An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United StatesNew York Times Bestseller 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-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. |
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African African Americans American Indian American Indian Movement Andrew Jackson Anglo Anglo-American Anishinaabe Apaches army attacks British buffalo buffalo soldiers California called century Cherokee Nation Civil claims colonialist Congress conquest continued corn counterinsurgency Creek culture Dakota decades Deloria destroy Doctrine of Discovery Dunbar-Ortiz early enous European federal government fighting forced frontier genocide Georgia Grenier Haudenosaunee historians hundred Ibid independence Indian Country Indian Territory Indigenous communities Indigenous lands Indigenous nations John Grenier killed Lakota leader Mexican Mexico military militia mission Mississippi movement Muskogee myth Native American Native American studies Native nations Navajo North America northern Ohio Country Oklahoma Osage Nation President Press Pueblo rangers reservations River Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz sacred scalp Scots-Irish Seminole settlement settler colonialism Shawnee Sioux Nation slaves soldiers South sovereignty Spanish squatters Texas thousand tion towns trade treaties troops Ulster-Scots United University villages warfare wars West women Wounded Knee