An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Dunbar-Ortiz details the lives of Indigenous communities in the Americas prior to colonization by Europeans. She particularly paints a picture of thriving civilizations with corn as a central part of Indigenous survival, society, and culture. Challenging popular belief, Dunbar-Ortiz asserts that the Americas were not a “new world” (15) or a “virgin wilderness” (30) but a vast network of communities and complex civilizations with agricultural practices, systems of governance, roads, and trade. Indigenous populations were large, with approximately 100 million people in the Western Hemisphere prior to the arrival of Europeans at the end of the 15th century. In addition to healthy diets, the large Indigenous population sizes were also supported by good hygiene practices and herbal medicine that helped limit diseases. 

Corn was sacred and required human attention with complex irrigation systems to grow properly. Dunbar-Ortiz identifies the origins of corn in the Valley of Mexico and Central America, or Mesoamerica, beginning with the Mayans. Corn cultivation was central to culture and religion. The Mayans also made advancements in art, astronomy, science, and mathematics, such as developing the concept of zero in 36BC. They had large city-states governed by priests and nobility, albeit the use of forced labor eventually led to uprisings that led to Mayan collapse. Another example of a large Indigenous civilization was the Olmec civilization in the same region as the Mayans. The Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico in the 12th century and used alliances to obtain control of the region with corn as their main crop and the hydraulic agricultural system as the key to their economy. Market and trade networks were complex and widespread, reaching as far as eastern North America. The Aztecs were weakened after experiencing uprisings due to its oppression of peasants and the Spanish ultimately, with a genocidal war led by Cortés and lasting three years, overthrew the Aztecs with the help of resistant peasants. 

Meanwhile, further north in what is now the Southwestern United States, agriculture was being practiced by 2100 BC, with irrigation systems as early as 1250 BC. The Hohokam peoples built a canal system in this region, and farmers traded crops across a vast network reaching into the Great Plains region. The Anasazi people in the present-day “Four Corners” region constructed miles of roads that connected around 75 communities. Other communities in the region included the Navajos (or Diné) and the Apaches.

The extremely fertile Mississippi Valley region had the city-state of Cahokia and others containing tens of thousands of people with monumental constructions around the 12th century. This territory included the Indigenous nations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee Cree, Seminole, and Natchez Nation. In the north around the Great Lakes region and as far south as the Carolinas, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee confederacy, was made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk Nations, and, later, the Tuscaroras. They operated on a “clan-village system of democracy based on collective stewardship of the land” and a matrilineal system (24). 

Bison-dependent peoples of the prairies of Central North America down to West Texas and the Rocky Mountains included the Cree in the present-day Canada region, the Lakota and Dakota Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho. Similarly, farther south had nations of the Ponca, Pawnee, Osage, and Kiowa with millions of buffalo in the area. The Pacific Northwest region had seafaring and fishing peoples, such as the Tlingit, Salish, Makah, Hoopa, Pomo, Karok, and the Yurok peoples, connected by trade with lots of natural resources, including salmon.

Dunbar-Ortiz details the governance systems of Indigenous nations and city-states as consisting of a wide variety of systems. Decision making was consensus-based rather than by majority rule. In the region east of the Mississippi River, there were towns or federations of towns with family lineages as governing bodies led by male elders who required approval from a council of elders composed of different clans of the town. Each town had a sacred fire that represented the town’s relationship with spirits. Meanwhile, in the Southeast, the Muskogee Creek and Seminole tribes governed under three branches made up of civil administration, the military, and a relationship with the sacred with leaders from the elite.

Indigenous nations also developed practices of diplomacy with agreements as sacred pledges to each other and to spirits. Women also played a key role in governance in various societies, including holding political authority, as in the case of the Haudenosaunee and Cherokee, or having the responsibility of choosing representatives, as in the case of the Mohawks or Oneidas, for example. The crux of many Indigenous societies was valuing the interest of the community over that of any individual. 

Dunbar-Ortiz also describes how Indigenous people took special care of the land as its stewards and shaped it significantly before Europeans arrived. This involved trade networks, roads, using fire to control wild landscape or attract game, and transforming forests into lands on which bison could thrive. Dunbar-Ortiz concludes by emphasizing the relationships, civilizations, and advancements that existed in the Americas and were lost to colonialism.

Dunbar-Ortiz analyzes the “culture of conquest” (32) involving “violence, expropriation, destruction, and dehumanization” in the Americas as originally developing in Europe prior to European colonization of the Americas. She identifies one of the origins as the Crusades from the 11th through 13th centuries that involved conquering North Africa and the Middle East regions, particularly to control Muslim trade routes. Dunbar-Ortiz calls this approach a “profit-based religion” that was later brought to the Americas by colonizers who sought wealth for themselves while displaying “a Christian zeal that justified colonialism” (32-33). The Crusades were also a source of “militaristic tradition,” as soldiers sacked and looted Muslim communities. Wealth became concentrated in the hands of a small group of people. Toward the end of the 13th century, the papacy targeted pagans, women as witches, and commoners whose land was seized by knights and nobles. Simultaneously, commoners would be recruited into crusading against Muslims. Dunbar-Ortiz labels European peasantry as the first group of people “forcibly organized under the profit motive” (33) as their lands were seized and then they were exploited for their labor. Elsewhere, colonization was taking place in nations like Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and Muslims and Jews were expelled from Iberia beginning in 1492. 

Dunbar-Ortiz argues that these historical practices and events served as a template for how European colonizers later approached lands across the Atlantic. Colonialism, relocation, and expropriation methods were practiced extensively by the end of the 15th century. These methods and strategies of exploitation and displacement were then transported across the Atlantic to the Americas and later to Africa, the Pacific, and Asia. Having these strategies is what Dunbar-Ortiz notes as the key difference between western European explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries versus others who came before them, such as the Arabs, Norse, Chinese, or Polynesians.

Dunbar-Ortiz highlights the development of the idea of land as private property as originating with Europeans, especially the British. In 16th-century England, the “commons” were privatized for commercial sheep production and peasants whose lands were seized were then forced to work in textile factories under poor working conditions. Out of desperation, this exploited and impoverished population later became “land-hungry” (36) settlers in British colonies in North America, lured with the promise of land after serving a period of indentured servitude.

White supremacy, “the core ideology for modern colonialism,” (37) also found its roots in the Crusades in Muslim territories and the colonization of Ireland by Protestants. The papal law of cleanliness of blood was the foundation of the Spanish Inquisition and was a concept previously unknown before as Muslims and Jews who had converted came under scrutiny and investigation. Special treatment was given to “Old Christians” over converts and served as a unifying factor and helped to ignore class differences among “Old Christians” by giving poor people a way to identify with the rich and hope for upward mobility. Dunbar-Ortiz labels this “imagined racial sameness” even among different classes of people as the origin of white supremacy, which only helped to limit any ill-will the poor might feel toward the landed or the elite. 

Similarly, the British took these ideas of racial supremacy from the Spanish racial caste system and applied it through a Protestant lens with the idea of themselves as “a chosen people founding and raising a New Jerusalem” (38). The British also had experience with colonization and imperialism through its conquest of Ireland in the early 17th century where settlers arrived mainly from western Scotland, which had, along with Wales, already been conquered by England earlier. In its colonization of Ireland, England attacked Irish culture, social systems, and killed many clans. Just as they would later in North America against Indigenous peoples, English officials placed bounties on the heads or scalps of Irish people. The settlers in Northern Ireland considered the Irish to be an inferior race.

Dunbar-Ortiz criticizes the common narrative among historians that European-American conquest of Indigenous populations was largely due to disease or that their deaths were inevitable. She argues that such an assumption ignores the role of settler colonialism as “genocidal by plan” (42) and fails to explain continued warfare for centuries that followed on the continent. Gold became the driving force for colonization and conquest of the Americas. When Columbus, representing Spain, arrived in the Caribbean in present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti, he returned with gold and enslaved Indigenous peoples. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 created the Doctrine of Discovery and made a dividing line specifying the areas on either side as available for conquest by either Spain or Portugal. Under various conquistadors, the Spanish conquered and waged war against Indigenous civilizations, such as the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in the Andes region, all while gathering gold and silver. Meanwhile, Portugal destroyed present-day Brazil and began the Atlantic slave trade by sending enslaved Africans to South America. The sudden, large increases in wealth by a few led to most Europeans becoming increasingly poor and dependent on the wealthy minority for the first time. This dependency would later become a global reality due to “capitalist-based colonialism” (43).

Dunbar-Ortiz reaffirms her rejection of the myth that North America was all wilderness upon the arrival of Europeans. Instead, she asserts that conquest by European settlers, and therefore loss of land by Indigenous people, led to land being unattended, with forests growing wild and settlers cutting down trees in other areas. The myth of a “pristine wilderness” became a part of the U.S. origin myth, when in reality, there were large networks, roads, farmlands, and more under Indigenous management that was stolen from them. Dunbar-Ortiz cites historian Francis Jennings in his argument that Europeans did not have the technology, resources, or ability to maintain colonies across the Atlantic if the land indeed had been “virgin land” or true wilderness (47). 

Another aspect of the U.S. origin myth is the idea of U.S. exceptionalism, which “has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world” (47). Dunbar-Ortiz characterizes the United States as a covenant state. The idea of the covenant and influence of scriptures informed the idea among believers as fulfilling a duty to occupy a promised land for God, especially involving the defeat of enemies or heathens in the process. The religious reformer John Calvin was especially instrumental in spreading the covenant ideology and Hebrew scriptures to European Christians. Calvinism became a Protestant Christian separatist movement, as reflected in Calvinist ideology among the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for example. A key belief by Calvinists was predestination and being called upon by God as a chosen person. Colonists applied Calvinist ideology to label themselves as predestined chosen peoples and Indigenous people as the opposite. 

A key group of settlers were the Ulster-Scots or Scots-Irish, who were Protestants from Scotland that settled in Northern Ireland when the British colonized it. As most of them were poor and landless, they decided to settle the British colonies in North America as indentured servants. These settlers brought their Calvinist ideology of the covenant to North America after already having gained experience as settler colonialists in Northern Ireland, which included working as soldiers for the British in Ireland and engaging in the practice of scalping Irish people for bounty. They similarly were at the forefront of British colonial militias in the French and Indian War and later were troops and the largest group of settlers in the westward expansion of the U.S, becoming involved in destroying Indigenous towns as they sought to gain access to Indigenous lands that would become private property. During the settlers’ war for independence, most Scots-Irish were the “backbone” of Washington’s army (54). They viewed themselves as divinely chosen and “authentic patriots, entitled to the land through their blood sacrifice” (54) just as their descendants continue to view them. It is these groups of settlers upon whom many U.S. myths are based, and many presidents of the United States had Scots-Irish ancestry.

The covenant ideology can also be seen in the U.S. origin story as represented by the Mayflower Compact signed by English pilgrims of Plymouth Colony as a covenant with God. Similarly, in modern day, many U.S. citizens consider the U.S. Constitution to be a covenant with God. Their “cult-like adherence” to the U.S. Constitution is not seen in other modern constitutional states, and this covenant ideology has become the “bedrock of U.S. patriotism” which continues to reinforce the idea of U.S. exceptionalism (50). Similarly, other historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech “are all bundled into the covenant as sacred documents” (50). Even within the idea of the U.S. as a “nation of immigrants” (50), immigrants are invited to be a part of the sacred covenant, but they must continue to prove their loyalty, a sharp contrast to the descendants of settlers who are already deemed patriotic.