An Indigenous Peoples' History of the US

RT; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Xochitl, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

This is the first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples here before the invasion and subsequent migration.

It's a New York Times bestseller and now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck. The author is a recipient of the American Book Award.

Today in the United States, there are more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations [but not in Los Angeles where so many indigenous are concentrated] comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the 15,000,000 Native people who once inhabited this land.

• Estimates say there were 100 million Natives living here when Europeans arrived to exploit resources, launch an imperial power (that immediately went on to attack the Philippines), and establish a world military power and growing empire.

The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.

Now, for the first time, acclaimed activist and historian Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers 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.

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dr. Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them.

And as Dr. Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under U.S. President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by U.S. Army general Thomas S. Jesup who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles:

“The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes U.S. history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. More + AUDIO SAMPLE