In the early 1990s, Native historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz found herself rethinking her contributions to a volume in the textbook series Out of Many: A History of the American People. Inside the book was an image that seemed a rebuke to every Native American history class she had ever taught: a traditionally dressed Navajo woman at work on her loom, weaving an American flag. “But it’s a real picture,” pleaded historians. That Navajo weavers routinely take on commissioned work was almost beside the point. What piqued the historian’s ire was the way this image seemed to symbolize the work of her revisionist colleagues’ attempt to fit indigenous people into an ill-suited American multicultural framework.
“This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the nascent United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of looting an entire continent and its resources ... with multiculturalism, manifest destiny won the day,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz in her comprehensive book, An Indigenous’ Peoples History of the United States. A professor emerita of ethnic studies at California State University East Bay, Dunbar-Ortiz sought to write “a history of the United States as experienced by its indigenous inhabitants.”
While many histories of Native Americans have been written over the past three decades, Dunbar-Ortiz breaks with recent narratives that she believes mistakenly identify Indians as an oppressed racial group rather than “territorially and treaty-based peoples” who have been robbed of their land. From the first pages, she invites the reader to consider indigenous civilizational achievements in the Americas at the time of Columbus’ landing. Between Alaska and Argentina lived as many as 100 million indigenous tribal members — roughly twice the population of Europe at the time. That population density was achieved through the widespread practices of herbal medicine, dentistry, sanitation, and surgery, Dunbar-Ortiz writes. Early European settlers marveled as they drove horse carriages through the diligently spaced trees of the forests of Ohio and Virginia. The bison herds that roamed eastern North America were the result of careful wildlife management by Iroquois tribal bands, who successfully transplanted the animal from western regions through strategic fires, converting forests into plains that supported buffalo grazing.
But with the establishment of British colonies in North America came settler colonialism, a policy and practice of eliminating Indians and appropriating their land that, Dunbar-Ortiz writes, the U.S. has rarely wavered from since. Such colonialism was carried out not just through military endeavors but with a wide array of actors, including private militias, clergy, and even the American homesteaders themselves, who were urged to attack Indians to defend their government’s land claims.
If land loss and human brutality seem to dominate the book, Dunbar-Ortiz would advise us to look at the ways in which we are subtly coached to ignore Native history. But she is not without hope. As conflicts abroad and within threaten American global dominance, she believes indigenous tribal experience remains instructive, writing, “Indigenous peoples offer possibilities for life after empire.”Â
