Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck 2015 Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples 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, for the first time, acclaimed 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. 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, 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 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 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.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US 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.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

2020 American Indian Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book 2020 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People,selected by National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Children’s Book Council 2019 Best-Of Lists: Best YA Nonfiction of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · Best Nonfiction of 2019 (School Library Journal) · Best Books for Teens (New York Public Library) · Best Informational Books for Older Readers (Chicago Public Library) Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples’ resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism. Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity. The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People

"The common assumption that the United States is a "nation of immigrants" camouflages the reality that the US is a colonialist settler state"--

Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

Not a Nation of Immigrants

Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history. Tracing how these ideas evolved, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as: "Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims", "Indians Were Savage and Warlike", "Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians", "Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans", "Most Indians Are on Government Welfare", "Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich", and "Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol. Each chapter shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land.

And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans

"All the Real Indians Died Off"

A provocative, timely, and deeply-researched history of gun culture and how it reflects race and power in the United States

A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

Loaded

A founder of the feminist movement tells of her life as a radical activist and revolutionary.

A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975

Outlaw Woman

A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

Growing Up Okie

Red Dirt

Sitting in Judgement on America : Based on and Containing Testimony Heard at the "Sioux Treaty Hearing" Held December, 1974, in Federal District Court, Lincoln, Nebraska

The Great Sioux Nation

Hoy en día en Estados Unidos hay más de quinientas naciones indígenas reconocidas por el Gobierno federal que comprenden casi tres millones de personas, descendientes de los quince millones de nativos que habitaban esas tierras. El programa genocida que los colonos desarrollaron durante siglos ha sido omitido en gran medida de la historia, pero ahora, por primera vez, la historiadora y activista Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz nos ofrece una historia de Estados Unidos contada desde la perspectiva de los pueblos indígenas. Abarcando más de cuatrocientos años, nos revela cómo los nativos americanos, durante siglos, han resistido activamente la expansión del imperio estadounidense, y desafía el mito sobre la fundación de Estados Unidos, exponiendo cómo la política contra los pueblos indígenas era colonialista y estaba diseñada para apoderarse de los territorios de los habitantes originales, desplazándolos o eliminándolos. Una política que, por cierto, fue muy elogiada en la cultura popular, a través de escritores como James Fenimore Cooper o Walt Whitman, así como desde las instituciones gubernamentales y militares más importantes.

La historia indígena de Estados Unidos

In New Mexico—once a Spanish colony, then part of Mexico—Pueblo Indians and descendants of Spanish- and Mexican-era settlers still think of themselves as distinct peoples, each with a dynamic history. At the core of these persistent cultural identities is each group's historical relationship to the others and to the land, a connection that changed dramatically when the United States wrested control of the region from Mexico in 1848.

A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico

Roots of Resistance

Settler Colonialism examines the genesis in the USA of the first full-fledged settler state in the world, which went beyond its predecessors in 1492 Iberia and British-colonized Ireland with an economy based on land sales and enslaved African labor, an implementation of the fiscal-military state. Both the liberal and the rightwing versions of the national narrative misrepresent the process of European colonization of North America. Both narratives serve the critical function of preserving the "official story" of a mostly benign and benevolent USA as an anticolonial movement that overthrew British colonialism. The pre-US independence settlers were colonial settlers just as they were in Africa and India or like the Spanish in Central and South America. The nation of immigrants myth erases the fact that the United States was founded as a settler state from its inception and spent the next hundred years at war against the Native Nations in conquering the continent. Buried beneath the tons of propaganda-from the landing of the English "pilgrims" (Protestant Christian evangelicals) to James Fenimore Cooper's phenomenally popular The Last of the Mohicans claiming settlers' "natural rights" not only to the Indigenous peoples' territories but also to the territories claimed by other European powers-is the fact that the founding of the United States created a division of the Anglo empire, with the US becoming a parallel empire to Great Britain, ultimately overcoming it. From day one, as was specified in the Northwest Ordinance, which preceded the US Constitution, the new "republic for empire," as Thomas Jefferson called the new United States, envisioned the future shape of what is now the forty-eight states of the continental US. The founders drew up rough maps, specifying the first territory to conquer as the "Northwest Territory." That territory was the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was already populated with Indigenous villages and farming communities thousands of years old. Even before independence, mostly Scots Irish settlers had seized Indigenous farmlands and hunting grounds in the Appalachians and are revered historically as first settlers and rebels, who in the mid-twentieth century began claiming indigeneity. Self-indigenizing by various groups of settlers is a recurrent theme in story of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the history of erasure and exclusion about which I have written elsewhere.

Settler Colonialism

The author describes her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era

Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as “a force of nature on the page and off.” That force is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz’s firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua. With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City—a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay—the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra “affair” and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world—connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition. A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.

A Memoir of the Contra War

Blood on the Border

Alfons Cervera

Katixa Agirre

Sarah M. S. Pearsall

María Bonete Escoto

Zaron Burnett III

Mark Lause

Un cuestionamiento plural del mito fundacional de los Estados Unidos, una mirada crítica a la imagen del cowboy heroico que ha modelado parte de la cultura pop occidental.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

About

Books

Join the club