★★★ (3 of 5)

• Full Title: An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States
• Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• Year: 2014
• Pages: 236*
• Genre: U.S. History, Race Relations
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• ISBN 978-0-8070-5783-4 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including author’s note, acknowledgements, suggested reading, notes, bibliography, and index)

 

Summary

As part of a series called ReVisioning History, this book aims to retell the history of the United States “as experienced by the Indigenous inhabitants”, in a manner “intellectually rigorous but relatively brief and written accessibly”. In other words, it had a goal (and title) similar to that of Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States, which I favorably reviewed last year — though Zinn cast a wide net over many marginalized and oppressed groups while Dunbar-Ortiz looked primarily at Native Americans.

A veteran activist of the women’s liberation movement (1960s and ‘70s) in addition to participating in the Native American civil rights battles since in the 1970s, Dunbar-Ortiz is also an accomplished author and historian, holding various professorships. In this book, she begins with the state of the Americas before the arrival of European “discoverers”, and moves quickly through the first contacts, earliest settlements, spread of disease, slavery, genocide, attempts at assimilation and other acts of oppression, ending with hopeful notes based on the last 60 years or so.

 

Praise

Maybe the best part of this book is its existence. Though I once thought “everyone knows” how European colonists and later the United States terrorized the original inhabitants of the Americans, I keep running into people who still cling to the white supremacist myths of “discovery” and “manifest destiny”. As long as misinformation continues to persist, we’ll need works like this one.

A wealth of well-documented research went into this work, besides the author’s lifetime of experience advocating for the right of self-determination of Native Americans. For the most part, the writing is clear and accessible and the facts laid down without decoration.

I like that she often points out how incidents of U.S. soldiers losing in battles to Native Americans were called “massacres”, but actual massacres by U.S. soldiers were often called “wars” or “battles”, contributing to the mistaken narrative that the soldiers were heroes while the indigenous nations were the aggressors.

Dunbar-Ortiz also makes apparent the now-obvious thread between the U.S.’s counterinsurgency operations among indigenous peoples and our current military operations overseas, showing how the strategies of “total war” aren’t new, but really only repackaged versions of what our enemies have always experienced at our hands.

 

Points Off For...

Though the overall arc of the book is chronological — beginning with the ancient first peoples to settle in the Americas and ending with the U.S. as it existed in the 2010s — there are quite a few strange out-of-order sections. Within chapters and sometimes within paragraphs, Dunbar-Ortiz will skip around in time leaving the reader to sort out which events happened in which order. (I noted similar confusion in Zinn’s book.) This odd style is compounded a bit by lack of transitional phrases between paragraphs and sections: many of the issues could be solved with simple additions like: “But even before that” or “part of what led to that was”.

Also, as far as I could tell, there was very little new or groundbreaking here. The stories related by Dunbar-Ortiz are very often the same stories related elsewhere in U.S. history, only with minor word changes. For example, when referring to the Battle of the Alamo, traditional histories refer to James Bowie as a “frontiersman” or “Colonel”; to Davy Crockett as “the famous frontiersman” or “U.S. Congressman from Tennessee”; and William Travis as “lawyer and soldier”. But Dunbar-Ortiz describes the same men this way:

“...mercenaries James Bowie and Davy Crockett and slave owner William Travis...”

—page 127

These minor word changes — chosen carefully for their connotations and emotional impact, were the primary differences between this book and stories I’ve already read about these same events. Some of them I quite enjoyed, such as referring to the “Founding Fathers” as “the separatist colonial oligarchy”

I suppose that the average person might not have read as much U.S. history as I have and so much of what’s in this book might be new for them. If so, I strongly encourage them to read it.

 

Conclusion

I’m glad I read this, and I’m glad it won several awards (including the American Book Award, past winners of which include Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., MacKenzie Bezos, and George Takei). I wish more of the subsections were better sorted chronologically — or at least that there were explanations for why they weren’t.

 

 

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