An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

  “In this riveting book, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz decolonizes American history and illustrates definitively why the past is never very far from the present. Exploring the borderlands between action and narration—between what happened and what is said to have happened—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. Best of all, she points a way beyond amnesia, paralyzing guilt, or helplessness toward discovering our deepest humanity in a project of truth-telling and repair. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States will forever change the way we read history and understand our own responsibility to it.”

  —BILL AYERS

  “Dunbar-Ortiz provides a historical analysis of the US colonial framework from the perspective of an Indigenous human rights advocate. Her 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

  “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: A Decolonization Handbook

  “Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a fiercely honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement, one that 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 inspires trust. It is truly an Indigenous peoples’ voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz’s book 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

  “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States provides an essential historical reference for all Americans. Particularly, it serves as an indispensable text for students of all ages to advance their appreciation and greater understanding of our history and our rightful place in America. 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

  “This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. If you are expecting yet another ‘new’ and improved historical narrative or synthesis of Indians in North America, think again. Instead Roxanne 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

  “Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes a masterful story that relates what the Indigenous peoples of the United States have always maintained: against the settler US 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 US and demand justice as well as the realization of sovereignty on their own terms.”

  —JENNIFER NEZ DENETDALE, associate professor of American studies, University of New Mexico, and author of Reclaiming Diné History

  “In her in-depth and intelligent analysis of US history from the Indigenous perspective, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz challenges readers to rethink the myth that Indian lands were free lands and that genocide was a justifiable means to a glorious end. A must-read for anyone interested in the truth behind this nation’s founding and its often contentious relationship with indigenous peoples.”

  —VERONICA E. VELARDE TILLER, PhD, Jicarilla Apache author, historian, and publisher of Tiller’s Guide to Indian Country

  “Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States should be essential reading in schools and colleges. It 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 The Poorer Nations

  ALSO BY ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

  The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty

  Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico

  Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War

  Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975

  Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

  BOOKS IN THE REVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES

  A Queer History of the United States

  by Michael Bronski

  A Disability History of the United States

  by Kim E. Nielsen

  AN

  INDIGENOUS

  PEOPLES’

  HISTORY

  OF THE

  UNITED STATES

  ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

  REVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY

  BEACON PRESS BOSTON

  TO

  Howard Adams (1921–2001)

  Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005)

  Jack Forbes (1934–2011)

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  INTRODUCTION

  This Land

  ONE

  Follow the Corn

  TWO

  Culture of Conquest

  THREE

  Cult of the Covenant

  FOUR

  Bloody Footprints

  FIVE

  The Birth of a Nation

  SIX

  The Last of the Mohicans and Andrew Jackson’s White Republic

  SEVEN

  Sea to Shining Sea

  EIGHT

  “Indian Country”

  NINE

  US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism

  TEN

  Ghost Dance Prophecy: A Nation Is Coming

  ELEVEN

  The Doctrine of Discovery

  CONCLUSION

  The Future of the United States

  Acknowledgments

  Suggested Reading

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As a student of history, having completed a master’s degree and PhD in the discipline, I am grateful for all I learned from my professors and from the thousands of texts I studied. But I did not gain the perspective presented in this book from those professors or studies. This came from outside the academy.

  My mother was part Indian, most likely Cherokee, born in Joplin, Missouri. Unenrolled and orphane
d, having lost her mother to tuberculosis at age four and with an Irish father who was itinerant and alcoholic, she grew up neglected and often homeless along with a younger brother. Picked up by authorities on the streets of Harrah, Oklahoma, the town to which their father had relocated the family, she was placed in foster homes where she was abused, expected to be a servant, and would run away. When she was sixteen, she met and married my father, of Scots-Irish settler heritage, eighteen, and a high school dropout who worked as a cowboy on a sprawling cattle ranch in the Osage Nation. I was the last of their four children. As a sharecropper family in Canadian County, Oklahoma, we moved from one cabin to another. I grew up in the midst of rural Native communities in the former treaty territory of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations that had been allotted and opened to settlers in the late nineteenth century. Nearby was the federal Indian boarding school at Concho. Strict segregation ruled among the Black, white, and Indian towns, churches, and schools in Oklahoma, and I had little interchange with Native people. My mother was ashamed of being part Indian. She died of alcoholism.

  In California during the 1960s, I was active in the civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti–Vietnam War, and women’s liberation movements, and ultimately, the pan-Indian movement that some labeled Red Power. I was recruited to work on Native issues in 1970 by the remarkable Tuscarora traditionalist organizer Mad Bear Anderson, who insisted that I must embrace my Native heritage, however fragile it might be. Although hesitant at first, following the Wounded Knee siege of 1973 I began to work—locally, around the country, and internationally—with the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council. I also began serving as an expert witness in court cases, including that of the Wounded Knee defendants, bringing me into discussions with Lakota Sioux elders and activists. Based in San Francisco during that volatile and historic period, I completed my doctorate in history in 1974 and then took a position teaching in a new Native American studies program. My dissertation was on the history of land tenure in New Mexico, and during 1978–1981 I was visiting director of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico. There I worked collaboratively with the All Indian Pueblo Council, Mescalero Apache Nation, Navajo Nation, and the Dinébe’iiná Náhiilna be Agha’diit’ahii (DNA) People’s Legal Services, as well as with Native students, faculty, and communities, in developing a research institute and a seminar training program in economic development.

  I have lived with this book for six years, starting over a dozen times before I settled on a narrative thread. Invited to write this ReVisioning American History series title, I was given parameters: it was to be intellectually rigorous but relatively brief and written accessibly so it would engage multiple audiences. I had grave misgivings after having agreed to this ambitious project. Although it was to be a history of the United States as experienced by the Indigenous inhabitants, how could I possibly do justice to that varied experience over a span of two centuries? How could I make it comprehensible to the general reader who would likely have little knowledge of Native American history on the one hand, but might consciously or unconsciously have a set narrative of US history on the other? Since I was convinced of the inherent importance of the project, I persisted, reading or rereading books and articles by North American Indigenous scholars, novelists, and poets, as well as unpublished dissertations, speeches, and testimonies, truly an extraordinary body of work.

  I’ve come to realize that a new periodization of US history is needed that traces the Indigenous experience as opposed to the following standard division: Colonial, Revolutionary, Jacksonian, Civil War and Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age, Overseas Imperialism, Progressivism, World War I, Depression, New Deal, World War II, Cold War, and Vietnam War, followed by contemporary decades. I altered this periodization to better reflect Indigenous experience but not as radically as needs to be done. This is an issue much discussed in current Native American scholarship.

  I also wanted to set aside the rhetoric of race, not because race and racism are unimportant but to emphasize that Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples—hundreds of nations—not as a racial or ethnic group. “Colonization,” “dispossession,” “settler colonialism,” “genocide”—these are the terms that drill to the core of US history, to the very source of the country’s existence.

  The charge of genocide, once unacceptable by establishment academic and political classes when applied to the United States, has gained currency as evidence of it has mounted, but it is too often accompanied by an assumption of disappearance. So I realized it was crucial to make the reality and significance of Indigenous peoples’ survival clear throughout the book. Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance and storytelling passed through the generations, and I sought to demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately understand the history of the United States.

  My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples’ experience, and the meaning and future of the United States itself.

  A note on terminology: I use “Indigenous,” “Indian,” and “Native” interchangeably in the text. Indigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider “Indian” a slur. Of course, all citizens of Native nations much prefer that their nations’ names in their own language be used, such as Diné (Navajo), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Tsalagi (Cherokee), and Anishinaabe (Ojibway, Chippewa). I have used some of the correct names combined with more familiar usages, such as “Sioux” and “Navajo.” Except in material that is quoted, I don’t use the term “tribe.” “Community,” “people,” and “nation” are used instead and interchangeably. I also refrain from using “America” and “American” when referring only to the United States and its citizens. Those blatantly imperialistic terms annoy people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, who are, after all, also Americans. I use “United States” as a noun and “US” as an adjective to refer to the country and “US Americans” for its citizens.

  INTRODUCTION

  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.1 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.2 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, over-heated. 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.”3 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.”4


  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.