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An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States (2014)

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

080700040X (ISBN13: 9780807000403)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Beacon Press

review 1: Ms.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement by a true historian and intellectual. The presentation of facts and arguments is clear and direct. It is truly an Indigenous peoples’ voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz’s book direction, purpose, and trustworthy intention.This critically important book should be required reading for everyone in the Americas! **Received this book as part of the Goodreads First Reads program**
review 2: I received this book as part of the Goodreads First Reads program. First, I should say that I recognize what a herculean proposition it would be to create a history of the United States as experienced by its Indigenous inhabitants; I greatly resp... moreect both Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for accepting the challenge and Beacon Press for its foresight in publishing its ReVisioning American History series; and I think this book is an extremely important one. I hope it will have far-reaching ripple effects in the field. Over and over again, I found myself nodding at Dunbar-Ortiz's critiques of past approaches hailed as innovative while, at their core, they were based on subtle evasions or outright dismissals of settler colonialism and the genocide on which it was/is founded. Perhaps this book can motivate a new generation of historians (and citizens) to deal more honestly with the past. If it does, its worth could not be overstated.That said, I see fundamental flaws in this study.For one thing, Dunbar-Ortiz apparently is untutored in and unwilling to consult specialists on economics or intellectual history, and this causes her to mislabel and misattribute key forces and movements that rest at the heart of her argument. This ensures that her work cannot speak to other survey works and texts, and that is a terrible shame. For instance, she makes the very basic error of calling the hoarding of gold and the exploitation of colonial resources capitalism, when this practice and its corresponding theory/philosophy was, in fact, mercantilism. (Theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Smith, who became leading minds of free-market capitalism, framed their arguments in opposition to and in order to discredit mercantilism, not in support of its practice. These aren't the same or even similar ideas.)More troubling, however, is Dunbar-Ortiz's reliance on older secondary and tertiary sources that do not represent the latest understandings of the subjects she wishes to discuss. For example, she sets the stage for her discussion of "U.S. Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism" by offering a quote she attributes to Black Elk that says "the nation's hoop is broken and scattered." Yet it was proven some time ago (in 1984, by the anthropologist who founded and directed the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana State University in Bloomington, and this has been the subject of much publication since) that Black Elk never said any of this at all; the entire passage is a complete invention, one of many, poetic license taken by Black Elk's white interviewer John G. Neihardt to meet Neihardt's own (white) agenda in storytelling. Black Elk's own words and opinions were quite different. If Dunbar-Ortiz is claiming to represent the Indigenous perspective, and yet she is quoting as the authentic voice of a Native leader prose that was discounted decades ago as pure fabrication by a non-Native, shouldn't this give us pause? Several such examples of a lack of rigorous research struck me as undercutting Dunbar-Ortiz's entire project.I wish this work had been pursued with more precision and discipline and attention to detail; that said, perhaps it will inspire those who follow to do a more thorough and rigorous job. less

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