An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  In the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz:

  The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the memory will

  Be there: eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of this nation

  Will mend after the revolution.41

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have dedicated this book to Vine Deloria Jr., Jack Forbes, and Howard Adams, three late Indigenous activist-scholars who pioneered the development of Native American studies programs and scholarship in universities in the 1970s.

  My mentor, and a mentor and inspiration to many, Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), Yankton Dakota of the Great Sioux Nation, impressed upon me the necessity for Indigenous sovereignty to be the framework and groundwork for the decolonization of Native American history. Sovereignty, he argued, is not only political but a matter of survival, and the denial of sacred lands and sites is a form of genocide. I met Vine when he recruited me to work with the Wounded Knee legal defense following the 1973 siege. I served as an expert witness at the historic federal court hearing in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1974, when Vine and a team of lawyers initiated use of the 1868 Sioux-US treaty to validate Sioux jurisdiction over the Wounded Knee defendants being tried in federal courts. Vine also persuaded me to edit and publish the court testimony of Sioux elders and others from the two-week hearing, which would constitute an oral history of the Sioux Nation and its continuing struggle for sovereignty. The 1977 book, with Vine’s introduction, The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty, was issued in a new edition in 2013. Vine was already a best-selling author when I met him, and he published dozens more influential books and articles. He established early Native American studies programs at the University of California at Los Angeles, University of Arizona, and University of Colorado.

  Even before I met Jack Forbes (1934–2011) in 1974, his 1960 book, Apaches, Navajos, and Spaniards, was central to the thesis of my dissertation on the history of land tenure in New Mexico. Of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent, Jack was an activist-historian who inspired me to follow that path once I received a doctorate in history. He founded the Native American Studies Department and its doctoral program at the University of California, Davis, and cofounded D-Q University. In addition to working together on developing Native American studies programs, I joined him in research with the Pit River (California) Nation’s land struggle and with the Western Shoshone Nation of Battle Mountain in Nevada.

  In my own political and intellectual development studying colonialism and imperialism in Africa and the Americas and supporting national liberation movements, I found a kindred soul in 1975 when I met Howard Adams (1921–2001). Howard was a Métis political leader from rural Saskatchewan, a Marxist, and professor of Native American studies at UC Davis, recruited by Jack Forbes. Howard was the first academic I had met who had grown up as poor as I had, about which we had many conversations. His heartrending and elegant 1975 memoir-history of the Métis and their great leader Louis Riel, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, now a classic, became a template for my own research and writing.

  An overarching narrative of US history based on the historical experience and perspective of Indigenous peoples, which I have attempted to synthesize in this book, would not have been possible without the research, analysis, and perspectives that have emerged from several generations of Indigenous intellectuals, historians, writers, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. Working singly and collectively, they contribute to decolonizing the master narratives and politics that in the past have largely covered the fingerprints of centuries of genocide and genocidal policies. Thereby, they contribute to Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and national liberation.

  This book benefited also from conversations with Gerald Vizenor and Jean Dennison about Native constitutional developments; Andrew Curley on environmentalism and the Navajo Nation; Waziyatatawin on the catastrophe of climate change for all humanity, but especially Indigenous peoples; Nick Estes, Daphne Taylor-Garcia, Gloria Chacon, and Michael Trujillo on Indigenous identity; Susan Miller on historical periodization and use of Indigenous sources; Elizabeth Castle about oral history; and Rachel Jackson in our decade-long and continuing discussions of settler-Indigenous relations in Oklahoma.

  I want to thank my brilliant editor at Beacon Press, Gayatri Patnaik. Gayatri is a writer’s dream, a hands-on editor, tough but always right. I also benefited from the careful and intelligent work of Beacon assistant editor Rachael Marks.

  I appreciate that this book will take its place with other volumes in Beacon Press’s ReVisioning American History series, and for that I thank and honor the memory of Howard Zinn.

  Much gratitude goes to those who read parts or the whole of drafts and provided essential suggestions and much-needed support, especially Steven Baker, Steven Hiatt, Susan Miller, Aileen “Chockie” Cottier, Luke Young, Waziyatatawin, and Martin Legassick. Of course, only I am responsible for errors and interpretations in the text.

  SUGGESTED READING

  The essential compilation of Native historians, edited by Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, is Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011), including contributors Donna L. Akers (Choctaw), Myla Vicenti Carpio (Jicarilla Apache/Laguna/Isleta), Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), Steven J. Crum (Shoshone-Paiute), Vine Deloria Jr. (Yankton Nakota), Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné), Lomayumtewa Ishii (Hopi), Matthew Jones (Kiowa/Otoe-Missouria), Susan A. Miller (Seminole), James Riding In (Pawnee), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagnik Nishnaabeg), Winona Wheeler (Cree), and Waziyatatawin Angela Wilson (Dakota).

  Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

  Joanne Barker, ed., Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

  Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

  Duane Champagne, Notes from the Center of Turtle Island (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2010).

  David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008).

  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012).

  Jeff Corntassel and Richard C. Witmer, Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to Indigenous Nationhood (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008).

  James H. Cox, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

  Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).

  Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

  Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, new ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). First published 1969.

  Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

  Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007).

  Jean Dennison, Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). First published 1980.

  Roxanne Du
nbar-Ortiz, ed., The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). First published 1977.

  Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010).

  Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2013).

  Jack Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York: Autonomedia, 1992).

  Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Indigenous Quotient: Stalking Words; American Indian Heritage as Future (San Antonio, TX: Aztlán Libre Press, 2012).

  Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

  Lisbeth Haas, Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

  William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People (New York: Picador, 2010).

  Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

  Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

  V. G. Kiernan, America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Verso, 2005). First published 1978.

  Winona LaDuke with Sean Cruz, The Militarization of Indian Country, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Honor the Earth, 2012).

  Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

  Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).

  Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, eds., Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Peter Nabokov, Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 1999).

  Peter Nabokov, Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places (New York: Penguin, 2006).

  Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

  Sharon O’Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).

  Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

  Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  Jacki Thompson Rand, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

  Bradley G. Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).

  Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Boston: South End Press, 2005).

  Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

  Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996).

  David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

  Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). Originally published 1987.

  Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, ed., Tiller’s Guide to Indian Country: Economic Profiles of American Indian Resources (Albuquerque: BowArrow, 2006).

  Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999).

  Anton Treuer, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 2012).

  David Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey through Reservation Life (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012).

  Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

  Gerald Vizenor and Jill Doerfler, The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

  Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

  Michael V. Wilcox, The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  Waziyatatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, eds., For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2005).

  Laura Waterman Wittstock and Dick Bancroft, We Are Still Here: A Photographic History of the American Indian Movement (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013).

  PERIODICALS

  American Indian Culture and Research Journal

  American Indian Quarterly Journal

  Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society

  Indian Country Today

  Journal of Genocide Research

  Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal

  Red Ink

  Settler Colonial Studies Journal

  Wicazo Sa Review Journal

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: THIS LAND

  Epigraph: Willie Johns, “A Seminole Perspective on Ponce de León and Florida History,” Forum Magazine (Florida Humanities Council), Fall 2012, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/04/08/seminole-perspective-ponce-de-leon-and-florida-history-148672 (accessed September 24, 2013).

  1. The full refrain of Woody Guthrie’s most popular song: “This land is your land / This land is my land / From California to the New York island / From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters / This land was made for you and me.”

  2. Henry Crow Dog, testimony at the 1974 Sioux Treaty hearing, in Dunbar-Ortiz, Great Sioux Nation, 54.

  3. Chang, Color of the Land, 7.

  4. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 387.

  5. See Watson, Buying America from the Indians, and Robertson, Conquest by Law. For a list and description of each papal bull, see The Doctrine of Discovery, http://www.doctrineofdiscovery.org (accessed November 5, 2013).

  6. Williams, American Indian in Western Legal Thought, 59.

  7. Stewart, Names on the Land, 169–73, 233, 302.

  8. Sheehan, “Indian-White Relations in Early America,” 267–96.

  9. Killsback, “Indigenous Perceptions of Time,” 131.

  10. Turner, Frontier in American History, 127.

  11. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Paris, 9 December 1948,” Audiovisual Library of International Law, http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/cppcg/cppcg.html (accessed December 6, 2012). See also Kunz, “United Nations Convention on Genocide.”

  12. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting.

  13. April 17, 1873, quoted in Marszalek, Sherman, 379.

  14. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 393.

  15. 18 U.S.C.§1151 (2001).

  16. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror, 77–78.

  17. “Tribes,” US Department of the Interior website, http://www.doi.gov/tribes/index.cfm (accessed September 24, 2013); “Indian Reservation,” New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Indian_reservation (accessed September 24, 2013). See also Frantz, Ind
ian Reservations in the United States.

  CHAPTER ONE: FOLLOW THE CORN

  Epigraph: Mann, 1491, 252.

  1. Ibid., 264.

  2. Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography, 1; Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population,” and “Reply,” 440–44. See also Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival.

  3. Quoted in Vogel, American Indian Medicine, 253–55. Vogel’s classic text deals with every aspect of Indigenous medicine from shamanistic practices and pharmaceuticals to hygiene, surgery, and dentistry, applied to specific diseases and ailments.

  4. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas, 305.

  5. DiPeso, “Casas Grandes and the Gran Chichimeca,” 50; Snow, “Prehistoric Southwestern Turquoise Industry,” 33. DiPeso calls the area in the north “Gran Chichimeca,” a term used by precolonial Mesoamericans and adopted by early Spanish explorers. Another term used in precolonial times in the south to describe the former homeland of the Aztecs is “Aztlán.”

  6. DiPeso, “Casas Grandes and the Gran Chichimeca,” 52; Snow, “Prehistoric Southwestern Turquoise Industry,” 35, 38, 43–44, 47.

  7. Cox, The Red Land to the South, 8–12.

  8. For further reading on the precolonial Southwest, see Crown and Judge, Chaco & Hohokam.

  9. Ortiz, Roots of Resistance, 18–30. See also Forbes, Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard; Carter, Indian Alliances and the Spanish in the Southwest.