I’m taking part in a Zoom book group with East Suburban Unitarian Universalist Church in Murrysville, and we’re reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, so I want to share some quotes and related questions as I make my way through the book.
US policies and actions related to Indigenous people, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. … The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. …
Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential of one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. …
To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without which consideration not much in US history makes sense, unless Indigenous people are erased. …
The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency. …
US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of US Americans.
from “introduction: this land” in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz