Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz — An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

48 published claims from this book.

• A Pentagon lawyer equated Seminole resistance with modern-day al-Qaeda in a Guantánamo brief
• An educated propertied Black elite existed in the United States by 1903
• Cahokia exceeded London’s population in the twelfth century
• California’s gold rush exterminated over one hundred thousand Indigenous people by 1870
• Calvinist predestination let colonizers rationalize Native dispossession as divine judgment.
• Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement.
• Colonists survived by seizing what Indigenous peoples had already built.
• Disease deaths under colonial conditions constitute genocide by neglect.
• Dutch colonial rule required the Indies never become settlers’ home
• Federal policy fragmented most reservations into severely divided land parcels
• Frontier violence fueled racism, not the reverse
• Hispaniola’s indigenous population collapsed from 750,000 to 29,000 within two decades
• Hohokams built eight hundred miles of irrigation canals by 1450
• Indigenous Americans cultivated corn in Mexico ten thousand years ago
• Indigenous self-defense triggered an unauthorized genocidal counteroffensive by Jackson
• Indigenous survival required a culture of resistance that blended assimilation and defiance.
• Indigenous warfare was ritualized and produced few deaths
• Jefferson bought Louisiana without consulting the Indigenous nations who lived there
• Johnson v. McIntosh held that mere discovery gave European governments title to Indigenous lands
• Land sales funding the treasury drove US genocidal policy
• Land seizure through genocide, not technology, powered US expansion
• Mayans invented the concept of zero by 36 BC
• Military base land is frequently acquired by outright seizure rather than purchase
• My Lai and Wounded Knee massacres were visually indistinguishable
• Precolonial Mexico had thirty million people
• Racism is a constitutive, foundational element of colonialism rather than an incidental detail.
• Ramstein is the largest U.S. base amid fifty thousand Americans abroad
• Scorched-earth warfare against civilians became the template for later U.S. overseas interventions.
• Settler colonialism aims to terminate peoples’ existence, not individuals
• Slavery was central to capitalism, not a mere primitive precondition
• Southern militia attacks on farmers were driven by booty-seeking, not race
• Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa founded the first pan-Indigenous movement uniting spirituality and politics.
• Tecumseh’s British alliance was Indigenous-led, not British-controlled.
• The 1783 United States comprised only the thirteen Atlantic colonies
• The Alcatraz occupation radicalized thousands of Native people
• The Doctrine of Discovery originated in papal bulls permitting seizure of non-Christian lands
• The first European settlement in the Americas quickly collapsed into violence with indigenous peoples
• The Sioux never wanted compensation because the land was never for sale
• The Sioux refused a $106 million award to reclaim the Black Hills
• The Trail of Broken Treaties influenced the UN Rights Declaration
• The UN genocide convention applies to US-Indigenous relations since 1988
• Two million Indigenous remains remain unreturned despite NAGPRA
• U.S. conquest has long been framed as benevolent rescue.
• U.S. leaders have increasingly embraced imperial ambitions in an era of unprecedented military strength
• Unacknowledged wars against Indigenous peoples preceded global US total war
• US administrations pursued documented genocidal policies in four distinct periods
• US conquest of the Sioux followed the classic stages of colonialism
• US Indian policy constitutes settler colonialism rather than mere discrimination