Name: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
ISBN: 9781322089751

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

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.

What Hacker News says

rexpopJan 2019

Yours is a phenomenal analogy, I thought, but as the comment opening this thread insinuated, you are naive.

> increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups too

Close, but increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups _most_. And, as it's been said, what we have made is only generously defined as progress--and most vehemently by those who seek to halt what little progress we've made as "sufficient".

> If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress.

This Malcolm X quote does a great job highlighting how the cessation of a particular oppression is hardly progress. Since slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and Red-Lining, there has been little in the way of reparations to make African American communities whole--not to mention the millions of Mesoamericans(1) similarly exploited in the history of American Imperialism(2), and still to this day(3)!

So, thanks again for that completely brilliantly painted analogy. I hope you find these texts offer some compelling augmentations to your understanding.

1) Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America"

2) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"

3) CrimethInc's "No Wall They Can Build"

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erikschosterDec 2018

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States from 2014 is very illuminating of the strategy of colonization and empire building in the US. It also connects the dots to the present day very well.

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chemaJan 2015

Very interesting visualization. It complements the recent release of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an excellent introduction to a consistently ignored aspect of US History.

http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-U...

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spoonfeeder006Dec 2024

First of all, how much is this your issue, vs the society's problems impacting you?

The main causality I'm seeing here is that the uber-wealthy are clinging to their money like a crack addict to their next fix. Specifically by often paying their employees the absolute bare minimum they can, based on the circumstances. The result is that, to achieve basic financial independence, most people need to spend a herculean effort, often along lines that aren't in line with their fundamental aspirations, and which might not even succeed

And since this wealth disparity is an issue we take for granted, we often grow up learning to think of "being wealthy" as the root of all human aspirations, when in fact all that can do is satisfy only a person's most basic of basic needs

Hence we don't learn how to find what our true aspirations in life are, and hence if we do achieve financial independence, we often feel something is missing

An example of this can be learned from the book by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" where she talks about how, before the Genocide dessimated their societies and cultures, the indigenous peoples had a lot more time for recreation, ceremony, and arts than the europeans did. This tells me their economies were more efficient, probably because they didn't have the ever expanding greed of an elite class to satisfy

This would open people up to exploring their true aspirations beyond survival

In my personal experience, at some point I suddenly felt the need to become a mental health counselor. Eventually I started studying neuroscience through MIT lectures on youtube. I honestly cannot describe how enthralling that was. It wasn't something that would get me rich. It was just fascinating and eye opening, and something that could probably lead me on a path of doing basic research in the future that would, who knows, help homeless drug addicts, especially those who are victims of systemic racism

So in the future, I think I need to focus on stuff like that more

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