An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

New 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9780807000410

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is professor emerita at California State University.

Book preview

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

Foreword to the Tenth-Anniversary Edition by Raoul Peck

Introduction to the Tenth-Anniversary Edition

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

More Suggested Reading

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Foreword to the Tenth-Anniversary Edition

When I started researching for my four-part documentary Exterminate All the Brutes, I knew I had to go to the story of the so-called New World origins. I knew I first had to immerse myself totally, and Roxanne’s enlightening book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States not only got me exactly there but changed everything. And in the process, not only did I find a friend but also a political soul mate with many decades of militancy behind her, a serious political operative, and a solid scholar.

What we shared was not just an exchange of knowledge and profound mutual respect. At the root it was a common view of the world, a common sense of the fight for justice and social equality. A deeper connection ensued, for we are both personally affected by the subject of our research. Both our lives are built on experiences of injustice and observations of the silenced cracks of the history we originated from. We both looked for ways to have a voice that carries, pushes forward, and breaks walls, for our stories to be heard. It is precious to encounter someone both perceptive and sensitive on this strenuous path to the deconstruction of history.

It was instantly clear to me that An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States would become one of the pillars on which I was going to build my documentary. The purpose of this arduous project was to deconstruct the theological, political, and civilizational discourse the USA has been built on. The very foundation, the soul, the fabric, of this society needed to be questioned. I started by disentangling the legends weaved around a pure and innocent Old Europe discovering a so-called new world, to reestablish this invented tale on its right footing. It was a bloody conquest. Roxanne's work provided the meticulous blow-by-blow testimony of this bloodiness, of this thoroughly planned, systematic elimination of the natives, this country’s from-the-start open-book agenda for a conquest from sea to shining sea.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is the national history of America from the point of view of a silenced yet fundamental and decisive episode: the genocide of the Indigenous people at the founding moment of the United States. It’s the tale of an entire population’s excruciating destruction, the wiping out of many tribes across an entire continent. The untold story of the stealing and appropriating of their harvest fields, their roads, their raw material, their infrastructures, their lives.

Yet, what is more difficult is to grasp the meaning of this untold history and the ramifications of this historical tale with other historical dilemmas: slavery, the founding of the United States, the birth of capitalism, all tangled into historical knots. And all this, we need to know.

Roxanne looks at history with no filters, and amongst the facts and numbers, she reveals the hidden sides of humanity, in all its complexity. Far into the past, she looks at America before the United States and tells us history made of multiple tales. We were told one side of the story; we finally have the whole tale. We know now how the United States was founded on a genocide.

It is the account of a masquerade: the malicious construction of the virgin island’s narrative, inhabited by a few worthless and inferior creatures, anomalies to be neutralized. The conquerors have told a story of victory, glory, self-worthiness, power. This story has been brought to us all the way from those dark ages, without being questioned; it has set the basic values, the foundations of this society today.

It is also, and most importantly, a tale of the Indigenous peoples’ resistance, a tale of their constant fight against a barbaric ethnic cleansing enterprise, from its beginning until today. This story, unfortunately, could never really be told openly to a wide and nonacademic audience. The legend was permanently printed one way. And after many reprintings, it became History. After generations of biased narration, this legend has metastasized within the American imagination, its literature, its cinema. The story then spread throughout the world and became the dominant and ubiquitous narrative.

Like many children in the world, I learned this innocent story of the origin, from Western movies, of course, and from the Eurocentric visions of an adventurous romanticism, which ultimately reduced all non-Americans to victims at best and to nonhumans at worst.

The words used by Roxanne to describe the historical tragedy of the Indigenous peoples of the United States—genocide, ethnic cleansing—have never been addressed so clearly and rigorously before to tell history from this angle. This is not only the Indigenous peoples’ history but the world’s history, which is entirely entangled with that historical tale. By telling an Indigenous peoples’ story of the United States, Roxanne also tells the story of the founding of capitalism, the fundamental role played by slavery in the founding of the United States, and the untold side of European history. She turns history on its head and reveals the underside, invisible to us, as it is the side on which today’s society is standing on.

The underside is revealed and now we can move forward.

Eventually.

As I conclude in Exterminate All the Brutes, It is not knowledge that we lack. In light of this fact, how do we proceed? How do we rewrite, preserve, and teach history? How do we find common ground?

—Raoul Peck

2022

Introduction to the Tenth-Anniversary Edition

You could call this book an Obama-era artifact. I researched and wrote it during the first five years of his presidency, in the midst of hope gradually fading into disappointment as the war machine grinded on. Any book is at least partially a captive of the time in which it is written, and in the case of writing US history, the mystic cords of memory of the founding and first century of the US conquest of the continent haunted the time, echoes of endless wars since the beginning that became the United States.

As I began writing, I felt dismayed hearing President Obama’s 2009 inaugural speech in which he eloquently celebrated settler colonialism and a land without people: For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. President Obama affirmed another key element of the US national myth in an interview a few days later with Al Arabiya television in Dubai. Asked if the United States could gain the trust of the Muslim world, he said, We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record . . . , America was not born as a colonial power. Only by erasing the existence of Indigenous nations could such a claim be made.

Rather than ending the war in Afghanistan, Obama ramped it up, celebrating the US Special Forces 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden, considered by the US to be the number-one terrorist in the world, responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The videotape of Obama and other officials watching the entire operation showed the joy on their faces when a voice proclaimed, Geronimo is dead. Neither the president nor his aides apologized for the choice of the code name when asked about it.

Coming from, arguably, the most liberal US president ever and the first Black president, Obama’s reaffirmation of the country’s official origin story grounded me in my task. That task was to create a new narrative that promised liberation from a false national story. The only means for doing that was through the experiences and narratives of the Indigenous peoples who were targeted for elimination from the first landing of Anglo settlers on the continent in 1607. It also meant that my task had to be about war and violence, the endless wars to take and hold the continent, followed by domination of the rest of the globe: settler colonialism and imperialism based on the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull of the Holy Roman Empire, issued in 1493, granting all the Western hemisphere to the Spanish monarchy that also was inscribed in US law in the 1820s. The Doctrine of Discovery marked the onset of the brutal colonization and looting of the non-European world for the next five centuries.

Soon after the book was published, life imitated art when Pope Francis announced, in January 2015, that he would bestow sainthood on the Spanish colonizer Junípero Serra that September, despite the three decades of protests conducted by descendants of the California Indigenous survivors of Spanish genocide after Serra was beatified in 1988. That had been the first step to sainthood but was so controversial that it had been set aside. In the first canonization to take place in North America, an orgy of solemn celebration of colonialism and the genocide of California Indigenous peoples, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, cabinet members, and members of Congress attended the ceremony at the Shrine of Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, broadcast live on most television and radio networks. This was a blatant confirmation of the continued authority of the Doctrine of Discovery. The Holy See, choosing to locate the sainthood ceremony in the US capital with a governmental endorsement presence as host, confirmed as well that the United States was carrying on the imperialist Holy Roman Empire’s Doctrine of Discovery.

The present informs every page of this book; it’s not just history.

What is remarkable is that most people who read the book react positively, as if something clicked in their heads, they were liberated from confusion and fairy tales, there was a shift. The book quickly took off in sales, adopted as a text in grade school as well as in university classes; reading groups formed, and many existing ones took up the book. WBAI radio host John Kane, who is a citizen of the Mohawk nation, while interviewing me, characterized the book as one-stop shopping. I found it an apt description, my goal in writing the book being to lead readers to learn more; to seek out the work of Indigenous teachers, scholars, authors, poets; and to rethink their accepted version of US history. The book was translated into Spanish by Argentine translator Nancy Viviana Piñeiro and published in Madrid, while Brandeis University professor Pascal Menoret translated it into French, and the book was published in Marseille. Then, in 2019, the young adult version of the book, adapted by Dr. Jean Mendoza and Dr. Debbie Reese, was released by Beacon Press and became an immediate hit with educators, winning multiple awards.

I was able to learn about that reaction and hear more feedback in the many talks I have given, and continue to give, about the book, switching from in-person to remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2020. After the initial three-month book tour, arranged by Beacon’s publicist, and excellent sales of the book, I expected that would be it and that I would embark on another book project. Instead, constant invitations from around the country have taken me to university campuses, community groups, churches, reservations, educators’ conferences, and other venues as a keynote speaker or participant on panels. The hunger to unlearn what so many of us have been taught is pronounced.

Following the 2016 surprise election of Donald Trump and his approval of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, many of the discussions I had with groups about my book turned to questioning how a vocal racist could be elected. But, of course, Trump had campaigned on the platform of white supremacy, making immigration the center of his campaign, focusing on the exclusion of Mexicans, and promising to build a border wall and militarize the southern border. He railed to his stadium audiences, When México sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards. In a January 2018 staff meeting on temporary immigration status, Trump asked, Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out. . . . Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries. . . . We should have more people from Norway. The month before, again degrading Haitians, Trump said that they all have AIDS, and about Nigerians, he claimed that once they had seen the United States, they would never go back to their huts in Africa. My audiences were also questioning the surge of strong white evangelical support for Trump.

White nationalism and European/US colonialism are major themes in the book, but in my talks they had not been raised as much as other aspects until Trump openly expressed and celebrated white supremacy and armed white nationalist militias became normalized. When he lost in 2020, with the highest voter turnout ever for a US presidential election, he still received 73.5 million votes to Joe Biden’s 79.3 million, 10 million more than he had received in 2016. That is a huge and dedicated number of mostly radicalized white people, many of them armed to the teeth. Trump had activated what President Richard Nixon had called his base, the silent majority, that is, descendants of white settlers, whom Nixon also had relied on in winning the 1968 and 1972 elections. White nationalists claim to be victims of white genocide. Not understanding the United States as a settler-colonialist state from its inception, as well as being imperialist—which is better understood—proves dangerous.

In the spring of 2018, Afro-Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, best known in the United States for his Academy Award–nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, contacted me regarding an HBO documentary series he was making on colonial violence titled Exterminate All the Brutes. His film company had optioned An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and he invited me to assist him with the adaptation. My book, then, was among three adapted for the film, the first on European colonialism to include the United States’ colonization of the Indigenous nations. Although I am a film lover and particularly admire Raoul Peck films, I had never attempted to work on a film script and found it difficult to capsulize pages of my text into a sentence, assuming the visual would capture its essence, a kind of magic that I came to respect enormously. The four-hour series premiered in April 2021 to critical acclaim, bringing more readers to the book.

Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that spring, the Black Lives Matter movement led demonstrations and marches that spread like wildfire, igniting a new consciousness about and condemnation of the continued law enforcement shootings and criminalizing of Black people. A strong affinity between Black Lives Matter and Native groups, like the Red Nation in New Mexico and the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay Area, collaborated in toppling statues of slavers (including presidents) and colonizers, especially those of Columbus and including Junípero Serra. Along with many other works on white supremacy published during this period, the book shot up in sales.

A violent backlash ensued when Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, including the January 2021 Capitol insurrection but also when armed white nationalist militias showed up at school board meetings, teachers and librarians were menaced, and Texas and other states banned books that deal with white supremacy, including the young readers’ version of this book, which proves its power and the power of books in general.

Since 2013, when the book was ready to go to press, dozens of other important books by Native authors have been published, all of which I wish I’d had access to while writing. I have added some of these titles to the Suggested Reading section. Indigenous knowledge also contributes to and deepens critical race theory, which teaches that white supremacy is structural, built into British colonial institutions and embedded in institutions established and perpetuated by the United States, and that racism is not a personal character flaw that can be eliminated by individual change alone. For understanding the origins of the United States, mired in war and genocide and the dispossession of Native nations, Indigenous peoples know this settler-colonial history and make demands for sovereignty and the return of lands taken outside treaty agreements.

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.

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.⁵ As law professor Robert A. Williams observes about the Doctrine of Discovery:

Responding to the requirements of a paradoxical age of Renaissance 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. Unfortunately 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 radical divergence from European-derived norms of right conduct signified their need for conquest and remediation.⁶

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.⁷ 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 appearance, and Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on the continent claimed by the United States.

Traditionally, historians of the United States hoping to have successful careers in academia and to author lucrative school textbooks became protectors of this origin myth. With the cultural upheavals in the academic world during the 1960s, engendered by the civil rights movement and student activism, historians came to call for objectivity and fairness in revising interpretations of US history. They warned against moralizing, urging instead a dispassionate and culturally relative approach. Historian Bernard Sheehan, in an influential essay, called for a cultural conflict understanding of Native–Euro-American relations in the early United States, writing that this approach diffuses the locus of guilt.⁸ In striving for balance, however, historians spouted platitudes: There were good and bad people on both sides. American culture is an amalgamation of all its ethnic groups. A frontier is a zone of interaction between cultures, not merely advancing European settlements.

Later, trendy postmodernist studies insisted on Indigenous agency under the guise of individual and collective empowerment, making the casualties of colonialism responsible for their own demise. Perhaps worst of all, some claimed (and still claim) that the colonizer and colonized experienced an encounter and engaged in dialogue, thereby masking reality with justifications and rationalizations—in short, apologies for one-sided robbery and murder. In focusing on cultural change and

Reviews for An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Outdated by now (the Supreme Court has gone a lot further in mandating deference to religion), but recounts key cases and in many instances talks to people involved in them. Wexler has a very strong, jokey voice that you may react strongly to one way or another, but does a good job communicating what the doctrines were like at the time.

[wearyhobo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not as funny as Assassination Vacation, a book that HH draws comparisons to, but Wexler is really smart, really opinionated, and really invested in getting people to understand church-state law better.

[dday_70 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book wasn't really what I was hoping for when I picked it up. I thought it would be an in-depth look of the stories behind some of the landmark cases involving the separation of church and state. Instead this was more of a amusing overview of the law concerning freedom of religion that included a few interviews with people involved in some of the cases. While the author is good at explaining the constitutional law aspects of different cases and is definitely amusing, I felt he spent too much time doing this. I've already taken con law and didn't really care about the legal issues, I wanted to know more about the stories behind the cases. So while others might find this book more enjoyable, I was disappointed.