An Indigenous People’s History of the United States

Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a longtime advocate of Native American rights, calls Andrew Jackson “the implementer of the final solution.” It doesn’t take much to convince me of this, especially when today’s high school history textbooks make it clear that Jackson was evil. The question, however, is how much of the damage was his doing.

In the story of how the Louisiana Purchase robbed the tribes of their land, the author lets slip that Jackson wasn’t a mere tin pot tyrant. He was a backwoodsman, orphaned as a teenager, supported himself with odd jobs, and studied the law at his own expense, so we can say that Jackson was “from the streets.” Like Bill Clinton, he was born dirt poor and had a desire for an education, so his “up from poverty” background gave him credit. Unlike Bill Clinton, Jackson didn’t believe in racial equality. He regarded the Native Americans as a pest and a nuisance, and to this man with a huge Southern following, wiping out whole tribes was like stepping on a cockroach. We can easily deduce that the killing was part of Jackson’s design.

Dunbar-Ortiz doesn’t place 100% of the blame on Jackson, as she discusses the dynamic of the tribes. Some of the tribal leaders sold or ceded land when it wasn’t legally theirs to give. As settlers farmed the land, the tribes became dependent on the goods produced by white settlers, and that eroded the tribes’ self-sufficiency. From the beginning of the book, she asserts that the settlers pitted tribes against each other, like the Pequot war of the 1600’s, and it unleashed a base instinct in many Native Americans.

I watched a video (courtesy of YouTube) where activist Russell Means decries the Native American tribal governments, telling Congress that these groups are alien to Native American life, and they in no way resemble traditional tribal authority of old. Means is not quotes much in this book, which I thought was unusual, but then again he was a self-proclaimed leader, and the author is free to decide who to include. There’s another book, titled Looking for Lost Bird, where the Navajo handle crime traditionally; they exile the offending youth and his family. Prior to Anglo-American influence, their method of dealing with recalcitrance was expulsion, and I have to wonder if there wasn’t a huge benefit to this. Would it be easier to force a family to leave town, than to spend all that money jailing a teenager? Would it teach the family something? Perhaps Russell Means was right, in that Anglo-American law clashes with the desire to preserve life.

Dunbar-Ortiz has done good research here, and the writing is unbiased, so the book accomplishes what it set out to do. However, as a book of history, it is not entirely satisfactory. Photographs, illustrations, and maps would have been a big help. If you’re going to write a book of history, especially one that deals with migrations, then maps are essential.