

i haven't seen the musical hamilton but i find her focus on it really odd. and i feel like she's missing the point of what the show was supposed to be about. i'm interested if anyone in my book group will have seen it and what they think about this. because i thought the point was to emphasize how black and brown people were left out of the decisions and practices and how different things would have been if they were recognized as people. so an unfortunate way, for me, for this book to open, but it covers so much more and so widely, that there are other aspects that also don't resonate, but so much that does, and so much that makes me think more deeply about things.

"White supremacy and settler-colonial violence are permanently embedded in US topography. The United States has a foundational problem of white nationalism that wasn't new with Nixon or Reagan or Trump."

"Not only were they used as forced and unpaid labor, but their very bodies were legally private property to be bought and sold, soon creating a thriving, legal domestic slave market, which by 1840 was of greater monetary value than all other property combined, including all the gold in circulation, all bank reserves, and all real estate."

"As Mahmood Mamdani observes, 'The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a seller state.'"

"Furthermore, Mamdani argues, regarding the conflation of immigration and settlement: immigrants join existing polities whereas settlers create new ones. 'If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.'"

"At the eve of the Civil War, almost a third of Southern families were slavers, and in Mississippi and South Carolina 50 percent were. In the 1950s, only 2 percent of US Families owned corporation stocks equal in value to the 1860 value of a single slave. On a typical plantation (more than twenty slaves) the capital value of the slaves was greater than the capital value of the land and implements."

i can't believe that this never occurred to me, or that i've let it escape my memory if it had; that after slavery was outlawed, that actually some semblance of protections for black people were gone: "The Klan burned the homes of Black families, confiscated their guns, and inflicted punishment similar to sale patrols' beatings, but they also had far more freedom to torture and murder their victims, since the Black body no longer carried monetary value that the murderer would have to compensate the slaver for."

"Now and then, a Klansman would be put on trial by the occupying US Army, but no one would ever be convicted for Klan violence, even murder. Occasionally, the US Army would declare martial law, but as one army commander said 1871, 'The entire United States Army would be insufficient to give protection throughout the South to everyone in possible danger from the Klan.' The Klan was effectively the reconstituted Confederate Army."

"The US republic was from its birth the engine of capitalist accumulation in expropriating Native land to sell to land speculators, slavers, and later the railroads and white settlers, under the Homestead Act, thereby financing the government and its military, which carried out the expulsions and crushed enslaved people's resistance."

"For oppressed people to take history into their own hands, they have to know that history."

she claims that the american dream was a concept that was invented in 1931, which is an interesting spin on the depression.

"This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is a screen that obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the Indigenous population, and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations."½

This book would be good for middle level grades. This book gives the indigenous peoples' side of the story to doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, and the myth that the US is a nation of immigrants. I would use this in conjunction with history lessons about the US "discovering" the "new world" to show the other side of the story.

An understandably angry (and therefore somewhat repetitive) history of the US from indigenous viewpoints, focusing on the genocides and settler colonialism that were core to the founding and never stopped. Among other things, Dunbar-Ortiz highlights that Sherman’s March was merely the application of tactics used against indigenous people against white Southerners, and that the military term “in-country” is actually shortened from “Indian Country,” highlighting the extent to which the US military remains organized around the founding concept of going to other people’s lands and telling them what to do. The actors here are indigenous fighters/activists and settler oppressors; when laws change in favor of indigenous communities they are just passive-voice changed, and it would have been a stronger book if it explained why settler legal systems would ever do this (similar to Derrick Bell’s theory of interest group convergence, which explains why some whites support some anti-white supremacy initiatives).

I knew it would be going in, but this was a tough read. She makes a compelling case for genocide. I look at news stories about Indians differently after reading this book.

I can’t say that I’ve read much about Native peoples, but I learned from this book that Native Americans have a history, that (like the Jews), their history is genocidal in the proportions of its suffering, and also that their tree is still alive. It also (since I do know more about what we colloquially call America), reveals something about our national history, and our current paranoia, often obvious, sometimes subdued, about deviations from perceived racial, religious, and gender norms, to say nothing of obsessive pushback against less harmful forms of political and economic governance. It all began with what we might politely call irregular, or more frankly unlawful warfare, which was designed from the beginning to be for total conquest across the continent. Having read this book, I can no longer look in the same way on someone like Parson Weems, whose Life of Washington I once saw as a sort of comic adventure, whose protagonist’s historical mischances provided the necessary first step upon the voyage of discovery, which I imagined was something we might one day all share….

I don’t know. I can honestly say that this book did not make me angry, and I don’t think that it was written to inspire unreasoning rage, or even unreasoning language. Of course, I don’t always look in the same way at America and our history as another soul, but usually it is the person pointing out the crimes, in contemporary society and its past, that is calmer than the person who gets offended that we are not all ‘normal’ or whatever (and, indeed, not allowed to be—and don’t you forget it). Few people examine their lives or why they put greed first, as both ancient philosophers and prophets have commented. Of course, it remains that much of this remains unclear to me in certain ways, these lessons that I have unconsciously put off having for so long. How did it come to this? We have fine things, but we did not get them by being fine people; our history although not always subtle in the parlor seating sense of the word, is not more simple for being more bloody. Yet it is clear it wasn’t Washington’s parlor manners that did it for us. There is still a strain in the national consciousness that seeks to boast of this, for all the vagueness and romanticizing necessary to supplement the sheer guttural cry of triumph. And of course, an even stronger strain that seeks to forget, since greed is ‘new’, and all things are well, more or less.

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

A look at U.S. history from an indigenous point of view turns everything you've learned on its head. How many people died on the altar of "manifest destiny"? The U.S. fomented its own genocide of its native population. Any hostilities the colonists and later the settlers experienced was due to impinging on land that wasn't theirs. It's the white settlers who killed women and children. Its the U.S. military who used the lessons of warfare against indigenous populations and applied them to other populations around the world to become an imperial power. The over-militarization of our society now is still apparent.

American history, as traditionally taught, teaches of the US’s “manifest destiny” and of many ensuing conflicts with natives on the Western frontier. A few ugly scenarios are often mentioned, but systematic genocide, on the order of Hitler or Stalin, is not described. However, from the perspective of these indigenous peoples, that’s exactly what happened as the United States attempted to destroy their entire culture. It’s this story from this perspective that Dunbar-Ortiz attempts to tell in this history of the American behemoth.

This book is unabashedly told from a perspective, and the reader has to get used to it. It’s not told from the perspective of an “objective historian,” but instead makes moral judgments on history. It borders at times on telling a story about the “good” indigenous peoples against “bad” white settlers. It uses present-day terms to judge this history, terms that were inscribed in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, in 1948. While I agree that genocide tragically occurred, I find it a bit unfair to judge prior centuries’ decisions from ethical standards of a more recent day.

Dunbar-Ortiz’s history unapologetically makes recommendations that go hand-in-hand with the American political left. She does not attempt to moderate these views in the least or to bring them into dialogue with more neoconservative voices. Rather, she sees the neoconservative voices as the enemy to be overcome. And she makes a pretty good case from history as to why these voices are the enemy. The starkness in her tone is one often heard in wartime, and being from an indigenous background herself, she explains the hostility very clearly.

That said, she does a fairly good job of sticking to the facts, facts often overlooked in US education. She is not careful on some fronts – like with her overblown (but debated) statement that there were 100 million indigenous people in modern America before Columbus. Still, she gives us an understanding of why indigenous Americans are distrustful of federal and state governments. To some, like my wife, former US president Andrew Jackson will always be a genocidal leader on the order of Stalin or Hitler for the Trail of Tears. Dunbar-Ortiz’s examination clearly shows why.

This book was written before the Trump era, and some of its analysis in then-contemporary events reflects that. It seems embroiled in the left-versus-right era of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, rather than in populist white nationalism. Nonetheless, it shows where the nationalist sentiments that Trump unearthed came from historically. White Christian nationalism has a long history in the United States, particularly on the frontier where it kept “law and order.” Dunbar-Ortiz shows that there isn’t anything new here, and her voice has relevance even in a new paradigm. Thinking readers of all sorts can benefit from wrestling with her respective that represents a significant segment of the US populace.

A valuable guide to a more authentic version of the American story.

Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.

The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

Amérindiens, Raoul Peck½

Very good, informative, a great summary. Recommended.

This is a textbook example of what a textbook for a course in "What Your Teachers Never Taught You About Native Americans" would be. The focus on the "Doctrine of Discovery", which served as the justification for stealing and profiting from the confiscation and sales of tribal lands, is sobering. Another revelation is the creation of the "Rangers", the Indian fighters who were the forebearers of our modern military - "In Country", a/k/a Indian Country, as used in Vietnam to indicate anti-guerilla warfare against the inhabitants of the land. The relationship of Indian people to their lands and to the animals they managed was never as owners, but as stewards and protectors. The continued oppressive activities, including the theft of children and their placement into boarding schools (similar to the Magdelene Laundries of Ireland), are horrifying, and reparations equal to the level of harm done are difficult to imagine. My reading and discussions of this book were sponsored by the Social Justice Book Club hosted by Brad McKenna of the Wilmington Memorial Library.

From the title, I thought this book would be a general history of Indian tribes. Where they lived, what they ate, how they interacted with each other, etc. But it's not that. It is solely about their near-extinction at the hands of European Christians. Its detailed coverage of countless atrocities is as relentless as the Europeans who used war, disease, economic exploitation, treaty-breaking, and cultural assimilation to commit genocide.

It wasn't until halfway through the book that I took another look at the title and realized how accurate it was. This book really is a history of the United States from the point of view of indigenous people. And from their perspective, the United States has been nothing but a genocidal force.

I now have a deeper understanding of America's history and destructive nature. From Jamestown to Wounded Knee to the Vietnam War to the grim headlines of today, deadly imperialism has been dominant in Americans' DNA. Even William Tecumseh Sherman, who I've longed considered a heroic figure, told Ulysses S. Grant "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children."

The little-discussed Doctrine of Discovery that fueled the Europeans' taking of indigenous lands is still the cornerstone of American law and policy. Even as recently as the 1970s, the USA military forcibly removed thousands of indigenous people from sites with strategic military importance. When asked by a reporter about the deportation of the Micronesians, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supposedly replied "There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?" And every time we get excited by fighter planes soaring overhead during the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, that sentiment reverberates in us.

This book is dense and unpleasant, but it made me realize that America can never become a great nation unless it exorcises its rapacious soul. The last chapter mentions some significant and hopeful steps toward this end, but those are just the beginning of a very long journey. If, even after the events of the last few years, part of you still believes "the myth of an exceptional US American people destined to bring order out of chaos, to stimulate economic growth, and to replace savagery with civilization--not just in North America but throughout the world," maybe you should read this book and become a part of that journey.½