#Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

[gatheringbones]

[“The Nazis’ adoption of the US pseudoscience of eugenics has been well documented. They borrowed US race laws and also the US strategy of continental imperialism, ethnically cleansing the land in order to populate it with white settlers, what the Nazis called Lebensraum. Less well known is Nazi officials’ interest in US racially determined immigration laws and citizenship requirements.

Writing four years after the 1924 immigration act, Adolf Hitler, in the unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, admiringly characterized the United States as “a race-state,” referring to the US racist immigration measures that began with Chinese exclusion in 1882 and expanded to other nationalities in 1924. Hitler wrote, “American immigration policies provide confirmation that the previous ‘melting pot’ approach presupposes humans of a certain similar racial basis,” and that approach “immediately fails as soon as fundamentally different types of humans are involved.”

When the Nazi lawyers began studying US race laws in depth in 1936, they were surprised that racial exclusion dated to the founding, one remarking that such was not common at the time. Yale law professor James Q. Whitman writes in his important book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, “The two new Nazi anti-Jewish measures that we remember today as the Nuremberg Laws . . . were the product of many months of Nazi discussion and debate that included regular, studious, and often admiring engagement with the race law of the United States.”

In a global history for German readers published in 1934, Nazi historian Albrecht Wirth hailed the founding of the United States: “The most important event in the history of the states of the Second Millennium . . . was the founding of the United States of America. The struggle of the Aryans for world domination received thereby its strongest prop.” Another Nazi-era book in 1936, the translated title of which was The Supremacy of the White Race, characterized the US founding as “the first fateful turning point” in the worldwide rise of white supremacy, informing readers that the United States had assumed “the leadership of the white peoples” after World War I, without which “a conscious unity of the white race would never have emerged.”]

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, from not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion, 2021

[tiliman2]

“U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of war-fare-before and after the founding of the U.S.-that reduced the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driving the refugees out--step by step--across the continent....Violence directed systematically against noncombatants through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part of Americans' way of war. “

Military Historian John Grenier

Excerpt from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book:

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States

[anarchistin]

The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence onward, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a world system of colonization.

"Columbia," the poetic, Latinate name used in reference to the United States from its founding throughout the nineteenth century, was based on the name of Christopher Columbus. The "Land of Columbus" was-and still is-represented by the image of a woman in sculptures and paintings, by institutions such as Columbia University, and by countless place names, including that of the national capital, the District of Columbia.

The 1798 hymn "Hail, Columbia" was the early national anthem and is now used whenever the vice president of the United States makes a public appearance, and Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on the continent claimed by the United States.

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

[decolonize-the-left]

"The early twenty-first century has seen increased exploitation of energy resources begetting new pressures on Indigenous lands. Exploitation by the largest corporations, often in collusion with politicians at local, state, and federal levels, and even within some Indigenous governments, could spell a final demise for Indigenous land bases and resources.

Strengthening Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination to prevent that result will take general public outrage and demand, which in turn will require that the general population, those descended from settlers and immigrants, know their history and assume responsibility."

- Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous people's History of the United States (2014)

[vox-ex]

“Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—‘from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters’—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today.

It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself—the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, overheated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.”

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

[thoughtportal]

Compiled and introduced by the UK-based anarchist collective Dark Star, Quiet Rumours features articles and essays from four generations of anarchist-inspired feminists, including Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Jo Freeman, Peggy Kornegger, Cathy Levine, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Mujeres Creando, Rote Zora, and beyond. All the pieces from the first two editions are included here, as well as new material bringing third and so-called fourth-wave feminism into conversation with twenty-first century politics. An ideal overview for budding feminists and an exciting reconsideration for seasoned radicals.

Files

Quiet Rumours, An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, New Edition - The Dark Star Collective.pdf

(1.15 MB)

United States

Ireland

Bolivia

feminism

anthologies

[deadassdiaspore]

[a-typical]

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources.

Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy.

Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought for survival as peoples. The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. 

Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

[rivage-seulm]

A Letter to My 13-Year-Old Granddaughter before Her "Service Project" in Panama

A Letter to My 13-Year-Old Granddaughter before Her “Service Project” in Panama

Next Thursday, my granddaughter, Eva, will leave her home in Westport CT – one of our country’s most affluent towns – for a service project in Panama. The project is called “Amigos,” and bills itself as following: “Discover AMIGOS is a two-week group volunteer experience for ages 13 and 14. Travel to Panama with a group of students to learn about environmental issues like conservation preserving…

[gatheringbones]

[“Protestantism in the United States was not simply a majority religion but a constituent militant element of US nationalism. The millions of Irish Catholic famine refugees arrived in the aftermath of the half century of Protestant fervor after the second “Great Awakening,” the first having swept through the British colonies in the 1730s and linked the separate settler colonies by fanatic religiosity up to the founding of the United States.

In the 1795–1835 Second Great Awakening, large meetings were held in small towns and big cities but also in camp revival gatherings of the mainly Scots Irish frontier trekkers in Kentucky and Tennessee, the US foot soldiers of Empire who fed their genocidal guilt with feverish evangelism. The core of this religious fervor was a personal experience with Christ, and that could take many forms—speaking in tongues, handling snakes. In 1801 in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, following bloody massacres of Indigenous farmers and the burning of their crops and towns, the settlers from the newly established white settler communities, built on the bones of dead Indians, came from a wide area to hold a weeklong revival. The event drew more than ten thousand regular attendees and many more attended for a day or two. Seven itinerant Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist preachers worked the crowd. The masses screamed and writhed and sang themselves to unconsciousness and oblivion, clearing their relationship with the devil. But surely the guilt remained, unnamed, even unknown. Patriotism was its perfect expression and justification. The Protestant religious awakenings formed a type of purging, in what Richard Slotkin characterizes as “regeneration through violence.”]

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, from not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion, 2021

[fuck-yeah-anarchy]

Just a reminder for my fellow white anarchists about how critical it is to explore the perspectives of people of color, both anarchist and non-anarchist alike as not only do experiences of common oppressions like the state and class rule differ depending on identity and conditions, but they also demonstrate how intersecting systems of oppression, such as white supremacy, permeate society as wide-reaching structures of oppression. It emphasizes the significance of dismantling these systems alongside the destruction of the state and the development of a free society.

Failure by white anarchists to comprehend white supremacy, its connection to other forms of oppression, and the experiences of people of color and their distinctive oppressions will not only significantly impede any endeavor towards building a freer society but also guarantee the perpetuation of these oppressions within the organizations/affinity groups they establish and the work they undertake. These groups typically fade away after alienating numerous potential nonwhite sympathizers to anarchism and its principles, all while merely paying lip service to Anti-Racist ideals and the movements led by people of color.

Only by actively listening to, reading, and reflecting upon the experiences of people of color, as well as engaging in introspection to comprehend the white supremacist mindset that persists even among white radicals like anarchists, can we initiate the dismantling of these oppressive systems and progress towards a genuinely free society.

Here is some content on the subject from some fantastic folks.

Videos:

Zoe Samudzi - On a Black Feminist Anarchism

Saint Andrewism - Landback

Saint Andrewism - What is Black Anarchism

Literature:

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin - Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - An indigenous peoples' history of the United States

Mariame Kaba, William C Anderson, Zoe Samudzi - As Black As Resistance

[apocalypselog]

@ fellow USAmericans- while the world is burning down and we’re all starting to realize how powerful we really are and that it doesn’t have to be this way, please don’t forget about indigenous people here in the US. The way I hear some ppl talk, I get worried that our dreams of a better world don’t include the oldest residents of Turtle Island.

Please don’t take my word for it- listen to actual Native people. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a great starting point; so is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Living Resistance by Kaitlin B Curtice is more about life and activism in general but it’s still really good. Here on tumblr @/decolonize-the-left does a lot of good stuff (I’m sure there are others but I haven’t found them yet).

I’m still learning. Remember that while grief is natural, the point isn’t to feel ashamed, it’s to make a better world going forward. I’ve learned so much from indigenous people about how to resist and live and heal, and I’m so tired of my fellow settlers ignoring them. They were here first. We need to listen to them.

[librarycards]

Hello! Your posts are very enlightening and I'm inspired by how much you read. Might be a weird question and I'm sorry if it is but do you have any good book recommendations for a USAmerican trying to expand their worldview? I.e., histories of other countries/global regions, imperialism, etc.

i have some, but also recommend looking through @metamatar / @fatehbaz / @lafemmemacabre / @killy / @sawasawako / @handweavers (these are the mutuals that stand out to me but just the tip of the iceberg) &other blogs that have a more robust collection of resources –– i have learned a lot from them over the years!

that said, here are some books and authors whose oeuvres/at least multiple books i strongly recommend. different genres, and i'm not delineating between them as i am ideologically opposed to Doing That/creating epistemic hierarchies. obviously, that is particularly true given the nature of this ask. but it should be pretty clear what is considered a standard 'political/historical nonfiction' book and what...isn't!

authors:

Lisa Lowe

Jasbir Puar

Laila Lalami

Sara Ahmed

Trinh T. Minh-ha

Jamaica Kincaid

b. binaohan

Larissa Lai

Edwidge Danticat

Harsha Walia

Bhanu Kapil

books:

Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Pankaj Mishra, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, the West, and the Afterlives of Empire

Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live

Susan Williams, White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa

Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not a Nation of Immigrants

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes

Marwa Helal, Ante Body

Aviva Chomsky, Central America's Forgotten History (NB: forgotten by usamericans, that is)

Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape

Moraga, Anzaldúa, and Bambara, eds., This Bridge Called My Back

Poupeh Missaghi, trans(re)lating house one

Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings

Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

Bonaventure Soh Beje Ndikung, Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

again, this appears as a long list, but is truly just a taste of what's out there. i hope it helps!

[madsmilfelsen]

Hello! I'm really curious, what books/authors would you recommend to someone who's new to writing horror?

Hi! Here is what I have on hand (minus my loaned out copies of my favorite book ever Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones and Never Whistle At Night: an indigenous anthology of dark fiction which made me cry on an airplane and made the person next to me very uncomfortable, like she was just trying to build a cart at banana republic, apologies to seat 17B)

God’s Cruel Joke Lit Mag because I’m in them and will be in issue 4, too :) published either mid-January or February 2024– @labyrinthphanlivingafacade is in issue 3 with a great short story that I won’t spoil ***right now the magazines are available to purchase in physical copies but I was told all issues will be free to download as pdfs pretty soon!

Severance by Ling Ma (body horror but not in the way you think, the real horror is repetition and loneliness)

Wilder Girls by Rory Power (body horror)

The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis (adjacent the horror genre but a hell of a read)

ANYTHING BY STEPHAN GRAHAM JONES ANYTHING

We Have Always Lived in a Castle by Shirely Jackson (I read this for the first time last spring boy howdy, I also included The Lottery for its suspense)

Dean Koontz because my husband suggested it for the list— this was just the first title I grabbed, I think he said Patrician Crowell too but I was busy looking for Mongrels

A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans (I didn’t finish this because depression set in shortly after I started but the first chapter plays with second pov which I really liked, I’m determined to read it this year)

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (I really enjoyed HBO’s adaptation)

The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey (likely the only zombie stories that made me weep uncontrollably)

Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein (non-fiction: explores modern young women navigating sexuality and because I have a thing for loss of autonomy— it’s been a few years since I read it but there is discussion of sexual assault, but I appreciate the expanse of her research and even included a conversation with someone who is asexual)

Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James (got a chill just typing this out— the audio book is exquisite)

You’ll notice some nonfiction because, as a historian undergrad, nothing scares me more than man. The battles of Leningrad and Stalingrad are particularly stomach churning. America’s Reconstruction Era is full of acted out malice and under taught in my opinion.

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The 900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison E. Salisbury

Enemy at the Gates by William Craig

(On the other side of WW2 I have a book of the experiences of German solider’s left over from a paper I wrote on the inadequacy of Nazi uniforms and how it expedited their failure in Russia, Frontsoldaten by Stephen G. Fritz)

Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (one of my favorite authors, try finding “How Reconstruction Still Shapes American Racism” Time Magazine, April 2, 2019, I used it as a source for a paper on the history of voting rights)

Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers— folk tales of Canadians, Lumberjacks & Indians by Richard M. Dorson (published around 1952 but content collected from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 40’s)

Raven Tells Stories: An Anthology of Alaskan Native Writing (I’m Alutiiq and the museum on Kodiak has a lot of stories recorded under Alutiiq Museum Podcast— my kids and I listen on Spotify)

I think the genre of horror is really mastering tension and playing on peoples fears which is why I included old school folk stories (An Underground Education had a great write up on the Grimm Brothers and the original fairy tales from around the world such as the Chinese and Egyptian Cinderella, as well as several different sections of funny tales, torture techniques, absolute weirdos etc etc) in this vein of thought The Uses of Enchanment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim could prove to be useful

If you’re writing a character with Bad Parents— Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and Toxic Parents (it has a longer subtitle but I don’t see my copy anywhere) might be able to help you shape character traits

I reached out to @littleredwritingcat who has a mind plentiful in sources who recommended

The Gathering Dark: an anthology of folk horror (I will be picking this one up asap)

Toll by Cherie Priest (southern gothic)

Anything by Jennifer MacMahon

The Elementals by Michael McDowell

[iscairot]

it makes me kind of crazy to think that how the minute i started picking up gender/race/feminist/trauma theory books, i gained information in 3 weeks that I’d spent literal years on the internet trying to find out. when people say you Have to read, they don’t just mean articles, they don’t just mean posts, they mean go into your library and pick up a book, because the internet is run by the same corporate conglomerates that benefit from an illiterate and uneducated America.

here’s some books i think are great if you’re just getting into reading nonfiction:

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong - a memoir of sorts about how it feels to grow up Asian American. Especially beneficial for non-Asian people to understand the nuances of orientalism and how it impacts anti-asian racism in particular.

Threadings. by Ismatu Gwendolyn- a Podcast (not a book, but she provides transcripts to read of all her episodes) by Ismatu Gwendolyn, a black woman and activist. I recommend starting with “You’ve Been Traumatized into Hating Reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)”. Incredibly compelling as a writer and a speaker and was my inspiration to get more into reading this year!

Not a Nation of Immigrants by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Breaks down where the phrase “America is a nation of immigrants” comes from, and explains why this specific phrase is white colonial revisionist history. Incredibly good and dives into the specific anti-immigrant actions and politics of the United States, a lot of which I’d never even heard of.

if reading scares you or you’re not sure you can do it alone, DM me, I’m thinking of starting a discord book club!

[soyouwinagain]

1, 43, + a book everyone raves about but you disliked !

1. Name the best book you’ve read so far this year.

I've read very little good fiction so far this year but a bunch of great nonfiction—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion was near the top

43. Title of a book you own that’s in the worst physical condition you have. Explain what happened to it. Post a picture if you want.

WELL. I don't own these anymore. but surely my copies of Dune and Foolish Hearts that ended up in a ditch by the side of a Slovenian road should win this one. other than that... I take very good care of my books so the only ones in rough shape were bought used or treated badly by others—notably my copy of A Separate Peace, which my mom got a nice coffee ring on the cover of 🥴 it's currently with my sister, otherwise I would share a photo

a book everyone raves about but you disliked

you think you know what's coming here? sure? maybe you do skskjdf we both know I'm still not over Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (but I thought about naming and shaming Babel here). it's just not a good book at all! the more I think about it the madder it makes me! this could've been SO good if it had actually been about video games!! instead we got Sadie blaming everyone else in her life for all the shit that happens to her (just like. don't fuck your professor. maybe. as a start.) and not realizing that's what she's doing. unbearable. also some very cheap narrative choices for some significant plot events. thank you for suffering through this buddy read with me <3