Title: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United StatesAuthor: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍
My Review: This book, much like Howard Zinn's book "A People's History of the United States", attempts to tell the true story of how indigenous people were subjugated by white European settlers. I grew up watching cowboy and Indian movies and believed in the myth of manifest destiny that was taught in my early school years. I've since come to realize that much of what was taught was false or not the complete truth. Reading this book is quite eye-opening and should be required reading for all Americans.
Description (Audible): Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. This classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden. Writing from the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants, she centers Indigenous voices over the course of four centuries, tracing their perseverance against policies intended to obliterate them.
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. With a new foreword from Raoul Peck and a new introduction from Dunbar Ortiz, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
