A review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

TLDR: This book was an absolute banger that I don’t think 98% of Americans have the heart to read. To be clear, any literate and educated adult who wants to seriously engage with the history and trajectory of the United States in the scheme of the past 5000 years of history must understand and internalize these lenses. In atleast one lens “Everything in US history is about the land – who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity broken into peices to be bought and sold on the market”¹.

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism – the founding of a state based on the idealogy of white supremacy, the widespread practice of Afrtican slavery, and a policy of genocide and left theft. THose who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not yet visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society (Dunbar-Ortiz pp. 2).

I thought no else in the world shared my absolute disdain for the horrible Christian idea of God creating man “in his image.” But some woman in Oklahoma is with me!

She describes a history of Irish, Italian, African, and Asian Americans transforming from colonized into colonizers.

From its beginning, the United States has welcomed – indeed often solicited, even bribed – immigrants to repopulate conquered territories “cleansed” of their indigenous inhabitants

US colonies established during 1898–1919 include Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and Northern Mariana.

I find that the discourse around this topic is riddled with self reports. For example, discourse around Israeli settler-colonialism sometimes drifts to a “two state solution” which is how westerners read their own history and assume that no one else in the world can accept, celebrate, and learn from “others” (those who are 99.999% the same as us. Oh I’m sorry 99.998%, you gremlin). If, for example, one thinks that a Sioux nation that controls what is now many genocide trophies national parks won’t let her see Yellowstone in the Summer, then she might understand 1% of the depths for which the United States has been the worst kind of neighbor. It sucks that the history could have been different in 1700 or 1800 or 1900 to alleviate thinking about this garbage. The greatest self-report might be going about one’s life, juicing up on that sweet military-financial-industrial complex dollar, and thinking that the US can genocide humans and animals without paying a price.

Even honoring a few treaties would be a start. And some of them are basically the least we could do.

The US could choose to elevate itself above its current genocidal character.

Let me tell you that I do not regard England or for that matter America as free countries. They are free after their own fashion, free to hold in bondage coloured races of the earth. Are England and America fighting for the liberty of these races today? If not, do not ask me to wait until after the war ².

The US could choose to be a country where people can reasonably be called “free.” But apparently violence is just too fun, or something.

Indeed this lens of history is hyper-materialist. I hate how hyper-materialist it is because I think the importance of spiritual matters is largely underestimated by Western historians because the tradition of personal enlightenment, asceticism, and ahimsa have been completely eradicated – if they ever existed at all – leaving little imagination for the sheer force of a unified group of individuals who take issues of elevating consciousness and ensuring the long term survival of the species seriously. But I hate colonialism and imperialism even more.

I can already hear the Americans asking “is this saying that I’m partly to blame for their suffering? Do you actually think my very existence here is a crime/travesty? You can’t actually mean that I benefit from genocide by going to the University of Minnesota ^{3 4}? I will bust out a gun if you are implying that my parents should give up their land or that you/the government will give my parents’ land to brown people” (Of course Americans love their guns ). I think my answer to “is this a personal accusation?” is “If your actions work to preserve the empire, then yeah.” To be clear, I include myself in this. I literally worked for years for the benefit of (almost?) every organization in the US that spends $1B+ each year to gamble on financial instruments, including land. I don’t technically know, but I know that my work contributed to the commidification of land, and continues to work in service of the idealogy that “land can be owned by people, bought and sold.” The military-financial-industrial complex is a bitch (I include “financial” in the complex because the money for eternal war must come from somewhere and these assholes absolutely profit from war and genocide).

I have my own answer to this: I will not die in the imperial core.

An apology … of sorts

I am no Nixon-Marty, and we should never give war criminals too much credit, but his speech announcing Public Law 91-550, returning Blue Lake, New Mexico to the Taos Pueblo Indians speaks volumes, because even a person personally responsible for expanding the empire somehow can be receptive to the grievances of Native Americans without taking it personally ⁵.

And it is a bill which could be interpreted particularly in the Christmas season as one where a gift was being made by the United States to the Indian population of the United States. That is not the case. This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done in which land involved in this bill, 48,000 acres, was taken from the Indians involved, the Taos Pueblo Indians. And now, after all those years, the Congress of the United States returns that land to whom it belongs. This bill also involves respect for religion. Those of us who know something about the background of the first Americans realize that long before any organized religion came to the United States, for 700 years the Taos Pueblo Indians worshiped in this place. We restore this place of worship to them for all the years to come ⁶.

Nixon continued.

Today the United States passes $1 trillion in terms of its national economy. That was undreamed of even 25 years ago. And, of course, undreamed of 190 years ago when this was a small country, of 3 million people and 13 States, and very, very poor and very, very weak. We are the richest nation in the history of the world and will remain so.

That $1 trillion shows one side of the strength of America. But today, in the eloquent comments of Mr. Romero, we saw another side, a side that money cannot measure–eloquence, a deep spiritual quality, and the strength that the Indian people, the first Americans have given to America generally in their contribution to this Nation.

Whatever inhabits what is now the USA in 10,000 years will “inherit” from us polluted water, soil, and air. So much for “industrial civilization.” Not in the sense of voluntary inheritance, of course, more in the sense of “luck of being born in a certain time and place in history.”

“Accusations”

I think the assessment of Publishers’ Weekly is not quite correct, or atleast needs some qualification.

Dunbar-Ortiz brings together every indictment of white Americans that has been cast upon them over time, and she does so by raising intelligent new questions about many of the current trends of academia, such as multiculturalism.

Let’s be clear about what those “indictments” are.

• Only one “civilization”/‘culturally+linguistically+historically linked unit’ has a deeply ingrained, popularly reinforced imagination to conquer the entire world, not matter how many people need to die for that to happen. The evidence is the past 500 years of European history and the 800+ American military bases around the world.
• Only one “civilization” has a track record of acting out the proposition “it is a good idea to pick one ‘other’/scapegoat/enemy to dehumanize fellow brothers and sisters all just to juice up the war machine. Any cultures that get raped along the way are just evidence that the war machine is doing its job”

To the idea that other civilizations had similar characterisitcs, maybe a difference in scale is a difference in kind. There is a difference between a society having slaves/colonies and “being a slave/colonial society.”

A society predicated on violence

I think this really gets to the meat of Dunbar-Ortiz’ argument:

Militariation … [is] happening at the individual level, when a woman who has a son is persuaded that the best way she can be a good mother is to allow the military recruiter to recruit her son so her son will get of the couch. When she is persuaded to let him go, even if reluctantly, she’s being militarized. She’s not as militarized as somebody who is a Special Forces soldier, but she’s being militarized all the same. Somebody who gets excited because a jet fight flies over the football stadium to open the football season and is glad that he or she is at the stadium to see it, is being militarized… [Militarization] is not just “do you think that the use of collective violence is the most effective way to solve social problems?” (quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz p238)

Part of the “accusation” here is, roughly, that imperialism that the way of genocide isn’t merely something the US does when it is ‘backed into a corner by larger powers,’ rather militarism and violent repression are the chosen way of life of Americans, even in the best of times.

The best that I have to contribute to this discussion might be thinking about and visualizing the centrality of violence and war to the existence of the United States .

What next?

In all likelihood, the US will leave Native Americans and African Americans two options: relative poverty and “being superhuman” to overcome the results of hundreds of years of exploitation. That dehumanizing expectation that a group systematically be “superhuman” to “catch up” is basically the official policy today.

The US will do basically nothing on the order of diverting $400B+ from its annual military budget for the next 10 years to be used for reparations (basically using 2020 census numbers explicitly funding $x per African American and Native American given to various counties, municipalities, nations, with laws requiring that in American cities receiving this money use it on the standard things leftists like, with various measures to ensure that capitalists dont steal too much of the money). Even a 70% leaky pipeline will have groundshaking effects on the American character. The US will never give back land to Native American nations on the order of North and South Dakota, half to 2/3s of Minnesota, Colorado, Wyoming, (maybe having Canada join in, for good measure). The US will never collectively engage with its genocide like a serious human being might.

Consider atleast one experience in an AP US History class in a “good” public school: We were literally told to just read about the native americans on our own (basically mentioned in passing) and the general consensus was to just “Take the L on the 1-2 questions about the native americans that might be on the AP test and you can still get the highest score on the final test at the end of the year.” I realize as an adult how fucked that is.

The contradiction of “all men are created equal” and “systematic repression of a people” will live with the US until the empire collapses in 50 or 200 or 500 years. Idk what to do about it.

At the very least, let’s not celebrate genocide ⁷.

Endnote: +1 for Strand Book Store in the Upper West Side of Manhattan

I stumbled upon this book during an unplanned visit to Strand Book Store . It was a neat and affordable find that I never would have sought out on, say, Amazon.