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

Only the last 50 or so pages were what I was actually looking for in this book. I learned some new information from the first section of the book, but it wasn't the information I was hoping to gain from this book. I would still recommend this one for a brief overview of specifically the history of the US government/military massacres of the Indigenous peoples of this land. But it is definitely a BRIEF overview and it is very group-heavy where I was more interested in individual stories. I'm hoping Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee will be closer to what I'm looking for. I wanted to read this one because I have a few other memoirs and fiction from Indigenous authors that I wanted some context for before reading them.

The other downside of this book is that it is really written like an academic dissertation. I would NOT recommend this to anyone looking for an introduction to this topic, as even I felt extremely bogged down while reading. I think introductory texts MUST keep the reader engaged and interested to continue in their journey, and this is not that...

No rating, because my reading experience was really not great, but I think this is still a valuable text, so I don't want to give it a low rating a deter future readers just based on that. Hopefully my review explains my position better than a rating would.