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Rewriting History Through Indigenous Eyes
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States isn't just another historical account-it's a seismic shift in how we understand America's foundations. When Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz published this groundbreaking work in 2014, it quickly became essential reading for those seeking to understand the nation's true origins. Praised by Indigenous scholars and embraced by progressive educators nationwide, the book has been adapted for young readers and incorporated into countless syllabi. Its unflinching examination of colonization resonated deeply with readers seeking alternatives to sanitized historical narratives. What makes this work particularly powerful is Dunbar-Ortiz's personal connection to her subject-her mother was part Cherokee, and her journey from Oklahoma to academia and activism infuses her scholarly perspective with lived experience. This isn't just history; it's a reclamation of narrative that challenges us to confront uncomfortable truths about the nation's origins and ongoing relationship with Indigenous peoples.
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Ancient Civilizations and Sacred Connections
Long before European arrival, North America was home to sophisticated civilizations with complex agricultural systems, extensive trade networks, and advanced governance structures. The continent wasn't a "new world" but an ancient one where corn agriculture, originating in Mexico ten thousand years ago, spread throughout the Americas within fourteen centuries. This sacred crop, requiring human care and complex irrigation, formed the foundation for dense populations across the continent.
Pre-colonial America supported approximately 100 million people, with 40 million in North America alone-comparable to Europe's 50 million. These populations thrived on healthy diets centered around the "three sisters" of corn, beans, and squash, which together provided complete protein. They developed remarkable achievements in mathematics, astronomy, and calendar systems, with the Mayans pioneering the concept of zero by 36 BC, long before European mathematicians.
Indigenous nations functioned as independent, self-governing entities with decision-making through consensus rather than majority rule. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) constitution, based on principles of peace, equity, and unity, later inspired elements of the US Constitution. In many nations, women held significant political power-Haudenosaunee and Cherokee clan mothers controlled the selection of male representatives and retained the right to recall them, creating what one author called "a feminist dream."
Far from being passive inhabitants of "wilderness," Indigenous peoples actively shaped the North American landscape. They strategically used controlled burns to transform forests into managed environments with spaced trees that European observers likened to "English parks." These practices created ideal habitats for game animals and extended bison ranges eastward. Additionally, Indigenous nations developed an extensive network of roads spanning the continent-not simple paths but sophisticated transportation systems that would later become the foundation for colonial highways.
What emerges is a picture not of scattered tribes in untouched wilderness, but of advanced civilizations with deep spiritual connections to their lands. The Green Corn Dance, strongest among Muskogee people but practiced throughout Indigenous agricultural areas, commemorated the gift of corn by an ancestral corn woman. These civilizations based on advanced agriculture and complex governance systems reveal "the magnitude of what was lost to all humanity" through colonization.
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The European Culture of Conquest
The European colonizers who arrived in the Americas didn't suddenly develop their violent approach to conquest-they brought with them a culture of violence, expropriation, and dehumanization that had developed centuries earlier during the Crusades. This culture had already been refined through the colonization of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and other European regions.
By 1492, institutions of colonialism and methods for relocation, deportation, and land expropriation were well-established. European peasants were the first population forcibly organized under the profit motive, while entire nations within Europe were colonized under various monarchies. The rise of modern European states depended on accumulating wealth by exploiting labor and displacing millions from their lands.
A crucial development was the emerging concept of land as private property. In sixteenth-century England, "enclosure" privatized the commons-land that peasants had relied on for centuries-transforming them into commercial grazing lands that created wealth for a few while impoverishing many. The displaced rural population, unable to survive as farmers, were forced into miserable factory work or became settlers in North American colonies.
White supremacy ideology emerged from Christian Crusades and Protestant colonization of Ireland, serving as rehearsals for American colonization. The Spanish concept of "limpieza de sangre" (cleanliness of blood) created the first known legal concept of biological race, granting psychological and legal privileges to "Old Christians" regardless of economic status. This cross-class identification based on imagined racial sameness became the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa.
The English conquest of Ireland, where they systematically attacked Irish culture, exterminated clans, and collected bounties for Irish heads and scalps, previewed the racialist treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America. When we understand these historical patterns, we see that the genocide of Indigenous peoples wasn't an accident or unfortunate byproduct of "progress"-it was the application of already-developed techniques of conquest.
What drove this conquest? Gold fever. Spanish and Portuguese colonization was legitimized by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas and the Doctrine of Discovery, driven by an obsessive pursuit of gold. The conquistadors melted down Indigenous artwork and statuary for currency, while the Portuguese began the Atlantic slave trade. This accumulation of wealth had devastating consequences in Europe itself, where peasants became impoverished urban workers dependent on a wealthy minority. Gold became not just a metal but an ideology, with the belief that subjugating entire societies and slaughtering villages was justified by gold acquisition.
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Myths That Enabled Colonization
To justify their conquest and displacement of Native peoples, colonizers constructed powerful myths about Indigenous lands and peoples that persist to this day. The founding myth of the United States portrays colonists acquiring vast, unused lands from scattered Indigenous peoples. In reality, European colonists displaced sophisticated networks of nations with developed governments, commerce, arts, sciences, agriculture, and technologies.
By the early seventeenth century, Indigenous peoples had created what geographer William Denevan calls "a humanized landscape almost everywhere"-towns, farms, earthworks, road networks, and complex governments. Had North America truly been wilderness, European colonists likely wouldn't have survived. Instead, they appropriated already cultivated farmland, domesticated crops, maintained deer parks, existing roads, and water routes.
The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, teaching that certain individuals are among God's "elect" regardless of actions, was particularly attractive to colonists who could define natives as "immutably profane" while seeing themselves as "predestined to virtue." Material wealth was considered evidence of election, while poverty and dark skin suggested damnation.
The Ulster-Scots-or "Scotch-Irish"-formed the core group of frontier settlers in America. These were Protestants from Scotland who had first been recruited by the British to colonize northern Ireland, where they had seized half-million acres from indigenous Irish. They brought Calvinist covenant ideology, later secularized by fellow Scot John Locke into the "social contract" theory.
Throughout the late eighteenth century, they poured westward, forming what historian Carl Degler called "a veritable human shield of colonial civilization." Their Presbyterian faith evolved on the frontier, abandoning formal church hierarchy while maintaining their sense of being God's chosen people building a new Israel in the wilderness.
Once in settler hands, land was no longer sacred but became private property-a commodity to be acquired and sold. Most settlers moved frequently rather than establishing multi-generational homesteads. Later, as America urbanized, "the land" came to symbolize patriotism and national identity rather than specific territory.
American literature reinforced these myths. James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales provided a new American origin myth-not through biological merger but through the symbolic transfer of the continent from the "last Mohican" to Hawkeye, the nativized settler. This fantasy of Indigenous peoples willingly "dying off" became the foundation of American historical identity, systematically excluding Indigenous participation except as "foils for Europeans."
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Warfare and Genocide as National Policy
The US military's use of Indigenous names like "Geronimo" as the code for Osama bin Laden and terms like "Indian Country" for enemy territory reveals the persistence of colonialist sensibilities at the core of American warfare. These aren't merely insensitive slurs but technical military terminology-"Indian Country" appears in training manuals meaning "behind enemy lines," often shortened to "In Country."
Military historian John Grenier demonstrates how the "first way of war"-unlimited warfare against civilians to destroy their will or capacity to resist-was developed against Indigenous communities by colonial militias in Virginia and Massachusetts. For nearly two centuries, Anglo settlers gained experience as "Indian fighters" outside formal military institutions, using brutal irregular warfare that targeted unarmed women, children, and elders.
The first Jamestown settlers, unable or unwilling to sustain themselves, resorted to forcing the Powhatan Confederacy to provide them food, clothing, land, and labor. When Wahunsonacock, the confederacy's leader, pleaded for peaceful relations, John Smith threatened to kill all women and children if demands weren't met. This threat materialized in August 1609 when war against the Powhatans began.
In New England, the Puritans responded to conflict with immediate, hideous annihilation warfare, targeting women and children. When mercenary John Mason attacked a Pequot stronghold containing mostly non-combatants, he slaughtered defenders and burned remaining inhabitants alive. This total warfare shocked even the neighboring Narragansetts who had allied with the Puritans, causing them to withdraw in disgust, saying the English were "too furious" and "slayed too many men."
Colonial authorities institutionalized scalp hunting as a permanent element of settler warfare. Though bounties for Indigenous heads and scalps had been offered during the Pequot War, the practice became routine only after 1697. Scalp hunting evolved into a lucrative commercial practice that privatized warfare. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated, bloody corpses left behind: "redskins."
After clearing Indigenous populations from much of the Atlantic coast, settlers employed the same warfare techniques in establishing Georgia in 1732. The military provided direct continuity between continental and global conquest. By the war's end, 186,000 Black soldiers had fought and 38,000 had died-a higher death toll than any individual state.
After the war, many Black soldiers remained in the army and were assigned to segregated regiments sent west to crush Indigenous resistance. This pattern of using oppressed peoples against other oppressed groups was not unique to America but part of European colonial tradition since Roman times.
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Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears
Andrew Jackson embodied the Scots-Irish migration to imperial borderlands. As western Tennessee's most notorious land speculator, he enriched himself by acquiring Chickasaw Nation land. His Indian-killing military career began when he took command of the Tennessee militia, waging a brutal war against the Muskogee Nation before targeting the resistant Seminoles.
Though celebrated as a champion of poor whites against the elite, Jackson's promise of land for common settlers merely facilitated the transfer of Indigenous territories to wealthy speculators and plantation owners. Despite being a central focus of Jackson's career, historians have largely failed to place Indigenous destruction at the center of his legacy.
Immediately upon his election in 1829, Jackson initiated removal policies, using political code language about "voluntary" emigration while enabling Georgia to nullify Cherokee sovereignty and ignore the Supreme Court ruling in the Cherokee Nation's favor.
During the Jacksonian period, nearly all Native nations east of the Mississippi were forced off their lands-seventy thousand people in total. The United States made eighty-six treaties with twenty-six Indigenous nations, all forcing land cessions or removals.
The Cherokee Nation resisted removal pressure, asserting: "We wish to remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or molestation. The treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties, guarantee our residence and our privileges, and secure us against intruders."
While some Cherokee contingents relocated as early as 1817 with a larger migration in 1832, the main forced removal in 1838 became known as the Trail of Tears. General Winfield Scott's troops established stockades throughout Cherokee country, sending squads to hunt down families with bayonets. As they left, many saw their homes in flames, looted by outlaws who followed the soldiers.
Half of the sixteen thousand Cherokees perished during the winter march. The Muskogees and Seminoles suffered similar death rates, while Chickasaws and Choctaws lost around 15 percent. Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed one such crossing at Memphis, where Choctaws attempted to cross the frozen Mississippi: "No cry, no sob was heard... Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable."
Against all odds, some Indigenous peoples refused removal and remained east of the Mississippi, though they lost traditional land titles and status. Many survived as peoples, with some successfully fighting for federal acknowledgment in the late twentieth century.
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Continental Expansion and Mexican Territories
The narrative of America's westward expansion as a "natural" progression of covered wagons is mythical. In reality, the US invasion of Mexico was carried out by marines through Veracruz, and early California colonization proceeded from the Pacific coast. Between the Mississippi and the Rockies lay vast territories controlled by unconquered Indigenous nations. Settlers couldn't reach California or the Pacific Northwest without military escorts.
This persistent narrative of "manifest destiny" normalizes successive invasions and occupations as ordained progress rather than colonialism, treating Mexico as "just another Indian nation to be crushed." By 1846, the United States had already invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed dozens of nations east of the Mississippi.
Mexico's emergence as an impoverished republic in 1821 after centuries of Spanish colonialism left it vulnerable to US aggression. With Spain removed, the United States could pursue imperialism without risking conflict with European powers. Mexico immediately opened its borders to trade, and US traders from St. Louis began extending business to New Mexico.
US traders established the "American party of Taos," with figures like Kit Carson-a fur trapper, entrepreneur, and noted Indian killer-marrying into wealthy Spanish-identified families who hadn't favored independence from Spain. This created Anglo affinity within the local ruling class, with the ultimate goal of US annexation.
In Texas, Mexico's colonization law of 1823 allowed land grants to empresarios who recruited settlers, enabling slave-owning Anglo-Americans to dominate despite slavery being illegal in Mexico. This led to Mexico's loss of Texas in 1836. Similarly, Senator Benton, his son-in-law Captain Fremont, and Kit Carson paved the way for California's invasion through propaganda and military intelligence gathering.
The US-Mexican War culminated with American forces fighting from Veracruz to Mexico City, forcing Mexico to cede its northern territories in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. While Texas and California quickly became states, Arizona and New Mexico weren't admitted until 1912.
After the Mexican War, the United States faced the challenge that the vast majority in the annexed territories were Indigenous peoples or Mexican farmers and ranchers with established communities. The Navajos, Apaches, and Utes, who had resisted Spanish and Mexican colonization for centuries, continued to resist the new American regime.
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From Civil War to Wounded Knee
As the Civil War approached, the US Army was organized into seven departments, with six of them stationed west of the Mississippi-essentially functioning as a colonial army fighting Indigenous peoples. In much of the western lands, the army served as the primary government institution, establishing deep military roots in these regions.
When the Civil War erupted in 1861, the Confederate States of America drew 286 US Army officers to its cause, half being West Point graduates and most experienced Indian fighters. Despite the South's demographic disadvantage, the Confederacy persisted for more than four years.
Indigenous nations in Indian Territory were profoundly affected by the war. The southeastern nations-Cherokees, Muskogees, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws-had rebuilt their communities after forced removal, but all five signed treaties with the Confederacy. Within each nation, class divisions emerged: the wealthy, assimilated, slave-owning minority favored the Confederacy, while the non-slave-owning poor and traditional majority wanted to remain neutral.
To free professional soldiers for the eastern front, Lincoln called for western volunteers, who came from territories across the West. With few Confederates to fight, they turned on Indigenous peoples. In the most infamous incident, Colonel John Chivington led the Colorado Volunteers in the Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864. Despite the Cheyennes and Arapahos living peacefully under Black Kettle's leadership on a reservation with a white flag of truce, Chivington's seven hundred men attacked without warning, killing 105 women and children and 28 men.
Even while fighting the Civil War, Lincoln enacted legislation to satisfy his free-soiler settler base. The 1862 Homestead Act, Morrill Act, and Pacific Railroad Act transferred vast Indigenous lands to settlers, states, and private companies-breaking multiple treaties in the process. Under the Homestead Act alone, 1.5 million homesteads comprising nearly 300 million acres were granted to settlers west of the Mississippi.
After the Civil War, the US Army quickly pivoted to "win the West" with a more advanced killing machine and seasoned troops. They slaughtered people and buffalo while destroying the natural tall grasses of the plains, replacing them with short grasses for cattle-eventually leading to topsoil loss decades later.
By the 1890s, most surviving Indigenous people were confined to reservations with their children taken to distant boarding schools. In this desperate situation, a form of resistance emerged from Nevada Paiute holy man Wovoka: the Ghost Dance. This spiritual practice promised to restore the Indigenous world as it was before colonialism, making invaders disappear and buffalo return.
Following Sitting Bull's death, Big Foot led 350 Lakota refugees (230 of them women and children) toward Pine Ridge Reservation to surrender. They were intercepted by US troops and taken to Wounded Knee Creek, where they were surrounded by armed soldiers with Hotchkiss machine guns. On December 29, 1890, when a young man's rifle accidentally discharged during a weapons search, the soldiers opened fire. The Hotchkiss guns fired a shell per second, killing 300 Sioux. Twenty-five soldiers died from friendly fire. The military classified this slaughter as a battle, awarding twenty Congressional Medals of Honor to participating soldiers.
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Resistance and Reclamation
The founding of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in 1944 marked a surge of Indigenous resistance. Extraordinary Native leaders emerged in the 1950s, including D'Arcy McNickle, Edward Dozier, Helen Peterson, and many others from diverse nations. Their organizing efforts prevented termination policies from completely eliminating Indigenous status.
The return of Taos Blue Lake wasn't a gift but the result of decades of struggle and a growing Native American self-determination movement. In 1961, twenty-six young activists from twenty-one different Native nations founded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in Albuquerque. With an international vision, they supported local struggles like the "fish-in" movement in Washington State, where Indigenous peoples fought to protect treaty-guaranteed fishing rights.
The movement gained momentum with the spectacular November 1969 seizure and eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island by "Indians of All Tribes," which drew Native pilgrims from across the continent and radicalized thousands. Their satirical yet serious proclamation offered to purchase Alcatraz for "twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth" and establish Indigenous institutions there.
In February 1973, Oglala Lakota traditionalists at Pine Ridge Reservation invited AIM to help them oppose their authoritarian tribal chairman Richard Wilson and his "GOON squad" (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). After deliberations led by Russell Means, they decided to protest at Wounded Knee, site of the 1890 massacre. What followed was a two-and-a-half-month siege, with armed personnel carriers, helicopters, and military snipers surrounding the protesters while supply teams of mostly Lakota women moved through military lines under cover of darkness.
Self-determination of peoples is a relatively recent historical phenomenon tied to the formation of modern European nation-states and the imperialist world system eventually led by the United States. For Indigenous nations in the United States, self-determination means developing governance and an economic base without compromising essential cultural values. Their central concern is having the federal government honor hundreds of treaties concluded between sovereign states.
After generations of treating colonialism's symptoms, Native nations are now strengthening sovereignty through governance reform. Many are reconceptualizing their governments with new constitutions reflecting their specific cultures. These governance reforms embody "survivance"-an active Indigenous presence that continues cultural narratives beyond mere reaction to domination.
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From Colonial Past to Decolonized Future
The conventional US historical narrative segregates "Indian wars" as a subspecialty within "the West," popularized globally through novels, movies and television. Yet this architecture of continental militarism directly shaped today's US global dominance.
Military analyst Robert Kaplan explicitly connects these histories in his influential 2005 book "Imperial Grunts." He documents how US military personnel worldwide refer to their operations as taking place in "Injun Country," with the Pentagon dividing the planet into five area commands similar to how the American West was divided in the nineteenth century.
Following the September 2001 attacks, the Bush administration designated detainees at Guantanamo as "unlawful combatants" rather than prisoners of war, denying them Geneva Convention protections and subjecting them to torture. In defending this designation, Assistant Attorney General John Yoo's infamous 2003 "Torture Memo" cited a troubling precedent: the 1873 Supreme Court opinion in "Modoc Indian Prisoners."
The United States originated as a settler-state with explicit intentions to occupy the continent-origins containing the historical seeds of genocide. This continued colonization of Indigenous nations allows the US to "cast its imperialist gaze globally" while presenting itself as a multicultural democracy.
The Winchester Mystery House in California symbolizes America's genocidal history and subconscious guilt. Sarah Winchester, widow of the rifle manufacturer whose weapons were designed specifically for killing Plains Indians, built an elaborate mansion with dead-end stairways, trapdoors, and secret passages until her death in 1922. Her apparent fear of being haunted by the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles mirrors America's constant search for enemies and military expansion-a nation resembling Mrs. Winchester trying to foil her ghosts, expressing buried guilt through what Richard Slotkin calls "regeneration through violence."
While living persons aren't responsible for their ancestors' actions, they are responsible for the society they inherit. Addressing this responsibility requires honoring treaties with Indigenous nations, restoring sacred sites including federally held parks and land, returning stolen sacred items and remains, and paying reparations for Native nations' reconstruction.
As Acoma poet Simon Ortiz writes: "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."
