An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Starred review from April 20, 2009
Boston University law professor Wexler is also a published humorist. This felicitous combination of talents is put to good use as he visits the towns and cities where the always controversial cases concerning separation of church and state arise. Wexler’s lucid explications of difficult constitutional concepts and the vagaries of Supreme Court rulings are superb, providing readers a deeper understanding of the First Amendment and Supreme Court jurisprudence. But that’s only half the story. Wexler is laugh-out-loud funny as he narrates his odyssey through battleground sites from rural Wisconsin through Texas to the chambers of the U.S. Senate. Along the way he happily and with a usually generous spirit skewers Supreme Court justices, legislators, educators, law school professors and pretty much anyone else, including himself, who has ever taken a position on the enduring American controversies surrounding prayer in schools, religious displays on public property, or the teaching of evolution. This is a rare treat, a combination of thoughtful analysis and quirky humor that illuminates an issue that rarely elicits a laugh—and that is central to the American body politic.

June 2, 2014
American Indian activist and scholar Dunbar-Ortiz (The Great Sioux Nation) launches a full-bore attack on what she perceives as the glaring gaps in U.S. history about the continent’s native peoples. Professional historians have increasingly been teaching much of what Dunbar-Ortiz writes about, yet given what she argues is the vast ignorance of the Indigenous experience, there still remains a knowledge deficit that needs to be rectified. She describes the U.S. as “a colonialist settler state, one that, like the colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules.” The conventional national narrative, she writes, is a myth that’s “wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence.” What is fresh about the book is its comprehensiveness. 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. Dunbar-Ortiz’s material succeeds, but will be eye-opening to those who have not previously encountered such a perspective.

September 15, 2014
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism. Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz's (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn't been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while "Indian" isn't bad, since "[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider 'Indian' a slur," "American" is due to the fact that it's "blatantly imperialistic." Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a "colonialist settler-state" (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-a-vis the Palestinians today) and then "displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated"-after, that is, having been forced to live in "concentration camps." Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book-undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses-probably won't question Dunbar-Ortiz's inaccurate assertion that the military phrase "in country" derives from the military phrase "Indian country" or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were "gold-obsessed." Furthermore, most readers won't likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term "Anasazi") sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn't entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe. A Churchill-ian view of native history-Ward, that is, not Winston-its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.

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July 1, 2014

Dunbar-Ortiz's (Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie) polemic is purportedly the first history of the United States written from an indigenous perspective. The book is framed around the theory that America is a "colonial settler state" that endeavors to subjugate its enemies through warfare that ends with the nation demanding that its defeated opponents "surrender unconditionally or face annihilation." With the book's foundation established from the beginning, the author is thus freed to pick and choose the data that supports the predetermined conclusion. Without a doubt, there are some episodes in the history of the United States's treatment of native peoples that rose to the level of genocide, but to say that the government employed mass killings as a consistent policy is debatable. That claim denies the agency that many Native American groups exerted throughout their dealings with the government. Also, the theory-guided narrative strains credulity when the author makes the case that what happened to the native peoples within the boundaries of the present-day United States is the same as what is currently occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places where the U.S. military is engaged. VERDICT Not recommended.--John R. Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2014
Dunbar-Ortiz, Native American studies scholar and longtime American Indian Movement member, offers a radical rewrite of traditional U.S. history up to and including the five wars waged since WWII, a history, she explains, based on settler colonialism, or the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. As part of the long-established Columbus myth, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a worldwide system of colonization, while, simultaneously, land in this country went from being sacredas it was for the indigenousto being a commodity to be bought and sold. Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't end her litany of violence against the indigenous as part of this land grab with the Sand Creek Massacre or Wounded Knee, as do some postmodern surveys of U.S. history. Instead, she argues that the same strategies employed with the indigenous peoples on this continent were mirrored abroad in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan, and Iraq again in 2003. Meticulously documented, this thought-provoking treatise is sure to generate discussion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)