Lade die kostenlose Kindle-App herunter und lese deine Kindle-Bücher sofort auf deinem Smartphone, Tablet oder Computer – kein Kindle-Gerät erforderlich.
Mit Kindle für Web kannst du sofort in deinem Browser lesen.
Scanne den folgenden Code mit deiner Mobiltelefonkamera und lade die Kindle-App herunter.
OK
Bild nicht verfügbar
Farbe:
-
-
-
- Herunterladen, um dieses Videos wiederzugeben Flash Player
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning History, Band 3) Gebundene Ausgabe – 16. September 2014
Dieses Buch gibt es in einer neuen Auflage:
28,54 €
(4.646)
Nur noch 10 auf Lager (mehr ist unterwegs).
Kaufoptionen und Plus-Produkte
Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck
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-Ortizoffers 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.
- Seitenzahl der Print-Ausgabe320 Seiten
- SpracheEnglisch
- HerausgeberBeacon Press
- Erscheinungstermin16. September 2014
- Abmessungen15.75 x 3.05 x 23.37 cm
- ISBN-10080700040X
- ISBN-13978-0807000403
Kunden, die diesen Artikel angesehen haben, haben auch angesehen
Produktbeschreibungen
Pressestimmen
—Booklist
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly
“From the struggles against the early British settlers in New England and Virginia to the final catastrophes at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, Dunbar-Ortiz never flinches from the truth.”
—CounterPunch
“[An] impassioned history.... Belongs on the shelf next to Dee Brown’s classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States helped me clarify my place in this country. It confirmed what had been told to me by my ancestors: that Indigenous peoples, from the North Pole to the South, have been here since before the world was known as round. As a conquering nation, the United States has rewritten history to make people of the U.S. forget our past as natives to this land. This is especially apparent in the Mexi-phobic, immigrant-phobic policies of our time.
"An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014) helped me clarify my place in this country...This book is necessary reading if we are to move into a more humane future."
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“A must-read for anyone interested in the truth behind this nation’s founding.”
—Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, PhD, Jicarilla Apache author, historian, and publisher of Tiller’s Guide to Indian Country
“This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes US history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks. Here, rendered in honest, often poetic words, is the story of those tracks and the people who survived—bloodied but unbowed. Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
“Dunbar Ortiz’s . . . assessment and conclusions are necessary tools for all Indigenous peoples seeking to address and remedy the legacy of US colonial domination that continues to subvert Indigenous human rights in today’s globalized world.”
—Mililani B. Trask, Native Hawai‘ian international law expert on Indigenous peoples’ rights and former Kia Aina (prime minister) of Ka La Hui Hawai‘i
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States provides an essential historical reference for all Americans. . . . The American Indians’ perspective has been absent from colonial histories for too long, leaving continued misunderstandings of our struggles for sovereignty and human rights.”
—Peterson Zah, former president of the Navajo Nation
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History . . . pulls up the paving stones and lays bare the deep history of the United States, from the corn to the reservations. If the United States is a ‘crime scene,’ as she calls it, then Dunbar-Ortiz is its forensic scientist. A sobering look at a grave history.”
—Vijay Prashad, author of Public Enemy
“Justice-seekers everywhere will celebrate Dunbar-Ortiz’s unflinching commitment to truth—a truth that places settler-colonialism and genocide exactly where they belong: as foundational to the existence of the United States.”
—Waziyatawin, PhD, activist and author of For Indigenous Minds Only
“Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awarenesses, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers—settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing—to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence.” —Bill Ayers
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a fiercely honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement, one which has never been attempted by any other historian or intellectual. The presentation of facts and arguments is clear and direct, unadorned by needless and pointless rhetoric, and there is an organic feel of intellectual solidity that provides weight and trust. It is truly an Indigenous peoples’ voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz’sbook direction, purpose, and trustworthy intention. Without doubt, this crucially important book is required reading for everyone in the Americas!”
—Simon J. Ortiz, Regents Professor of English and American Indian Studies, Arizona State University
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes a masterful story that relates what the Indigenous peoples of the United States have always maintained: Against the settler U.S. nation, Indigenous peoples have persevered against actions and policies intended to exterminate them, whether physically, mentally, or intellectually. Indigenous nations and their people continue to bear witness to their experiences under the U.S. and demand justice as well as the realization of sovereignty on their own terms.”
—Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and author of Reclaiming Diné History
Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
This land
We are here to educate, not forgive.
We are here to enlighten, not accuse.
–Willie Johns, Brighton Seminole Reservation, Florida
Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—“from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters”—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today.
It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself—the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.
What historian David Chang has written about the land that became Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: “Nation, race, and class converged in land.” Everything in US history is about the land—who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (“real estate”) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.
US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”
The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism— 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. Those who seek history with an upbeat ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian dreams of a better society.
Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth we’ve been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues.
Teaching Native American studies, I always begin with a simple exercise. I ask students to quickly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained independence from Britain. Invariably most draw the approximate present shape of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific—the continental territory not fully appropriated until a century after independence. What became independent in 1783 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic shore. When called on this, students are embarrassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call this a Rorschach test of unconscious “manifest destiny,” embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming inevitability of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent had previously been terra nullius, a land without people.
Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” celebrates that the land belongs to everyone, reflecting the unconscious manifest destiny we live with. But the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. Many were slave owners who desired limitless land for lucrative cash crops. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.
In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.
Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying identity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. That part of the origin story is supported and reinforced by the Columbus myth and the “Doctrine of Discovery.” According to a series of late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European nations acquired title to the lands they “discovered” and the Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it. As law professor Robert A. Williams observes about the Doctrine of Discovery:
Responding to the requirements of a paradoxical age of Re-
naissance and Inquisition, the West’s first modern discourses
of conquest articulated a vision of all humankind united
under a rule of law discoverable solely by human reason. Un-
fortunately for the American Indian, the West’s first tentative
steps towards this noble vision of a Law of Nations contained
a mandate for Europe’s subjugation of all peoples whose ra-
dical divergence from European-derived norms of right conduct
signified their need for conquest and remediation.
The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence onward, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a world system of colonization. “Columbia,” the poetic, Latinate name used in reference to the United States from its founding throughout the nineteenth century, was based on the name of Christopher Columbus. The “Land of Columbus” was—and still is—represented by the image of a woman in sculptures and paintings, by institutions such as Columbia University, and by countless place names, including that of the national capital, the District of Columbia. The 1798 hymn “Hail, Columbia” was the early national anthem and is now used whenever the vice president of the United States makes a public...
Produktinformation
- Herausgeber : Beacon Press (16. September 2014)
- Sprache : Englisch
- Gebundene Ausgabe : 320 Seiten
- ISBN-10 : 080700040X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0807000403
- Abmessungen : 15.75 x 3.05 x 23.37 cm
- Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 1.232.149 in Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Bücher)
- Nr. 424 in Indianer (Bücher)
- Nr. 5.996 in Geschichte der USA (Bücher)
- Nr. 600.710 in Fremdsprachige Bücher
- Kundenrezensionen:
Informationen zum Autor
Entdecke mehr Bücher des Autors, sieh dir ähnliche Autoren an, lies Autorenblogs und mehr
Kundenrezensionen
Kundenbewertungen, einschließlich Produkt-Sternebewertungen, helfen Kunden, mehr über das Produkt zu erfahren und zu entscheiden, ob es das richtige Produkt für sie ist.
Um die Gesamtbewertung der Sterne und die prozentuale Aufschlüsselung nach Sternen zu berechnen, verwenden wir keinen einfachen Durchschnitt. Stattdessen berücksichtigt unser System beispielsweise, wie aktuell eine Bewertung ist und ob der Prüfer den Artikel bei Amazon gekauft hat. Es wurden auch Bewertungen analysiert, um die Vertrauenswürdigkeit zu überprüfen.
Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Kundenbewertungen bei Amazon funktionieren.-
Spitzenrezensionen
Spitzenbewertungen aus Deutschland
Derzeit tritt ein Problem beim Filtern der Rezensionen auf. Bitte versuche es später erneut.
If we don't face these truths, we'll continue doing what the indigenous peoples of America have suffered from for so long. And this is not very Christian. Nor democratic. Nor well intended.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
In the final chapter of A People’s History of the United States (1980) Howard Zinn wrote,
“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country rich in natural resources, talent and labour power it can afford to distribute wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased.
There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media—none more successfully in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty…
Against the reality of that desperate, bitter battle for resources, made scarce by elite control, I am taking the liberty of writing those 99% as “the people”. To emphasise the commonality of the 99 percent, to declare the deep enmity of interest with the 1 percent, is to do exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them from the Founding Fathers to now- have tried their best to prevent.
About ten years earlier, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano published Las Venas abiertas de América latina. He introduced his story of Latin America’s bloodletting:
“For those who understand history as a contest, the backwardness and suffering of Latin America is only the result of defeat. We lost, the others won. But the fact is that the winners only won thanks to us losing. The history of Latin American underdevelopment is, as has been said, also the history of the inception of global capitalism. The foreigners’ victory always included our defeat; our wealth always brought with it our poverty and the wealth of others, namely to feed the empires and their local overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy gold is turned to waste and food to poison… The rain that irrigated the imperial power centres drowned the outer regions of the system. To the same degree the wealth of our ruling classes—ruling internally, ruled from abroad—is the curse of the mass of our people, that is damned to life as a beast of burden.”
Professor Dunbar-Ortiz has written a history alone whose title tells at least the US reader in what tradition she stands. Whereas Zinn’s classic attempts to recover in a readable summary the crucial details which the 99% of the US population have been taught to forget or maybe never even knew, Ms Dunbar-Ortiz goes one step further to explicitly remind generations of immigrants to North America and presumably indigenous readers as well that this continent was fully inhabited prior to its alleged “discovery” and that its indigenous population never surrendered its birth right. This makes her Indigenous Peoples’ History a bridge between Galeano’s study of Latin America and Zinn’s biopsy of Euro-America.
While Zinn’s history by no means disparages the role of Native Americans, his focus is overwhelmingly the struggles of those who came to the North American continent either as slaves, indentured servants, “coolies” or poor exiles from their native lands. This is not a deficiency per se. The size of the United States and the variety of peoples who came to inhabit it make any attempt to summarise the experiences of empire fast insurmountable. However as Galeano and Zinn show, the recovery of this history is an enormous and yet essential task that cannot be left to any one person. In fact their books, as in the present volume by Professor Dunbar-Ortiz, are all vital if the ordinary inhabitants of the Americas are to be able to teach their children and children’s children that their history is simply not the same as the history of the 1 percent that constitutes the ideological and doctrinal “grits” with which they are fed in schools, universities and the mass media.
At this point two other authors are indispensible if the scope of historical fabrication is to be genuinely comprehended and appreciated. Andre Gunder Frank, an idiosyncratic economist who wrote his dissertation under of all people Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and unlike his fellow Chicago alumni advised Salvador Allende instead of Augusto Pinochet, was in many ways a less radical but by no means less astute student of the Americas. His landmark Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) argued fervently against the prevailing notion that the people of Latin America (and the so-called developing world) lived somehow in “pre-capitalist” societies to be developed into capitalist countries like those in Europe and North America. In his last book ReOrient he demonstrated convincingly that it was the plunder of Latin America by Spain and Portugal that gave rise to capitalism as we know it in the first place, thereby shifting the control over the world economy from Asia (China) to Europe. The conquest of Meso-America and South America flooded Europe with silver and gold that then funded the conquest of North America by the British and their settler-colonial transplants on the Eastern seaboard.
Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist, demonstrated the absurdity of colonial mythology that depicted the Americas as sparsely populated, inhabited by “primitive” societies—a constitutive fantasy that persists in the US today.
Finally, no discussion of the indigenous peoples of North America is complete without the work of Ward Churchill. Among other works, A Little Matter of Genocide rebuts the central myth that the indigenous tribes of North America became “extinct” through superior civilisation. He also documented that the uninterrupted genocidal practices of the settler-colonial elite in North America included all the racial engineering instruments for which National Socialists were tried in Nuremberg in 1945—for crimes against humanity. The official and unfortunately widely accepted viewpoint among whites in the US is that the conquest of North America and the wars against the indigenous were and are to be measured by a different standard of culpability than that applied to the relatively short-lived if phenomenally brutal Nazi empire. His far more damning conclusion however is that unlike the Nazi genocide in Europe, the North American genocide against indigenous peoples continues unseen and unabated.
This all makes Ms Dunbar-Ortiz’ history even more critical today. The widely-held belief that there were no substantial indigenous civilisations in North America—a land without people—to annihilate and that the capitalist system built on their destruction was inevitable cannot be countered without extensive recovery of that indigenous history, esp. to the extent it is borne by those peoples themselves, and popularisation—that is to say its restoration in the collective memory of Zinn’s 99%.
It is Professor Dunbar-Ortiz’ contribution to that recovery and potential popularisation that make her book necessary reading. Unlike Ward Churchill, the polemicist, Ms Dunbar-Ortiz has reconstructed, in a very readable form, the enormous variety of cultures and socio-economic relationships which prevailed among North America’s aboriginal inhabitants while showing how they survive today despite the unending onslaught by the settler-colonial regime, led primarily by the extractive primary commodities cartels, banks, mass transportation companies, armaments industry and agribusiness—the mainstays of the North American elite today.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History is a demonstration, as she writes, “surviving genocide is resistance.” Survival is not a passive condition but a dynamic process. This survival has occurred at a number of levels in numerous ways.
On one hand it is important to demystify political and economic processes usually reduced to unanalysed slogans like “manifest destiny”, the “Monroe Doctrine”, or “discovery” and even “settlement” itself. The term “settler-colonialism” has been used in social sciences for decades but almost never applied to the US itself. The very colonial process is usually taught as something that ended in 1776 when the Anglo-American elite declared that its imperial interests would be pursued separately from those of Great Britain. Colonialism was only reintroduced selectively when the US defeated Spain and seized its colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines). Yet the term never enjoyed official recognition—e.g. there was never a colonial secretary or department in the federal government as there had been in every European empire. The official US term was “homesteading” and the legislation seizing indigenous lands were Land Grant Acts. One third of the continental US was acquired by purchase from the French Empire—it never belonged to the inhabitants. Hence it was at the pleasure of the federal government to give it to settlers—whereby the vast majority of the lands was given to stock corporations headquartered in the East.
Professor Dunbar-Ortiz therefore spends considerable time explaining the language and law that facilitated conquest and helped conceal it from the waves of immigrants who displaced the Native Americans. Of course mere survival was not the only form of resistance. Indigenous peoples fought to defend their lands. They negotiated where possible. Finally they assimilated and submitted when left with no other choice.
Indigenous peoples did not cease to challenge conquest of their lands and destruction with the so-called “closing of the frontier”. Just as the end of World War II and the adoption of the UN Charter raised the expectations of colonised peoples throughout the world that they would obtain their independence and equality among nations, indigenous peoples in North America renewed their demands against the US regime in the post-war era. What became known as the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s—and later was narrowly so channelled—was a broad and differentiated movement among indigenous peoples joining the demands for an end to Jim Crow by African-Americans. It was not the limited challenge to discrimination and deprival of voting rights that is portrayed by today’s mass media. Instead it was the North American part of emancipatory struggles throughout the world—and indigenous peoples were part of it.
Official history in the US downplays the massive government efforts to suppress these movements while portraying the few successes as the natural wonder of “deepening democracy”. Strangely enough although the US presents itself to the outside world as the paragon of democracy, its indigenous inhabitants, not to mention Blacks are supposed to accept their second and third rate status as incidental to a long march toward democracy at the end of which even they will be treated like white folks. Acceptance of this view by broad masses of “white” US Americans is fostered by the continuing flow of images propagated in school curricula and the mass media. Despite the fact that the Western genre is a patent falsification of indigenous history, one only has to recall James Baldwin’s speech at the Cambridge Union in 1965, where he told how as a child he found himself rooting for the cavalry as they killed the Indians—until he realised it was people like him that were getting killed. To underline how powerful these media images are: John Wayne established himself as a military hero, having played a soldier, sailor and marine in innumerable war films, although he never served a day in the armed forces (a fact that led to him frequently being booed off stages when he visited Vietnam).
More importantly until World War I practically the only activity of the US Armed Forces was what today is called counter-insurgency or counter-terror. The extensive network of forts, many still in service today, were built to dominate and annihilate indigenous resistance to the conquest of land and theft of natural resources. Apartheid South Africa did not invent Bantustans, like the apartheid laws, they copied them from the tried and true models developed in the US. Today the US Army cavalry divisions—although tanks and helicopters have replaced horses—still pride themselves on the headgear, the so-called “cav hat”, worn by their Indian-killing predecessors.
These are just some of the cultural traditions taken for granted in history told from the perspective of the settler-colonial regime. While Professor Dunbar-Ortiz retells these traditions in the context of what happened to indigenous peoples, she also tries to recover original history as told by survivors and conveyed from one generation to the next. This also raises the classical methodological question of reliability and verifiability. There are no capitals and “national archives” to scour for this history. Does this mean that the stories are tainted or historically unreliable? That of course depends on one’s attitude toward official archives and the written legacies of the victors. As Martin Bernal copiously documented, the entire academic discipline known as “Classics” was invented in Europe to create an imagined lineage between 18th and 19th century European empires and Ancient Greece. Edward Said demonstrated how the ideology of Orientalism —engendered academic disciplines in France and Britain whose primary purpose was to train the colonial bureaucracy. If one accepts the premise that the US has been a settler-colonial state, then substantial elements of its academic and institutional research apparatus are certainly tainted by the powers they were created to serve. Thus it is open to question how much of official academic knowledge about indigenous North Americans is to be trusted. It can by no means be assumed objective.
The waning—or suppression—of the post-war liberation movements throughout the world and especially in the US have fostered the attrition of Native American studies and similar projects introduced to universities during those years of protest. That alone makes a popular historical work like An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States a welcome analgesic if not a cure for the industrially induced amnesia of the past thirty years. If reading it reminds young people of the history they are not being taught and leads them to seek it themselves, this book will be a most welcome addition to any literate person’s library.