Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. The basis of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, directed by Raoul Peck, and a New York Times Bestseller, this classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden. Writing from the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants, she centers Indigenous voices over the course of 4 centuries, tracing their perseverance against policies intended to obliterate them.
Today in the United States, there are more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly 3 million people, descendants of the 15 million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. With a new foreword from Raoul Peck and a new introduction from Dunbar Ortiz, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
Big Concept Myths
Dr. Dunbar-Ortiz is joining us on the virtual Busboys stage to bust these myths and share a history of the United States that places Native Americans at the center. Copies of the book will be available for purchase before and during the event, so make sure to order your copy before we’re out of stock! Your purchase of the book includes shipping anywhere in the United States via USPS.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 7:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of the 10th Anniversary Edition of AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES will be available for purchase before and during the event. Please note that this event is VIRTUAL and will be livestreamed.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a New York Times best-selling author, grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.
Professor Maylei Blackwell is an interdisciplinary scholar activist, oral historian, and author of ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, published with University of Texas Press. She is an Associate Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women’s Studies Department, and affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. Her research has two distinct, but interrelated trajectories that broadly analyze how women’s social movements in the U.S. and Mexico are shaped by questions of difference factors such as race, indigeneity, class, sexuality or citizenship status and how these differences impact the possibilities and challenges of transnational organizing.
