American Indian activist and scholar Dunbar-Ortiz (The Great Sioux Nation) launches a full-bore attack on what she perceives as the glaring gaps in U.S. history about the continent's native peoples. Professional historians have increasingly been teaching much of what Dunbar-Ortiz writes about, yet given what she argues is the vast ignorance of the Indigenous experience, there still remains a knowledge deficit that needs to be rectified. She describes the U.S. as "a colonialist settler state, one that, like the colonialist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations in the territories it now rules." The conventional national narrative, she writes, is a myth that's "wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence." What is fresh about the book is its comprehensiveness. Dunbar-Ortiz brings together every indictment of white Americans that has been cast upon them over time, and she does so by raising intelligent new questions about many of the current trends of academia, such as multiculturalism. Dunbar-Ortiz's material succeeds, but will be eye-opening to those who have not previously encountered such a perspective. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Roiling beneath the picture-perfect myth of the US is the truth of genocide and colonial dispossession of the continent's Indigenous population. In her no-holds-barred historical rundown of the Indian experience, Dunbar-Ortiz (emer., ethnic studies, California State Univ., Hayward) lays out this disturbing history, moving from European colonization as it supplied the formational motifs of the US on the East Coast and progressively west to California. Summarizing the lethality of militias and formal armies as they gutted Indigenous nations under the mysticism of Manifest Destiny, the author provides a valuable ongoing discussion of the official military permutation of "Indian Country" from the actual Indian Territory into the "In Country" of subsequent imperial adventures from Vietnam to Iraq. Puzzlingly, however, Dunbar-Ortiz places the initializing Doctrine of Discovery at the end of the book. In giving the same number of chapters to eastern Woodlanders as to west-of-the-Mississippi peoples, the author attempts to achieve balance, but the populous Woodlands had a complex, 300-year face-off with invasion; the race to the Pacific involved a mere 90 years. Thus, the book's treatment of the East feels like a whirlwind "top ten" review to anyone knowing the full and fraught history of the Woodlanders. Nevertheless, as a primer, this book is a worthwhile purchase. Summing Up: Recommended. All public and undergraduate levels/libraries. --Barbara Alice Mann, University of Toledo

Dunbar-Ortiz (Outlaw Woman) undertakes the immense task of reframing the history of the United States in the context of "-settler-colonialism." Despite prevailing myths about Native peoples, Dunbar--Ortiz provides example after example of how flourishing, rich cultures and societies were systematically destroyed through forced re-education, massacre, occupation, relocation, and total disregard for diplomatic treaties. After building her case for the genocide of Native peoples by settlers, she draws distinctions between foreign policy in the 19th and 20th centuries to today's ongoing conflicts, painting a clear picture of the United States' myopic vision for itself. While initially narrator Laural Merlington sounds a bit dry and detached, further listening reveals her subtleties in tone and rhythm. VERDICT Though devastating at times, this work is well worth the investment of time and emotional energy. Be prepared for the inevitable change in perspective that accompanies hearing these stories.-Jeremy Bright, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism. Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz's (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn't been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while "Indian" isn't bad, since "[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider Indian' a slur," "American" is due to the fact that it's "blatantly imperialistic." Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a "colonialist settler-state" (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis--vis the Palestinians today) and then "displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated"after, that is, having been forced to live in "concentration camps." Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this bookundergraduates, mostly, in survey coursesprobably won't question Dunbar-Ortiz's inaccurate assertion that the military phrase "in country" derives from the military phrase "Indian country" or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were "gold-obsessed." Furthermore, most readers won't likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term "Anasazi") sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn't entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe. A Churchill-ian view of native historyWard, that is, not Winstonits facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Native American studies scholar and longtime American Indian Movement member, offers a radical rewrite of traditional U.S. history up to and including the five wars waged since WWII, a history, she explains, based on settler colonialism, or 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. As part of the long-­established Columbus myth, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a worldwide system of colonization, while, simultaneously, land in this country went from being sacred as it was for the indigenous to being a commodity to be bought and sold. Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't end her litany of violence against the indigenous as part of this land grab with the Sand Creek Massacre or Wounded Knee, as do some postmodern surveys of U.S. history. Instead, she argues that the same strategies employed with the indigenous peoples on this continent were mirrored abroad in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan, and Iraq again in 2003. Meticulously documented, this thought-provoking treatise is sure to generate discussion.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2014 Booklist