An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670’s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations. Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. “Redskins” (from Chapter Four: Bloody Footprints) The excerpt below is useful for teaching about the #ChangetheMascot campaign regarding the Washington football team and other sports mascots. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Thanksgiving: “It Has Never Been About Honoring Native Americans” on Democracy Now! on Nov. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Interview with Author Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by U.S. 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. 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.

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 U.S.

settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. 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.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz