“In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements – unlimited war and irregular war – into their first way of war which is still their way of war. I make throughout the book, connections between the U.S. military today and its foundation in these unrelenting wars that actually went up through 1890 and then moved overseas to the Philippines and the Caribbean with the same generals in the Philippines who had been fighting the Sioux and the Cheyenne in the Northern Plains.”

 

—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, speaking at the Green Apple used bookstore in San Francisco, December 4, 2014, on her new book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, published in September 2014 by Beacon Press. (The recording of this, Part One (from 14:43 to 15:31) of Two is available from Time of Useful Consciousness Radio).

 

From the Author’s Note (page xiii):
     “I’ve come to realize that a new periodization of US history is needed that traces the Indigenous experience as opposed to the following standard division: Colonial, Revolutionary, Jacksonian, Civil War and Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age, Overseas Imperialism, Progressivism, World War I, Depression, New Deal, World War II, Cold War, and Vietnam War, followed by contemporary decades. I altered this periodization to better reflect Indigenous experience but not as radically as needs to be done. This is an issue much discussed in current Native American scholarship.
     “I also wanted to set aside the rhetoric of race, not because race and racism are unimportant but to emphasize that Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples - hundreds of nations - not as a racial or ethnic group. "Colonization," "dispossession," "settler colonialism," "genocide" - these are the terms that drill to the core of US history, to the very source of the country’s existence.
     “The charge of genocide, once unacceptable by establishment academic and political classes when applied to the United States, has gained currency as evidence of it has mounted, but it is too often accompanied by an assumption of disappearance. So I realized it was crucial to make the reality and significance of Indigenous peoples’ survival clear throughout the book. Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance and storytelling passed through the generations, and I sought to demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately understand the history of the United States.
     “My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples’ experience, and the meaning and future of the United States itself.”