Review of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

And the arrogance of colonizing societies

I just finished listening to An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The book is a broad overview of U.S. history and, in spite of the title, it explicitly states at the start that there is no one “indigenous peoples’ perspective”. There are many native nations with a variety of overlapping histories which all faced the devastation of colonial genocide perpetrated by mainly European settlers.

The book does a good job as an introduction to a different perspective on U.S. history than the one normally taught in high schools here. It highlighted that there are so many voices that I haven’t heard and heightened my sense that there is too much information in the world for any one person to take in, and while some people choose to dig in their heels and ignore information that conflicts with their beliefs, it is better to give the benefit of the doubt to the powerless and marginalized, not the colonizers or oppressors. For anyone wanting to learn more about U.S. history from a different perspective, this is a great introduction. Because the book attempts to cover the period from colonization of the U.S. to the present in a relatively short volume, it sometimes lacks depth. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it gives the reader a lot of individual topics to follow up on and I’m sure I’ll return to it as a reference in the future.

While there is a lot to learn, there is just one part of the book I wanted to highlight in this post. It is when the author, citing several primary accounts, disproves the myth of the “bountiful, untamed wilderness” (bountiful, yes. Untamed, no). According to the accounts of several settlers and travelers, the underbrush in many forests was cleared to such an extent that they could easily ride carriages through the woods. Native Americans for a long time had practiced controlled burns of underbrush in forests, maintaining ideal environments for deer and other game and their predators (the same happened in the Amazon in South America). In promoting the health of the environment, indigenous people created the bounty that so many settlers saw and coveted. “Trailblazing explorers” who claimed to be charting new paths basically followed trails that animals had carved and that indigenous people had used for a long time for travel and trade. It is now very clear that the resources that attracted colonizers were built up over centuries by a proper stewardship of the land and many indigenous cultures that understood the importance of the environment to their collective health and survival. In an intentional act of genocide, the U.S. paid hunters and soldiers to kill as many buffalo as possible to both weaken the will to fight and destroy the economic independence and sustainability of the plains nations. They killed so many that the carcasses lay rotting in piles and much of the meat went to waste. This was how they were able to force native nations into relations of economic dependence on trade with the settlers, a blueprint for the future global economic order I discussed in my first post.

One issue with colonizing societies is that they must create myths of their greatness and their supremacy over those they are colonizing to justify the horrific human toll of colonization (A.R. Moxon has written some great analyses of supremacy). According to Wikipedia:

Between the late 15th and late 17th centuries, the population of native Americans decreased from approximately 145 million to less than 15 million. During this period, a minimum of 130 million indigenous Americans are estimated to have died in deadly massacres, mass rapes, forced starvations, wars, and chattel slavery imposed by European settlers and various epidemics.

These justifying myths become so widespread that people grow up unquestioningly believing them. One myth I’ve been thinking about a lot is the economistic myth of pure rationality. This myth (in part) says that every effect has a cause and through the scientific method we can discover all of those causes and eventually control our environment. The problem with this is that it relies on an absurd level of arrogance about the extent of human knowledge and capabilities. It also privileges a linear causality which tries to isolate one variable as the cause and one variable as the effect, rather than capturing the full complexity of most situations we are likely to encounter (I touched on this arrogance a little bit in my last post about spherical cows and the assumptions made in economic policymaking). Especially when we are talking about human systems and social science, there are feedback loops and often hundreds if not thousands of interacting factors that influence outcomes, factors that change over time and in different historical contexts.

The same is true of the environment. Such a narrow approach to knowledge and the white supremacist worldview that was required to justify colonization led to decades of environmental mismanagement by U.S. forestry services. Timber Wars is a great podcast by NPR that looks at a variety of environmental issues surrounding forest management, including a really interesting bonus episode about wildfires which shows how the controlled burns that Native Americans would regularly do actually prevented the larger and more dangerous wildfires we are confronting today. This is what I mean about rationality and the limiting nature of studies that attempt to prove causation. Through individual scientific studies, we are just starting to accept the knowledge that indigenous people developed from careful observation and practice hundreds of years ago. And still we are not putting these ancient and long-proven fire-abatement practices into effect across the U.S. The untamed wilderness we think of now (overgrown, difficult to traverse), is immensely different from the “untamed” wilderness that settlers encountered where they could drive carriages through forests because of the carefully maintained environment.

A common thread throughout the book is the U.S. exportation of settler colonial tactics across the world, including the tactic of total war which views civilian populations as legitimate targets along with enemy combatants (of course it’s not only the U.S. that did this, but that’s the focus of this book). The throughline can be seen to the present day in the U.S. military’s use of the term “Indian Country” to refer to enemy territory in the many countries in which we operate. It’s important to understand the white supremacist myths pervading our historical knowledge so that we can see how they justify atrocities today. The only way to fight against such a powerful military as the U.S. is through guerilla tactics, it should be no surprise that countries we invade use those tactics, but the narrative quickly becomes about the evilness of those people and how all people you encounter in “Indian Country” are potential enemy combatants and therefore they are all legitimate targets. This is the logic of total war and it’s the logic of supremacy.

Dunbar-Ortiz ends with the story about Mrs. Winchester, heiress to a fortune accumulated by sales of the Winchester repeating rifle. The Winchester House is built in a convoluted way because Mrs. Winchester lived in constant fear of the ghosts of the people killed by the rifles coming to find her (side note, I saw the movie a while back and it was pretty good, made more interesting now with this context). The author writes:

“Visitors trekking through the widow’s home are astounded, and perhaps saddened, by the evidence all around them of the fears and anguish of an obviously mentally disturbed person. Yet there is another possibility. A sense of the scaffolding that supports U.S. society. A kind of hologram in the minds of each and every person on the continent. Mrs. Winchester might have been more aware of the truth than most people and therefore fearful of its consequences. Regardless, in continuing to find or invent enemies across the globe, expand what is already the largest military force in the world, and add to an elaborate global network of military bases, all in the name of national or global security, does not the United States today resemble Mrs. Winchester constantly trying to foil her ghosts? The guilt harbored by most is buried and expressed in other ways on a larger scale as “regeneration through violence” in Richard Slotkin’s phrasing.”

This is the truth of U.S. colonialism and imperialism. As long as we oppress others and profit from their harm, we will fuel a cycle of violence. We will live in constant fear of retaliation (which deep down we know could be justified), and we will be constantly ready to strike back in a disproportionate way. I believe that this plays into the retributive nature of our criminal justice system which some states are slowly changing. It’s a cliché, but only by confronting our history can we avoid repeating it. In my limited experience, I’ve found that people without power in a society tend to have the clearest analysis and insights into the functioning of it. They are able to express something closer to the truth because they are not constrained by the mythmaking that the powerful continuously do to justify their position and their righteousness.