A powerful, meticulously researched and cogent review of a very important book.

Let me urge you, however, to read (and possibly review) as a companion book, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, by Kyle T. Mays. (Beacon Press Books, 2021.

Mays examines the often confusing, fractured, contradictory, and conflicting relationship between Africans/African Americans and Indigenous peoples beginning with black peoples' arrival in Virginia from 1619 to date. (This includes the fact that a number of tribes held slaves in even worse conditions than some white slaveholders; and many of them served as runaway slave catchers for those selfsame white guys).

As you so aptly point out, Dunbar-Ortiz does an admirable job of chronicling some of that history. But Mays goes even deeper; he does not "surgar-coat" or rationalize or excuse any of it.

One example here should suffice: Modern-day black people have been taught that the "Buffalo Soldiers" (ex-slaves who enlisted in the US Amy after the Civil War) were "heroes" who helped white settlers "win" the West. The truth, of course, is in the "dirty details": Most of those black men-soldiers participated just as eagerly, willingly in the genocide of Indigenous peoples and in the theft of their lands as did those white settler colonialists.

Again, great read.

HD

Chicago