An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Abstract

In this ambitious synthesis, targeted at a nonspecialist audience, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz aims to weave the threads of the past two decades of Native American history scholarship into a coherent narrative. Rather than adding native voices to a familiar U.S. history framework, she attempts nothing short of rewriting the U.S. national narrative with empire at its heart. The result is an incisive volume that bridges past and present, employing scholarship on settler colonialism to highlight not only the ongoing effects of colonialism in Indian country but also the ways colonialism endures as a domestic and international structural principle of the United States. Despite its title the book serves less as a history of indigenous peoples in the United States than an effort “to tell the story of the United States as a colonialist settler-state” (p. 14). The first chapter, “Follow the Corn,” paints a portrait of a vibrant and interconnected Western Hemisphere prior to 1492. Dunbar-Ortiz then presents a series of essays that subdivide U.S. history into periods corresponding to different stages of colonialism. She is skeptical of the scholarly emphasis on cross-cultural negotiation between indigenous people and Europeans, viewing such a focus as an attempt to sidestep colonial guilt, and she rejects the narrative that native people were hapless victims of epidemic disease. Instead, she emphasizes disturbing moments of massacre and territorial dispossession, making the case for systematic genocide as a pattern that “drill[s] to the core of U.S. history, to the very source of the country's existence” (p. xiii). To make her case, Dunbar-Ortiz turns to histories of federal Indian policy and explores numerous cultural and political themes. For instance, she notes how key figures gained celebrity status as Indian killers, narrates the American Revolution as populist imperialism, unpacks “Indian country” terminology and symbolism in the U.S. military, and highlights statements by President Barack Obama that deny U.S. colonialism.