An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett

Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times Bestseller

This American Book Award winning title about Native American struggle and resistance radically reframes more than 400 years of US history

A New York Times Bestseller and the basis for the HBO docu-series Exterminate All the Brutes, directed by Raoul Peck, this 10th anniversary edition of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States includes both a new foreword by Peck and a new introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

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. 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 four centuries, tracing their perseverance against policies intended to obliterate them.

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen 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

That America's founding was a revolution against colonial powers in pursuit of freedom from tyranny

That Native people were passive, didn’t resist and no longer exist

That the US is a “nation of immigrants” as opposed to having a racist settler colonial history

©2023 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (P)2023 Beacon Press

Critic reviews

“Meticulously documented, this thought-provoking treatise is sure to generate discussion.”—Booklist

“Justice-seekers everywhere will celebrate Dunbar-Ortiz’s unflinching commitment to truth—a truth that places settler-colonialism and genocide exactly where they belong: as foundational to the existence of the United States.”—Waziyatawin, PhD, activist and author of For Indigenous Minds Only

“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States helped me clarify my place in this country. . . . This book is necessary reading if we are to move into a more humane future.”—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street