Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - All the Real Indians Died Off: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans

No one writes a book without a team of people behind them, influencing them along the way. Some are on the front lines involved with the actual book itself and some provide the intellectual or personal foundation. Foremost on the front line was our awesome, inimitable editor Gayatri Patnaik, without whose discerning editorial eye and wide open mind this book wouldve suffered, and we thank her and the rest of the staff at Beacon Press for making this book happen.

Thanks to the faculty in the Native American studies program at the University of New Mexico (UNM) who continually mentor and pave a path of Native scholarship, especially Gregory Cajete, Lloyd Lee, Tiffany Lee, Beverly Singer, Mary Bowannie, Thomas Birdbear, Derrick Lente, and Maria Williams. Thanks also to the American studies faculty at UNM (past and present), who work hard to give Native people a voice in the field: Alex Lubin, Ayo-sha Goldstein, David Correia, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Michael Trujillo, Gerald Vizenor, and amazing Native doctoral students and friends Nick Estes and Melanie Yazzie. At UNM, thanks also to Anne Calhoun and Chris Sims in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies. Pilamiya to Terri Flowerday in the College of Education for daring to indigenize educational psychology and for being an irreplaceable friend.

Thank you to Rudy Rser at the Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS) for his fearlessness and tireless dedication to Indigenous geopolitics, and to his wife, Leslie Korn, for her amazing work to raise the cultural awareness of providers of mental health care everywhere. Thanks also to Heidi Bruce at CWIS for being a fantastic writing partner and coworker. At Indian Country Today Media Network, Indian countrys premier voice to the world, thank you to Ray Halbritter, Bob Roe, Ray Cook, Theresa Braine, Chris Napolitano, Vincent Schilling, Gayle Courey Toensing, and Ken Poulisse for your support and for giving Indian people a platform. We appreciate our colleagues in and beyond the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association for the brilliant scholarship which influences so much of this book: Jeani OBrien, Philip Deloria, Kim Tallbear, Ranjit Arab at University of Washington Press, Colville sister Laurie Arnold, Coll Thrush, Joanne Barker, Brendan Lindsay, Eric Cheyfitz, James Brooks, Patrick Wolfe, Vine Deloria Jr., Robert Williams Jr., and all those present, both physically and spiritually, too numerous to mention.

Finally, a book cannot be written without family and friends who provide love and support in all kinds of ways. Dina thanks Katie Alvord for over twenty years of friendship and inspiration as a writer, Geri DeStefano-Webre and Sissy Gilio for their unfaltering sisterhood, and most of all Tom Whitaker for being the best of the best.

Roxanne thanks most of all her daughter and best friend, Michelle Callarman, and her many nieces and nephews (and grand- and great-grandnieces and nephews) in Oklahoma, Washington, Louisiana, California, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Florida, and Cambodia, and she is grateful for the support and counsel of friends Chude Allen, Anne Weills, Rachel Jackson, Andrew Curley, Nanabaa Beck, John Mage, Simon Ortiz, and Starry Krueger. She remembers the late Lee Roy Chapman and Martin Legassick, thanks her colleagues of the Indigenous World AssociationKenneth Deer, Petuuche Gilbert, Mililani Trask, June Lorenzo, and Judith LeBlanc, and is grateful for many others.

R OXANNE D UNBAR- O RTIZ grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother, and has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades. She is the author or editor of eight other books, including An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. Dunbar-Ortiz lives in San Francisco.

D INA G ILIO- W HITAKER (Colville Confederated Tribes) is an award-winning journalist and columnist at Indian Country Today Media Network. A writer and researcher in Indigenous studies, she is currently a research associate and associate scholar at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She lives in San Clemente, California.

PrecolonialAccording to conventional science, humans begin migrating from Asia to North America thirty thousand to forty thousand years ago. The Bering Strait land bridge theory postulates that humans crossed a hypothetical land bridge and arrived south of the Canadian ice sheets 16,000 years ago, while the Clovis First model confirms human habitation in North America (current New Mexico) 11,500 years ago. However, recent discoveries confirm the existence of humans in South America at least twenty thousand years ago, upending the Clovis model. By twelve thousand years agoand very likely earlierIndians lived in all the unglaciated areas of the entire hemisphere. Competing and ever-changing theories make the dates for human habitation in North America a moving target and ignore the fact that two of the seven agricultural civilizations in the world originated there, which created food plantssuch as corn, tomato, squash, pumpkin, and cacao.

9000 BCAgriculture begins in North America.

4500 BCMonumental building begins in the Mississippi Valley.

750 BCMonumental temples are built in the Ohio Valley.

Ca. 1000Leif Erikson and a crew of other Norse explorers are the first-known Europeans to sail to North America. They settle in a region of todays southeastern Canada, but the settlement ultimately fails and the Vikings disappear, leaving behind artifacts that are discovered at LAnse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland in 1963.

AD 2001400The Hohokam culturepredecessors of the Tohono Oodham people in the Gila and Salt River region of todays southern Arizonais a technologically advanced agricultural civilization made possible by a complex system of irrigation canals. They also build large ball courts similar to those of the Mayans, for a game played with the first rubber balls known in the world.

AD 6001400Cahokia, one of the worlds largest cities in its time (located in todays Illinois), with some fifty thousand people at its peak, is part of a larger group of Indigenous peoples known as the Mississippians, predecessors of todays so-called Five Civilized TribesCherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminoleamong others.

1390The Haudenosaunee (league of the five nations of the IroquoisSeneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Mohawk, and Cayuga) is founded in what is now northern New York State and southern Ontario. Later, in 1712, the Tuscaroras will join the league.

1400Some of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples of the sub-Arctic region in the Northwest (Alaska and Canada) move to what is now the US Southwest and divide into two large groups, Navajos (Din) and Apaches.

1452Pope Nicholas Vissues Dum Diversas, authorizing Portugal to reduce Muslims, pagans, and all non-Christians to perpetual slavery and to seize their property.

1455The same pope issues Romanus Pontifex, granting a monopoly on the African slave trade to Portugal and reinforcing the Europeans power to enslave non-Christian Native peoples wherever they are found and seize their lands. This is the onset of four centuries of transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

1492Columbus arrives in the Caribbean believing he has found the Spice Islands of Indonesia (East Indies), which he calls the West Indies. He completes four round-trips between 1492 and 1498, wreaking death and destruction among the three million Taino residents of Hispaniola (todays Dominican Republic), establishing a trade in Indian slaves that would last over a century, and launching a genocide that would result in the Indigenous depopulation of much of the Caribbean, repopulated with enslaved Africans.