kellyneut's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Wow, do I have a lot to learn and reflect on. This book has opened my eyes!
roll_n_read's review against another edition
5.0
This book is filled with important historical information, but Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz also does a tremendous job of shepherding us in a way that threads disparate Native Nations' actions and the longstanding theme of settler colonialism together to form a compelling story. I read this book in early November and then had to sit down and spend a couple of evenings reviewing sections and searching online in order to put together the notes below. My US public school education rendered me woefully uninformed on this history of indigenous peoples in the Americas and this book is a great resource. Highly recommend for all.
There are possibilities for "life-after-empire." "That process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous Nations, by restoring all sacred sites—starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land—and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native Nations."
--BEWARE OF NOTES--
White supremacy can be traced to the colonizing ventures of the crusades in Muslim-controlled territories and the protestant colonization of Ireland. (Irish were beheaded and scalped by English similar to Native Americans.)
Ironically gold itself isn't actually very valuable, but Spain was sick with gold fever. Catholic church sanctioned conquest for gold.
THE CULT OF THE COVENANT
"In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted people who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed."
Ulster Scots were already settler colonialist scalping indigenous Irish for bounty. "Scots-Irish were the foot soldiers of British empire building and they and their descendants formed the shock troops of the westward movement in North America."
1670s scalp hunting for bounties and selling of indigenous children become profitable practice. Rangers start to form.
"Emphasize that native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples, hundreds of nations, not as a racial or ethnic group. Colonization. Dispossession. Settler colonialism. Genocide. These are the terms that drill to the core of US history."
"The americas were densely populated when the European monarchies began sponsoring colonization projects there. The total population of the hemisphere was about 100 million at the end of the 15th century." This is nearly double the population of Europe as far east as the Ural mountains at the same time.
"Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Trail of Tears
Andrew Jackson's support for removal of Native Americans began at least a decade before his presidency. Indian removal was Jackson's top legislative priority upon taking office.
During the civil war
In Nevada and Utah, a California businessman Colonel Patrick Connor commanded a militia of volunteers and spent the civil war years massacring hundreds of unarmed Shoshone, Bannock, and Ute people in their encampments. Later, he went to Arizona to fight Apaches. Others, like Carleton and Kit Carson used scorch earth tactics during the civil war to take control of Navajo peoples. Read about The Long Walk of the Navajo, a forced march of 8,000 civilians from their homeland in what is now Arizona to a military concentration camp in what is now eastern New Mexico area. "Some of the soldiers do not treat us well... Our women sometimes come to the tents outside the fort and make contracts with the soldiers to stay with them for the night and give them five dollars or something else, but in the morning they take away what they gave them."
Custer... I watched on Youtube a clip from a history channel episode about Custer's last stand and it shouldn't be a surprise, but from what was shown in the show the memorial site for the Battle of the Little Bighorn has gravesites for and memorials sticking out of the ground memorializing the soldiers from the US army, but not those fallen Lakota people who were defending their home and rights.
1890 - Wounded Knee Massacre was a massacre of nearly 300 Lakota people. One interesting thing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz does is compare this massacre to the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam.
By late 1800s many indigenous peoples had been forced onto small territories. "Allotment" began in 1887 in the General Allotment Act in which the government tried to allot parts of land to individuals in the form of settler private ownership.
The IRA - Indian Reorganization Act (1934) ended further allotment of native lands, although already allotted land was not restored. Also included, the government would try to purchase lands contiguous to the native lands in order to try to restore some of those to the native nations. Overall, and for reasons I'm not entirely able to understand, this act was rather controversial. The main provision called for a formation of tribal governments and some nations declined, most notably the Navajo (See Navajo Livestock reduction).
1946 Indian Claims Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Claims_Commission)
'the Commission created a process for tribes to address their grievances against the United States, and offered monetary compensation for territory lost as a result of broken federal treaties. However, by accepting the government's monetary offer, the aggrieved tribe abdicated any right to raise their claim again in the future.'
NCAI- National Congress of American Indians - founded in 1944 to represent the tribes and resist federal government pressure for termination of tribal rights and assimilation of their people. These were in contradiction of their treaty rights and status as sovereign entities.
Termination
1953: Congress seeks to abolish tribes, relocate American Indians
Congress passes a resolution beginning a federal policy of termination, through which American Indian tribes will be disbanded and their land sold. A companion policy of “relocation” moves Indians off reservations and into urban areas. Through these policies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs plans to move thousands of American Indian peoples to cities and urban jobs.
“Nothing else that Congress can do causes tribal members to lose more of their rights than termination. Termination is the ultimate weapon of Congress and ultimate fear of tribes. Despite its drastic effect, the Supreme Court has held that Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to terminate a tribe.” —Stephen L. Pevar, The Rights of Indians and Tribes: The Basic ACLU Guide to Indian and Tribal Rights, 1992
https://bit.ly/3kO5MSY
During Cold War, the US targeted the labor movement under the guise of combatting the communist threat of the Soviet Union. Also attacked civil rights and self-determination movements.
Kennedy positions himself as a frontiersman at Dem National Convention
"I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier..."
Seven years after Kennedy's nomination, American troops would be describing Vietnam as "Indian country" and search-and-destroy missions as a game of "Cowboys and indians." Kennedy's ambassador to Vietnam would justify massive escalation of force by citing the necessity of "moving the indians away from the fort so that the settlers can plant corn."
Taos Pueblo struggle to reclaim Blue Lake. Under pressure from growing activism and in the first land restitution to any indigenous nation, Nixon signed 91-550. "The congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs."
Lakotas struggle to restore the Black Hills (where odious mt. rushmore carvings have scarred the sacred site)
Some of the Grand Canyon lands have been restored.
1969 seizure of Alcatraz! - "We will purchase said Alcatraz island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago... It would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world entering the golden gate would first see Indian land and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation."
Fall of 1972 - Trail of Broken Treaties -Cross-country protest to bring national attention to injustices including violations of treaty agreements and inadequate living standards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Broken_Treaties
Wounded Knee Occupation in early 1973 demanded the reopening of treaty negotiations to hopefully arrive at fair and equitable treatment of Native Americans.
'We might as well say that Vietnam is where the trail of tears was headed all along.'
The Doctrine of Discovery and City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York in 2005. Ruth Bater Ginsberg writes majority opinion here NOT restoring the land to native nation partially using Doctrine of Discovery legislation as a basis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Sherrill_v._Oneida_Indian_Nation_of_New_York
"For Great Sioux Nation, Black Hills Can’t Be Bought for $1.3 Billion" - a trust of money sits in the US treasury waiting to be collected by 9 Sioux tribes. The money is from an 1980 supreme court ruling that set aside $105 million to compensate for the taking of the Black Hills in 1877. But the Sioux never wanted the money—the land was never for sale! "That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resources but as a relationship between people and place."
https://to.pbs.org/3nJWSYb
"The collusion of business and government in the theft and exploitation of indigenous lands and resources is the core element of colonization and forms the basis of US wealth and power."
The militarization of US culture - "somebody who gets excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to open the football season and is glad that he/she is in the stadium to see it is being militarized... Militarization is not just do you think the use of collective violence is the most effective way to solve social problems (which is also a part of militarization), but it's also about ordinary daily culture."
"Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe? Why does the United States spend as much on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert?"
John Quincy Adams: The United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The United States at John Quincy Adams' time was invading, subjecting, colonizing and removing the indigenous farmers from their land as it had since its founding and as it would through the 19th century. "Overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding."
"American Indian ancestries and heritages ought to be integral to K-12 curriculums."
There are possibilities for "life-after-empire." "That process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous Nations, by restoring all sacred sites—starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land—and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native Nations."
The future will not be mad with loss and waste
though the memory will
Be there: eyes will
become kind and deep, and the bones of this
nation
Will mend after the revolution.
-Simon Ortiz
Some oversimplifications on Native lands:
Diné-Navajo lived in the four corners areas
Haudenosaunee-Iroquois lived south of the great lakes
Tsalagi-Cherokee in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina Great Smoky Mountains area
Sioux / Teton / Lakota - Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska
Ojibwe lived north and west of the great lakes
There are possibilities for "life-after-empire." "That process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous Nations, by restoring all sacred sites—starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land—and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native Nations."
--BEWARE OF NOTES--
White supremacy can be traced to the colonizing ventures of the crusades in Muslim-controlled territories and the protestant colonization of Ireland. (Irish were beheaded and scalped by English similar to Native Americans.)
Ironically gold itself isn't actually very valuable, but Spain was sick with gold fever. Catholic church sanctioned conquest for gold.
THE CULT OF THE COVENANT
"In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted people who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed."
Ulster Scots were already settler colonialist scalping indigenous Irish for bounty. "Scots-Irish were the foot soldiers of British empire building and they and their descendants formed the shock troops of the westward movement in North America."
1670s scalp hunting for bounties and selling of indigenous children become profitable practice. Rangers start to form.
"Emphasize that native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples, hundreds of nations, not as a racial or ethnic group. Colonization. Dispossession. Settler colonialism. Genocide. These are the terms that drill to the core of US history."
"The americas were densely populated when the European monarchies began sponsoring colonization projects there. The total population of the hemisphere was about 100 million at the end of the 15th century." This is nearly double the population of Europe as far east as the Ural mountains at the same time.
"Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Trail of Tears
Andrew Jackson's support for removal of Native Americans began at least a decade before his presidency. Indian removal was Jackson's top legislative priority upon taking office.
During the civil war
In Nevada and Utah, a California businessman Colonel Patrick Connor commanded a militia of volunteers and spent the civil war years massacring hundreds of unarmed Shoshone, Bannock, and Ute people in their encampments. Later, he went to Arizona to fight Apaches. Others, like Carleton and Kit Carson used scorch earth tactics during the civil war to take control of Navajo peoples. Read about The Long Walk of the Navajo, a forced march of 8,000 civilians from their homeland in what is now Arizona to a military concentration camp in what is now eastern New Mexico area. "Some of the soldiers do not treat us well... Our women sometimes come to the tents outside the fort and make contracts with the soldiers to stay with them for the night and give them five dollars or something else, but in the morning they take away what they gave them."
Custer... I watched on Youtube a clip from a history channel episode about Custer's last stand and it shouldn't be a surprise, but from what was shown in the show the memorial site for the Battle of the Little Bighorn has gravesites for and memorials sticking out of the ground memorializing the soldiers from the US army, but not those fallen Lakota people who were defending their home and rights.
1890 - Wounded Knee Massacre was a massacre of nearly 300 Lakota people. One interesting thing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz does is compare this massacre to the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam.
By late 1800s many indigenous peoples had been forced onto small territories. "Allotment" began in 1887 in the General Allotment Act in which the government tried to allot parts of land to individuals in the form of settler private ownership.
The IRA - Indian Reorganization Act (1934) ended further allotment of native lands, although already allotted land was not restored. Also included, the government would try to purchase lands contiguous to the native lands in order to try to restore some of those to the native nations. Overall, and for reasons I'm not entirely able to understand, this act was rather controversial. The main provision called for a formation of tribal governments and some nations declined, most notably the Navajo (See Navajo Livestock reduction).
1946 Indian Claims Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Claims_Commission)
'the Commission created a process for tribes to address their grievances against the United States, and offered monetary compensation for territory lost as a result of broken federal treaties. However, by accepting the government's monetary offer, the aggrieved tribe abdicated any right to raise their claim again in the future.'
NCAI- National Congress of American Indians - founded in 1944 to represent the tribes and resist federal government pressure for termination of tribal rights and assimilation of their people. These were in contradiction of their treaty rights and status as sovereign entities.
Termination
1953: Congress seeks to abolish tribes, relocate American Indians
Congress passes a resolution beginning a federal policy of termination, through which American Indian tribes will be disbanded and their land sold. A companion policy of “relocation” moves Indians off reservations and into urban areas. Through these policies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs plans to move thousands of American Indian peoples to cities and urban jobs.
“Nothing else that Congress can do causes tribal members to lose more of their rights than termination. Termination is the ultimate weapon of Congress and ultimate fear of tribes. Despite its drastic effect, the Supreme Court has held that Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to terminate a tribe.” —Stephen L. Pevar, The Rights of Indians and Tribes: The Basic ACLU Guide to Indian and Tribal Rights, 1992
https://bit.ly/3kO5MSY
During Cold War, the US targeted the labor movement under the guise of combatting the communist threat of the Soviet Union. Also attacked civil rights and self-determination movements.
Kennedy positions himself as a frontiersman at Dem National Convention
"I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier..."
Seven years after Kennedy's nomination, American troops would be describing Vietnam as "Indian country" and search-and-destroy missions as a game of "Cowboys and indians." Kennedy's ambassador to Vietnam would justify massive escalation of force by citing the necessity of "moving the indians away from the fort so that the settlers can plant corn."
Taos Pueblo struggle to reclaim Blue Lake. Under pressure from growing activism and in the first land restitution to any indigenous nation, Nixon signed 91-550. "The congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs."
Lakotas struggle to restore the Black Hills (where odious mt. rushmore carvings have scarred the sacred site)
Some of the Grand Canyon lands have been restored.
1969 seizure of Alcatraz! - "We will purchase said Alcatraz island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago... It would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world entering the golden gate would first see Indian land and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation."
Fall of 1972 - Trail of Broken Treaties -Cross-country protest to bring national attention to injustices including violations of treaty agreements and inadequate living standards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Broken_Treaties
Wounded Knee Occupation in early 1973 demanded the reopening of treaty negotiations to hopefully arrive at fair and equitable treatment of Native Americans.
'We might as well say that Vietnam is where the trail of tears was headed all along.'
The Doctrine of Discovery and City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York in 2005. Ruth Bater Ginsberg writes majority opinion here NOT restoring the land to native nation partially using Doctrine of Discovery legislation as a basis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Sherrill_v._Oneida_Indian_Nation_of_New_York
"For Great Sioux Nation, Black Hills Can’t Be Bought for $1.3 Billion" - a trust of money sits in the US treasury waiting to be collected by 9 Sioux tribes. The money is from an 1980 supreme court ruling that set aside $105 million to compensate for the taking of the Black Hills in 1877. But the Sioux never wanted the money—the land was never for sale! "That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resources but as a relationship between people and place."
https://to.pbs.org/3nJWSYb
"The collusion of business and government in the theft and exploitation of indigenous lands and resources is the core element of colonization and forms the basis of US wealth and power."
The militarization of US culture - "somebody who gets excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to open the football season and is glad that he/she is in the stadium to see it is being militarized... Militarization is not just do you think the use of collective violence is the most effective way to solve social problems (which is also a part of militarization), but it's also about ordinary daily culture."
"Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe? Why does the United States spend as much on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert?"
John Quincy Adams: The United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The United States at John Quincy Adams' time was invading, subjecting, colonizing and removing the indigenous farmers from their land as it had since its founding and as it would through the 19th century. "Overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding."
"American Indian ancestries and heritages ought to be integral to K-12 curriculums."
There are possibilities for "life-after-empire." "That process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous Nations, by restoring all sacred sites—starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land—and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native Nations."
The future will not be mad with loss and waste
though the memory will
Be there: eyes will
become kind and deep, and the bones of this
nation
Will mend after the revolution.
-Simon Ortiz
Some oversimplifications on Native lands:
Diné-Navajo lived in the four corners areas
Haudenosaunee-Iroquois lived south of the great lakes
Tsalagi-Cherokee in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina Great Smoky Mountains area
Sioux / Teton / Lakota - Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska
Ojibwe lived north and west of the great lakes
scienceworks's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5