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S tre et R oots • February 6-12, 2015
Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph, whose
community was driven off its land in
Oregon by the U.S. government. After his
surrender, he continued to argue against the
injustice of the U.S. government. This photo
of him is from 1897, about 20 years after he
surrendered.
BY STEPHYN QUIRKE
trust fund with the funds, which have now
grown to over a billion dollars. This is one of
many land issues that must be resolved with
restitution of land; in nearly every case, the
disputed territories are sacred sites for the
particular Native Nation, including the Black
Hills. And, in nearly every case, these lands
are held by the federal or state
governments, not private land holders or
municipalities.
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
t ’s been said that education is what you
are left with after forgetting everything
you learned in school. And unfortunately
for us, American history books already
forgot to mention a few things: like human
beings inhabiting North America for over
20,000 years before Europeans. In fact, the
Europeans our history books call the
“original Americans” and “Founding
Fathers” didn’t start calling themselves
Americans until they started tó see
themselves becoming more like the
indigenous peoples they encountered - a
special kind of free people who belonged to
this land.
Insidethe U.S.yit isalmost impossible to
get a standard education in U.S. history and
come away with the knowledge that the
United States was founded on genocide, the
largest in world history up to that time. And
it’s even harder to learn about the nearly 3
million indigenous peoples still living in the
United States today, comprising 500
federally recognized indigenous nations and
communities.
These are the issues addressed in
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s new book, “An
Indigenous People’s History of the United
States.” Dunbar-Ortiz is a renowned activist
and scholar who has written extensively on
indigenous issues in North America and has
spent years organizing with the American
Indian Movement Dunbar-Ortiz is making a
rare Pacific Northwest appearance in the
middle of this month, with three scheduled
talks.
Dunbar-Ortiz will be hosted at Portland
Community College’s Cascade campus in
the Student Union Building, Room 204, on
Tuesday, Feb.17 from 3 to 5 p.m. The next
day, Feb. 18, she will speak at Reed College
in Eliot Room 103 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.,
and then at PSU’s Native American Student
and Community Center from 6 to 9 p.m.
I caught up with Dunbar-Ortiz to talk with
her about her new book and to get her views
on the state of indigenous resistance today.
I
Stephyn Quirke: Could you describe your
background in the indigenous rights
movement, and how that has informed your
academic research?
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: I was an anti
war, civil rights and women’s liberation
activist during the 1960s while a graduate
student at UCLA. It was actually my
dissertation research that led me to
S.Q.: You write extensively about the myth
that Native Americans disappeared after
European settlement, which seems closely
related to the myth that the continent was
sparsely inhabited or barely managed before
Europeans. Could you give readers a rough
sense for how long and how extensively this
continent ha d been inhabited b y indi^(>nous
Native voices
A conversation with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author o f
“A n Indigenous People’s History o f the United States”
involvement in the American Indian
Movement and the International Indian
Treaty Council in 1974.1 was recruited at
that time to serve as an expert witness in a
federal hearing oh the 1868 Treaty, which is
what the Wounded Knee uprising had been
about. That involvement brought me to
focus on oral history as the bedrock of my
academic research and writing.
S.Q.: You talk a lot in your book about the
importance of naming colonialism and
genocide, which is not something everyone is
accustomed to doing in U.S. history. Could'
you tell readers why we need these terms to
understand U.S. history?
R. D-O.: These are technical terms of
international human rights law that were
codified in the post-World War II period in
the response to the massive people’s i
liberation movements in Asia, Africa, the
Pacific and Caribbean. They delineate
precisely what native peoples in North
America have experienced under United
States colonization.
S. Q.: I recently learned about the history of
the Black Hills in South Dakota, a natural
formation sacred to the Lakota, and the
compensation arrangement you described in
your book after it was blasted with dynamite
and renamed Mount Rushmore. Could you
give readers a brief sketch of this story, and
what it says about the kind of justice we need
for indigenous peoples?
R.D-O.: As the period of decolonization
began, and with the founding of the United
Nations, the United States government
responded to indigenous nations’ demands
for land restitution or self-determination by
establishing the Court of Indian Land
Claims, but with the proviso that no land
would be returned, or monetary
compensation for Ihdigenous lands
confiscated without consent by treaties or
agreements. The Lakota Sioux did not file
for a claim because they did not want
financial compensation, rather the return of
the Black Hills. Militant actions over two
decades, culminating in the Wounded Knee
siege of 1973, and the subsequent founding
of the International Indian Treaty Council to
take the 1868 treaty to the United Nations,
led to the 1980 Supreme Court decision,
which acknowledged that the United States
had taken the Black Hills illegally, but
ordered only monetary compensation, which
the Sioux refused. The U.S. established a .
peoples prior to the start of Official U.S.
History?
R.D-O.: The estimate for the original
population at the onset of European
colonialism is 100 million, with 30 million in
North America, including Mexico and
Central America, some 10 million north of
the Rio Grande. Up to the 1960s when
native scholarship developed and questioned
tile figures, the estimate was 10 million for
the whole hemisphere, and 1 million north
of the Rio Grande. Both the fields of
demography and archeology (and of course,
anthropology) were highly politicized in
their pseudo-scientific attempts to keep
numbers low, presumably to lessen the
charge of genocide.
Even with the new figures, there remains
the master narrative of the “germ theory”
of the horrific initial death rates associated
with European colonization, supposedly
reducing the populations throughout the
hemisphere by some 90 percent. This
argument, which ignores the other causes of
death and disappearance, particularly
genocidal warfare and forced removals, also
lessens the charge of genocide, as it’s said
to be unintentional. However, we know that
the majority of Jews subjected to
concentration camps died of disease and
starvation, not m gas chambers, and this is
the case in a genocide.
As to the peopling of the Western
Hemisphere, another pseudo-scientific myth
remains dominant. The “Bering Straits”
theory, which poses the absurd scenario of a
single entrance to the continent from Asia,
near the North Pole, and spreading to the
South Pole, rather than following indigenous
See NATIVE, page 9