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4.4 AVERAGE
4.4 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation
Moderate: Violence
informative
medium-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Wow! Just ... wow. I will read this again to be sure. So much to take in and absorb. It’s a kind of reckoning.
The kind of book you can't put down once you start.
Like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the US, which this title riffs on, we can a new look at US history. Zinn's focus was wider, but it tended to all be grounded in economics and the power dynamics created by capitalism. Dunbar-Ortiz focus is tighter and narrower, which allows her to dive deeper into the multiple genocides indigenous people have suffered under European and then US colonialism.
Like Zinn's book, she assumes the reader is familiar with the cultural myths we're taught in US schools about the heroes of US history. People like Sherman, Jackson, Jefferson, and on and on. With that assumption, she's able to subvert our understanding of these men, and the time at which they lived, and how their policies were primarily genocidal in nature.
There's nothing you haven't heard before in this book about the genocides of native peoples in the Americas, but it's really powerful to have it all at once. To spend 300 pages with the atrocities the US has committed against indigenous people.
What's especially interesting is how Dunbar-Ortiz ties this to the neo-colonialism of the 20th and 21st century. Or how she sees our treatment of native people in the americas as a template for decimating nations and cultures all over the world. Tying Wounded Knee to Vietnam, or Manifest Destiny directly to Iraq.
It's staggering, really.
This is an important book and a profoundly simple book to read. It's straightforward and clear, and all the more devastating for it.
Like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the US, which this title riffs on, we can a new look at US history. Zinn's focus was wider, but it tended to all be grounded in economics and the power dynamics created by capitalism. Dunbar-Ortiz focus is tighter and narrower, which allows her to dive deeper into the multiple genocides indigenous people have suffered under European and then US colonialism.
Like Zinn's book, she assumes the reader is familiar with the cultural myths we're taught in US schools about the heroes of US history. People like Sherman, Jackson, Jefferson, and on and on. With that assumption, she's able to subvert our understanding of these men, and the time at which they lived, and how their policies were primarily genocidal in nature.
There's nothing you haven't heard before in this book about the genocides of native peoples in the Americas, but it's really powerful to have it all at once. To spend 300 pages with the atrocities the US has committed against indigenous people.
What's especially interesting is how Dunbar-Ortiz ties this to the neo-colonialism of the 20th and 21st century. Or how she sees our treatment of native people in the americas as a template for decimating nations and cultures all over the world. Tying Wounded Knee to Vietnam, or Manifest Destiny directly to Iraq.
It's staggering, really.
This is an important book and a profoundly simple book to read. It's straightforward and clear, and all the more devastating for it.
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
If you read this book and do not end it feeling so incredibly angry, you need to read it again.
Facts listed in this book had my jaw dropping open. I was nearly in tears. If you can think it, it happened, but worse.
Facts listed in this book had my jaw dropping open. I was nearly in tears. If you can think it, it happened, but worse.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Child death, Genocide, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence
emotional
informative
medium-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Outstanding history, though it doesn't necessarily add a lot of new information, so much as compiling the existing record.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
medium-paced