Do You Drive on Dead Indian Road?

“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014)

This is a relentless history of the U.S. viewed from the perspective of the numerous native nations that once populated the land of north America.  The ‘creation’ of the U.S. is here shown to be a settler-colonial war for land.  Dunbar-Ortiz is of mixed ancestry and lived her early life on an Oklahoma reservation.  She is also a leftist and believes in native American self-determination.

Read This Book

Genocide of the indigenous was foundational to the creation of the U.S.  This might be a cliché for some, but this book fleshes that out in detail. It was done with land seizures, continual war, the mass killing of indigenous women, children and the old, the burning of villages, the destruction of crops and animals - along with bribes, fake treaties and alcohol.  Dunbar-Ortiz argues against mainstream historians who insist disease was the main culprit, or that all this was ‘legal’ or that the U.S. government wasn’t really involved. 

Prior to the arrival of the British, north America was a heavily populated land full of roads, trading routes, villages and large towns and a human-managed sustainable environment.  Deer parks, created bison ranges, massive corn, squash and bean fields, large-scale irrigation – all shared cultural attributes with the Mayan, Aztec and Incan civilizations in central and south America.  Land was not privatized, a form of communism that First Nations try to follow to this day.

Dunbar-Ortiz covers the famous and infamous of U.S. history - people like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Kit Carson and even Walt Whitman. Of interest, the British expulsion of French-speaking Acadians from Canada to Louisiana was done because they intermarried and settled with native people instead of killing them.  

Dunbar-Ortiz notes the particular role of the Protestant Scots-Irish, who were first used by the British as violent shock troops against the Catholic Irish in the northern counties of Ireland, then against native Americans.  The Scots-Irish used scalping, which is the origin of the term ‘redskin.’ Especially in the south, these same poor Scots-Irish lost the land they stole to the developing plantation system…so they moved west.

She shows how the U.S. military developed through wars against indigenous nations, then carried those methods abroad - into Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan.  U.S. counter-insurgency is now used across the globe in many other ‘Injun Countries.’  Understanding these methods of warfare is foundational to understanding modern imperialism.    

If you read one recent book on this topic, this is it. 

P.S. - "Dead Indian Road" is an actual road in Oregon.  There are many others like it.  It echoes that Sherman quote about 'the only good Indian..."

Other posts and reviews on this subject below:  “Loaded,” (Dunbar-Ortiz); “New Zealand Now,” “History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,”  “Drug War Capitalism,” “Sami Blood,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil…,” “Climate Emergency,” “This Changes Everything,” “Indian Country Noir,” “The Heart of Everything That Is – the Untold Story of Red Cloud,” “Empire of the Summer Moon,” “Red State Rebels.”  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I Bought It at May Day Books!  You can too…

Red Frog

January 29, 2019