An indigenous peoples' history of the United States

Author

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Call Numbers

• 970.00497 D899 (CEN)
• H 970.00497 D899 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Boston : Beacon Press, [2014]

Physical Description

xiv, 296 pages ; 24 cm.

Summary

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 historian and activist 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. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz 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 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. As the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them."

Contents

• This land
• Follow the corn
• Culture of conquest
• Cult of the covenant
• Bloody footprints
• The birth of a nation
• The last of the Mohicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
• Sea to shining sea
• "Indian Country"
• US triumphalism and peacetime colonialism
• Ghost dance prophecy : a nation is coming
• The doctrine of discovery
• The future of the United States.