neocolonialist strategy—an attempt to accommodate new realities in order to retain the dominance— neocolonialist methods signal victory for the colonized.

Origin narratives form the vital core of a people’s unifying iden- tity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state in- volves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.

The ori- gin story of a supposedly unitary nation, albeit now multicultural, remained intact. The original cover design featured a multicolored woven fabric—this image meant to stand in place of the discredited “melting pot.”

Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights- movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work—and affirm US historical progress—Indigenous nations and communities had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multicultur- alism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic” or “Latino.” The multicultural approach empha- sized the “contributions” of individuals from oppressed groups to the country’s assumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus cred- ited with corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup, canoes, hundreds of place names, Thanksgiving, and even the con- cepts of democracy and federalism. But this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources.

This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present re- sponsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.’

Perhaps worst of all, some claimed (and still claim) that the colonizer and colonized experienced an “encounter” and engaged in “dialogue,” thereby masking reality with justifications and ratio- nalizations—in short, apologies for one-sided robbery and murder.

Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective re- quires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in its essence. Inherent in the myth we’ve been taught is an embrace of settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an absence of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society? That is the central question this book pursues.

Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”*