To end this week of posts about Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States and David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, I have a pair of final quotes from their books, and a compilation of all the posts, plus some other posts that led up to it and I see as related.
"We always talk about the settlement of the frontier, not the conquest of the frontier." (Dunbar-Ortiz, in one of the sections where she discusses historian John Grenier.)
When mainstream schools teach about Columbus discovering America, Thanksgiving, and the "opening" of the West, "Indians figured either as subaltern welcomers or impediments of progress" (Treuer, p. 329, writing about the need for Indigenous-controlled schools).
Both of those quotes are about language and control of narrative — framing. Both books provide plenty of information for challenging the usual framing, as long as one remembers to question the assumed reality, as with the Star Tribune's story of the Swedish family after the Civil War.
Here is the list of my posts related to the two books:
U.S. Indian Policy, an Overview
Dunbar-Ortiz and Treuer: Commonalities, a Few Differences
Dunbar-Ortiz and Treuer, Part 1 (through 1890)
Dunbar-Ortiz and Treuer, Part 2 (post-1890)
Asides from David Treuer
Facts from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Part 1
Facts from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Part 2
Relevant, fairly recent posts:
Who Gets Empathy?
I Am Your Relative
The American Buffalo
Message on a Train Car
The Lost Journals of Sacajawea
Glory Days
Two Shows at Mia, September 2023
Bandolier Bags at the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum
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