• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2014 September #1
  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. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco.