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.
