I was not aware of this book, nor of the reviewer a Canadian by the name of Bhupinder Singh.
I have reproduced the entire review for people interested in the indigenous view of the history of the USA.
Most visitors or immigrants or long term residents of this country which the Indians call The Turtle Island never come across Indians, other than the stereotypical views propagated by popular media. Like all the other indigenous peoples, Indians are very private people, and it takes a long time before they open up their thoughts and feelings, being displaced in their own land, the last of the colonized people on earth
Book Review: Where did the Indians go?
I have reproduced the entire review for people interested in the indigenous view of the history of the USA.
Most visitors or immigrants or long term residents of this country which the Indians call The Turtle Island never come across Indians, other than the stereotypical views propagated by popular media. Like all the other indigenous peoples, Indians are very private people, and it takes a long time before they open up their thoughts and feelings, being displaced in their own land, the last of the colonized people on earth
Book Review: Where did the Indians go?
January 11, 2016
By Bhupinder Singh
An Indigenous Peoples’ History
of the United States
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon Press (2015)
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon Press (2015)
In my many years of
professional life in the US and Canada, I have worked with people from many
nationalities but not encountered even one Indigenous person.
As I read through Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz’s, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United
States, it became easier for me to understand why this is so.
Dunbar-Ortiz delves into
the history that is missing from the mainstream US history’s obsession with
biographies of great men. Dunbar-Ortiz contends that the depopulation of the
Indigenous people from around 100 million when Columbus reached the place was not
just the result of diseases that the Europeans brought to the Americas, as is
commonly perceived.
It is her well-argued
conviction that it was the result of a genocide carried over the last five
centuries.
Dunbar-Ortiz traces this
bloody history, interspersed with insights that have been gathered over many
decades of her work with her people – the Indigenous people of the Americas.
She establishes in the book how this settler colonialism was carried out by
importing large populations from Europe and letting them colonize large tracts
of territory stolen from the natives.
This profit-based
religion was the deadly weapon that the Europeans and settlers brought to the
Americas even as it was couched under the garb of the “white man’s burden.” The
original settlers of Massachusetts adopted an official seal in 1630 depicting
“a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and
inscribed with the plea, “come over and help us.”
Nearly 300 years later,
the official seal of the US military veterans of the “Spanish American war”
showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed US soldier and a sailor, with a
US battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme
well into the early 21st century, when the United States continues to invade
countries under the guise of “rescuing” them.
“The only good Indian is a dead
Indian”
The 17th century Puritan
settlers waged a war of annihilation with the Indigenous people –
slaughtering old men, women and children and burning down their
homes. This kind of war was alien to the Indigenous peoples. According to their
ways, warfare was highly ritualized, with quests aimed at attaining individual
glory, not annihilating opponents.
This phase of killing was
followed by the next phase – scalp hunting – when a price was placed on every
dead Indian’s head.
Scalps and Indigenous
children became means of exchange, currency, possibly even creating a black
market. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left
in the wake of the scalp-hunts: redskins. In one instance, the white attackers
decorated their weapons and caps with body parts – fetuses, penises, breasts,
and vulvas. This way of war became the basis for the wars against the
Indigenous across the continent into the late 19th century.
The British novelist and
critic, D. H. Lawrence, conceptualized the US origin myth: “You have there the
myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the
democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential
American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
Buffalo hunting,
corporatization and colonialism
In an effort to create
economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed
the army to destroy the fundamental economic base of the Plains Nation – the
buffalo. Buffaloes were killed to near extinction. Tens of millions of them
were dead within a few decades, and by the 1880s, only a few hundred were left.
The logical progression
of modern colonialism began with economic penetration, graduating first to a
sphere of influence, and then to protectorate status or indirect control,
military occupation, and finally annexation. Growing protectorate status
established through treaties culminated in the 1868 Sioux treaty, followed by
military occupation achieved by extreme exemplary violence, such as at Wounded
Knee in 1890, and finally dependency.
The collusion of big
business and government in the theft and exploitation of Indigenous lands and
resources is the core element of colonization and forms the basis of US wealth
and power. By the end of the 19th century, Indigenous communities had little
control over their resources or their economic situations, receiving only
royalties for mining and leasing, funds held in trust in Washington. The
historian Matthew King believed that his people’s country had been a colony of
the United States since 1890. Annexation by the United States was symbolically
marked by the imposition of US citizenship on the Sioux (and most other
Indians) in 1924.
From colonialism to imperialism
The American act of
decimating the Indigenous people has been extended to the rest of the world as
the US has invaded country after country, causing devastation and death – all
in the name of freedom. Irregular warfare initially waged against the
Indigenous people would continue in US military interventions overseas, from
the Philippines and Cuba to central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of
military means and has become the very basis for US-American identity.
Dunbar-Ortiz’s sharp gaze connects disparate incidents into a holistic pattern.
She quotes the Lakota
scholar Elizabeth Cook Lynn who spelt out the connection between the “Indian
wars” and the Iraq War: “The current mission of the United States to become the
center of political enlightenment to be taught to the rest of the world began
with the Indian wars and has become the dangerous provocation of this nation’s
historical intent.”
History from the eyes of the
survivor
Two decades of collective
Indigenous resistance, culminating at Wounded Knee in 1973, defeated the 1950s
federal termination policy. Yet, another move toward termination developed in
1977, with dozens of congressional bills to abrogate all Indian treaties and
terminate all Indian governments and trust territories. Indigenous resistance,
however, defeated those initiatives as well.
Eric Hobsbawm once
remarked that it is those who lose that understand history better because they
need to understand why they lost. He quoted another historian Reinhard
Kosselck: In the long run, the gains in historical understanding have come from
the defeated.
This is more than borne
out by An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
That the Indigenous
people of North America have survived five centuries since the arrival of the
Europeans is a tribute to their resilience and courage. Dunbar-Ortiz’s
well-researched and honest attempt to understand American history from the eyes
of those who lost not only brings to light their perspective but enlightens us
far more than any perspective from the victor’s eyes would.
Bio:
Bhupinder Singh blogs at A Reader’s Words.
Bhupinder Singh blogs at A Reader’s Words.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday is the blog of Cafe Dissensus magazine, based in New York City, USA. All
materials on the site are protected under Creative Commons License.