Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dina Gilio-Whitaker: All the Real Indians Died Off

[bibliogramma]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s book “All the Real Indians Died Off” is a methodical deconstruction of 21 common myths about Indigenous people in America. While it is informed by US culture and history, there’s certainly some overlap, some myths that I’ve encountered as part of the white settler view of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Both authors are Indigenous women, who have lived the experience of being characterised by these myths and are thus best suited to expose and explode them.

“...knowing and being able to articulate clearly what all the most prevalent myths and stereotypes about Native Americans are comes at least as much from the lived experience of being Native, in its infinite manifestations. As we discuss throughout these pages, this knowledge inevitably includes processes of inclusion and exclusion and personal histories of profound cultural loss, things neither of us are strangers to. To know personally the myths and stereotypes about Indians is to grow up hearing the narratives behind those myths, knowing that they were lies being told about you and your family and that you were expected to explain yourself at the demands of others.”

As Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker point out, many of these myths about Indigenous Americans arise from the American master narratives of exceptionalism, of settling a new and empty land through the exercise of rugged individualism, of being “a place of exceptional righteousness, democracy, and divine guidance (manifest destiny).”

The first myth they examine is that of the “vanishing Indian” which says “all the real Indians died off.” This myth has been used to justify both the seizure of land and policies of assimilation. Other myths they unpack and examine include the beliefs that Columbus discovered America, that Indians were savage and warlike, that Europeans civilized the backward natives, that the US government did not have a policy of genocide, that Indigenous culture belongs to all Americans, that most Indians are on welfare, that they are predisposed to alcoholism, and other perceptions that ignore the truths about Indigenous life within a racist settler society.

Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker offer important lessons in the history of white treatment of Indigenous peoples, from the exploitation and extermination of the Arawak by Columbus, to the enslavement and cultural genocide practised in the California missions under the now canonised Junipiero, to the tragedy of the Trail of Tears enforced under Andrew Jackson, to the widespread and commercialised appropriation of Indigenous art, dress, spiritual symbols and ceremonies, and other cultural elements.

It’s not a long book, but it is packed with detail about how Indigenous peoples and their cultures and histories have been perceived, and misperceived, by white American society. The book ends with a brief timeline of key events in the colonisation of the North American continent and the oppression of its original inhabitants. A solid introduction to Indigenous issues.