Facts from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

It's Thanksgiving week, and I finished Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States more than 10 days ago. I've been thinking about how to write the combined post I promised about her book and David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, and putting it off because it's a big task.

Then yesterday a new round of National Book Award winners were announced. The nonfiction winner was Ned Blackhawk for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Without having read it, his book sounds like an excellent, academic-level combination of Treuer and Dunbar-Ortiz's books, given Blackhawk's serious credentials and the book's publisher (Yale University Press).

Not by chance, since my recent readings, I watched (or rewatched, after more than 40 years and probably only a partial watching on broadcast television) the 1970 film Little Big Man. And the recently released Killers of the Flower Moon. Both of which center white men in their narratives, but still do more than most mainstream films to tell truths about the histories they portray.

My intent this week is to post about the two books and related topics.

I'm going to start with a list of some facts I never knew from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ones that can be taken out of her main discussion, somewhat like the asides from David Treuer I posted earlier. While these are more closely related to her topic than those were, they can still stand alone without much context.

• Indian Country, shortened to "in country," is still used by the U.S. military when they talk about being amid the enemy, behind enemy lines. They defend the usage as a "technical military term" like collateral damage or ordnance. (pp. 56–57)
• Scots-Irish immigrants of the late 17th and 18th century are said to have brought the concept of scalping for bounty with them, having started it against the indigenous/Catholic Irish. Later in the book, Dunbar-Ortiz says, it began "in earnest" in New Hampshire in 1697 with a Puritan woman named Hannah Dustin (page 64), who took 10 scalps from her captors. There are sure a lot of memorials and plaques about her on the East Coast! 
• The term "redskins," Dunbar-Ortiz says, was originally a specific reference "to the mutilated and bloody corpses...left in the wake of scalp-hunts..." (p. 65).
• Amherst, Mass., is named for British Major General Jeffery Amherst, who was responsible for a number of acts of genocide. (pp. 68–69)
• This is totally obvious, but Dunbar-Ortiz reminds me to never use the phrase "take no prisoners" as a casual adjective about having a hard-working attitude. The term literally means to kill everyone instead of taking them prisoner.
• Puritan and English crown leaders liked to use the euphemism "chastise" when what they meant was "destroy" or "lay waste to." It's startling to read that word over and over in quotations about violent death.
• Part of the reason the English surrendered to the colonists at Yorktown in 1783, ending the American Revolution, was to "redirect their resources to South Asia" (p. 78). I definitely didn't learn that in school.
• In 1783, two-thirds of the U.S. population (nearly 4 million people) lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Within 50 years, 4 million people crossed the Appalachian Mountains (pp. 114–115).

This list is from the first half of the book. I may have more facts I never knew from the second half, or not, depending on what I find during my review.