Commonalities, a Few Differences

I'm still trying to organize my thoughts about these two books, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer.

First, the differences I see between the two:

• Dunbar-Ortiz paces her text to cover the entire history relatively evenly within 236 pages. Treuer primarily focuses on the period after 1890 in 455 pages, of which just one grueling 76-page chapter holds everything that came before that year.
• While they have both been involved with Native communities throughout their lives and careers, their reasons for writing are different. Treuer includes many journalistic narratives about specific people living today. Dunbar-Ortiz relies on historical sources.
• Treuer, with degrees in anthropology, includes more archaeological information in his prehistory. He also sets out cohesive descriptions of the pre-1492 existence of peoples in the different parts of present-day U.S., and overall tells a simpler story of the peoples by region. This makes sense, since this is just one chapter of his book, vs. being the subject of Dunbar-Ortiz's entire text.

Some of the similarities between the two:

• Dunbar-Ortiz published in 2014, Treuer in 2019. With Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023) — and I'm sure other books I'm not mentioning — they're part of a flourishing in Indigenous historical publishing in the midst of the movements they're documenting.
• They both reject the idea that unintentional disease was the critical factor in Europeans overcoming Indigenous resistance, or that it was inevitable:
  "If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare..." (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 40)
  Dunbar-Ortiz says that emphasizing disease on its own neglects overwork in mines, malnutrition/starvation from loss of land and trade networks, setting up different peoples to fight with each other, loss of will to live (suicide, infanticide), deportation and enslavement. Treuer doesn't downplay disease as much, but he finds it to be one factor of several, and clearly not the most important one. Nations were weakened by disease, but they recovered, and it was other factors that had more effect.
• The two authors concur that what Indigenous peoples experienced was genocide.

Dunbar-Ortiz relates that when she taught Native American studies, she would begin by asking students to draw a general outline of the U.S. in the early 1780s, after independence. They would almost always draw the current shape of the lower 48 states. Dunbar-Ortiz calls this "a Rorschach test of unconscious 'manifest destiny'" (p. 2). We (people raised in the United States) have been immersed in the idea of free land, empty land, from sea to shining sea, "This Land Is Your Land." The Catholic Doctrine of Discovery and the Puritans' "God-given right" to the land fed those beliefs. Later, she writes:

Somehow, even "genocide" seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest destiny (p. 79). 

In keeping with that, Treuer's summary chapter is called "Narrating the Apocalypse: 10,000 BCE–1890."

On page 96, Dunbar-Ortiz reiterates that U.S. policy willingness to use genocide to acquire territory was key to what became its place in the world. At the time, we didn't have the people or the technology: it was "the colonialist settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land." She sees it as formative to U.S. foreign policy from then on.

She marks at least four specific periods of genocidal policy in the U.S.:

• The Jacksonian era of forced removal
• The California gold rush
• "The so-called Indian Wars in the Great Plains" after the Civil War
• The termination period of the 1950s

As I said in a brief earlier post, Dunbar-Ortiz was perhaps the first to call for a new periodization of U.S. history from an Indigenous perspective, at least in a popular book. She was part of the move to recognize that Indigenous people are not a "race" or ethnic group, not "people of color." (That's part of the reason for the term BIPOC.) And to raise a new level of awareness of the genocide enacted by the different colonizers of North and South America, and how settler colonialism and genocide are linked. Settler colonialism is always violent, or at least carries the threat of violence. 

Dunbar-Ortiz cites Ojibwe historian Jean O'Brien's term "firsting and lasting," which she notes we see everywhere on monuments and historical signage in the U.S., to the point where we no longer realize it means something. 

The first settlement.

The first dwelling (always of Europeans).

The last Mohican.

Ishi, the last of his tribe.

Once you see that kind of usage, you can't unsee it. It's everywhere around us, including in our soon-to-be-replaced Minnesota state flag and seal.