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Allotment
This term arises from the General Allotment Act (or Dawes Act) of 1887 passed by the United States Congress. Allotment refers to redistribution of 160-acre parcels of land created from dividing up larger, “collectively held” Indigenous reservation land and allotted to individual Indigenous people in hopes of encouraging assimilation (pg. 157). Surplus land after distribution of the allotted land was opened to settlers. Allotment resulted in a reduction of Indigenous land from approximately 156 million acres down to 50 million acres by 1934, and that land was never returned. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz labels allotment as one of many policies by the U.S. government that furthered colonization, displacement, and encouraged assimilation rather than recognizing or respecting sovereignty of Indigenous nations and their identification with a community as a whole.
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Assimilation
Assimilation is the process by which a certain, usually smaller, group of peoples or culture gets absorbed or integrated into a dominant society or culture. Assimilation is often encouraged as a policy or forced through direct and indirect means. In the context of this book, assimilation refers to a policy throughout U.S. history to try to assimilate Indigenous peoples into U.S. society and culture. This included policies like allotment, sending children to boarding schools to unlearn their Indigenous roots, the spread of Anglo-Americans practices and values like the use of alcohol or slavery, and Christian missionaries’ attempt to convert Indigenous populations. Indigenous peoples have actively resisted assimilation, and Roxanne Dunbar- Ortiz also rejects assimilation as a policy because it would eradicate Indigenous identity and sovereignty and calls it “a form of genocide” (pg. 174).
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Calvinism
Calvinism is “a Protestant Christian movement with a strong separatist political component” that was started by religious reformer John Calvin in the 16th century. Calvin was instrumental in spreading the covenant ideology (the idea of having a covenant with God to take land from those considered evil or lesser peoples) across Europe that would later be popular among early settlers in North American colonies. Calvinism included belief in predestination, and that concept along with the covenant ideology is reflected in the Scots-Irish settlers’ belief that they were predestined or chosen or elected by God to conquer and occupy land on God’s behalf. This eventually became a part of the settlers’ origin story and U.S. exceptionalism.
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Doctrine of Discovery
The Doctrine of Discovery originated in a papal bull in 1455. It was the basis by which any European colonial power could claim title to non-Christian lands they “discovered,” and this simultaneously meant that Indigenous people on the land “lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it” (pg. 3). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz sharply rejects this doctrine as having any validity and calls it a “legal cover for theft” by which Europeans, starting with Spain and Portugal, conquered Indigenous lands and other parts of the world. She also notes that the United States also relied on the doctrine as established law to colonize Indigenous lands, and it retains relevancy to modern day as “the basis for federal laws still in effect that control Indigenous peoples’ lives and destinies” (pg. 198). In recent years, some organizations and religious institutions have rejected the authority of the doctrine.
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Genocide
This term originated after World War II and the Holocaust, and in 1948 the United Nations officially defined it. The U.N. definition of genocide includes, among other things, intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” through various means (pg. 8). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that genocide was a core policy of the United States given the intentional goal to “terminate” Indigenous peoples’ “existence as peoples—not as random individuals,” which she argues “is the very definition of modern genocide” (pg. 6). Dunbar-Ortiz describes various actions of the U.S. that would entail genocide against Indigenous peoples, including killing and massacres, military occupations, forced removal, and forced transfer of Indigenous children to boarding schools.
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Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance was a form of Indigenous resistance that emerged in the late 19th century in the West, originating with Wovoka, a Paiute holy man. The prophecy of the dance was a vision of an Indigenous world restored, the buffalo returned, and settlers gone from the land. The dance gained widespread popularity quickly, including among the Sioux in 1890. When the dance caught the attention of U.S. colonial authorities, they immediately acted to stop it and arrested Sioux leader Sitting Bull, under the suspicion that he was encouraging it.
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Imperialism
Imperialism is the policy of a state to extend or exert its power over another state or region by extending political, economic, or military control. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz refers to the U.S. as an imperialist state given its history of imperialism with respect to its actions throughout North America as it expanded and its imperialism overseas, such as in Cuba, Hawaii, or the Philippines. Dunbar-Ortiz draws a direct link between the wars against Indigenous nations across North America as a template for later overseas wars and invasion by the U.S into present day.
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"Indian Country"
A term used within the U.S. military to refer to enemy territory that is rooted in the development of the military through wars against Indigenous peoples of North America. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz criticizes the continued used of this term within the U.S. military as a technical term even found within training manuals as an “insensitive racial slur.” A shortened version of this as “In Country” emerged during the war in Vietnam.
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Irregular Warfare
Irregular warfare refers to the tactics, strategies, and methods that fall outside what is viewed as conventional war tactics. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz repeatedly refers to the use of irregular warfare by early European settlers and colonial militias and later settler-rangers in the U.S alongside regular armed forces. She primarily refers to it as attacking and killing civilians, but it can also include disease warfare, bounties for scalp hunting, destroying food supplies, and burning of towns. These methods, as Dunbar-Ortiz argues, were part of Anglo-Americans “first way of war” (pg. 59).
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Manifest Destiny
Manifest destiny is the idea that the United States was destined to expand to its present size across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes it as an idea that is “embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States.” This belief often obscures the reality of U.S. expansion through invasion, war, and displacement of Indigenous peoples and suggests the narrative that expansion of the U.S. westward was a “natural” movement (pg. 118).
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Origin Myth
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz refers to the U.S. origin myth as the narrative that developed regarding the founding and development of the U.S. The narrative includes early settlers’ belief in a covenant with God to take land from Indigenous people. This later developed further after the U.S. was founded and thus the narrative is one of the country being born from rebellion against an oppressive colonialist power and therefore the U.S. stands for freedom, democracy, and liberation. The idea of U.S. exceptionalism is also a part of this and in more recent times historians revised it to include multiculturalism and the idea of a “nation of immigrants.” Dunbar-Ortiz argues the origin narrative only distorts and obscures the reality of the U.S. as a settler-colonialist state.
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Reservation
Reservations were specified land areas designated by the U.S. as reserved for Indigenous nations to live on. The concept emerged after the founding of the U.S. through 1871 when the U.S. was in its era of treaty-making and started as the idea of “reserving a narrowed land base from a much larger one in exchange for US government protection from settlers” (pg. 11). Later, the common narrative became that land was being reserved for Indigenous nations by “being carved out of the public domain of the United States as a benevolent gesture” to Indigenous peoples, who were then see as “taking a free ride” on the land (pg. 11). Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz sees reservations as one of many methods by which the U.S. took land from Indigenous nations.
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Settle Colonialism
A type of colonialism that involves eliminating or displacing and replacing Indigenous populations by a settler population. It is the key term Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz uses to describe the history of the United States as rooted in settler colonialism, which is also based on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, and land theft. She further defines it as a “genocidal policy” (pg. 6) that inherently “requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals” (pg. 8). Among its goals is the “elimination of Indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers” (10). As Dunbar-Ortiz argues, to understand the true history of the United States and how the past’s effects trickle into the present we must understand settler colonialism.
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Sovereignty or Self-determination
Sovereignty refers to a nation’s ability and authority to govern itself. Indigenous sovereignty is also viewed as an obligation or duty, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz also describes it as a means of survival. As Dunbar-Ortiz discusses throughout the book, over time European colonial powers and later the United States curbed or eliminated the sovereignty of Indigenous nations in a variety of ways, such as through the doctrine of discovery, then later allotment, termination, and assimilation policies. Indigenous resistance and struggle for sovereignty continues today in many ways, including fighting for land restoration and having the U.S. government acknowledge illegally stolen lands or enforcing treaty rights.
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Trail of Tears
This term refers to the removal via forced march by the U.S. Army of the remaining Cherokee Nation from their ancestral land to “Indian Territory” during the cold, harsh winter of 1838. Of the 16,000 Cherokee people that were forced on this journey, about half died on the route. To Dunbar-Ortiz, the Trail of Tears represents the nature of the removal policies of U.S. President Andrew Jackson, who “made his career of taking Indigenous land,” which ultimately led to the Trail of Tears. The term is also more broadly applied to forced removals and marches in general involving other Indigenous nations too, such as the Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations.
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White Supremacy
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces white supremacy to the Christian Crusades and the Protestant colonization of Ireland and describes it as going beyond just skin color. The papal law of “limpieza de sangre,” or cleanliness of blood, was used to investigate suspected Jews or Muslim during the time of the Inquisition after they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula region. In that case, blood became a differentiating factor between peoples. During England’s colonization of Ireland, Irish people were considered to be biologically inferior peoples. European took these beliefs into North American colonies and refined it to apply it to Indigenous people and culture as inferior to white, European people and culture, who were believed to be a superior race. The ideology eventually developed into its modern form as the foundation of racism in the United States.
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