#roxanne dunbar-ortiz

[gatheringbones]

[“After the Civil War, six of the seven divisions of the US Army were stationed west of the Mississippi, where they carried out genocidal wars against the Plains and southwestern Indigenous nations, including the intentional extermination of tens of millions of bison. These troops were pulled out of the South, where they were supposed to be occupying the defeated former Confederate states to allow for land distribution to former slaves and for their political participation in democratic elections. Without sufficient US Army troops to stop them, the Ku Klux Klan made Reconstruction impossible, imposed a reign of terror, and restored the ex-Confederate elite.

But the “wild west” originated in the Northwest Territory, east of the Mississippi, not in the West. Defining the West as the site of genocidal conquest erases its origins at the very founding of the United States, when and where its leaders were intent on building world power based on land theft, genocide, and slavery, the pillars of the US fiscal-military state.”]

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

[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]

[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-everything]

"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)

[sazzyartist]

Snippets:

Morning Read: June 20 2024

as we know, the united states is a historical parallel to isntreal as it’s foundations are built on settler violence , encouraged & supported genocide, massive debt and private property that denies people autonomy, community and freedom of movement / existence

Take-aways: Why does one humans’ suffering become the suffering of another?(specifically how are peoples who’ve been genocided able to - in a generation or two - confidently enact that genocide forward)

How do we consider the generational energy we’re given and do the work to ensure we do not place it onto another (as revenge, as relief, as a sense of pride or “completing the cycle of one’s abuse”)?

[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

[gatheringbones]

[“Ames focuses on the promotion of individualism by the ruling class of corporate giants to explain why the gun situation is allowed to exist in a modern industrial society, arguing that gun-rights politics fit with the corporate agenda that profits from atomized individualism. “If all you do when you think of guns is think of an instrument that is dangerous, can kill, and is usually seen being waved around by dangerous criminals or pot-bellied white jerks in pickups, then you don’t see the angles.”

He rightly dismisses the idea that the wealthy fear an armed populace; rather, what they worry about is government regulations on their capacity to make profit, and this is increasingly the case with the tech industry. Ames asks: “So why does the Big Business lobby align so seamlessly with the gun cultists?” He recognizes that Second Amendment advocates, nearly 75 percent of the population, truly believe that guns are a source of political rights and political power: “That guns in fact are the only source of political power. . . . If you think guns, rather than concentrated wealth, equals political power, then you’d resent government power far more than you’d resent billionaires’ power or corporations’ hyper-concentrated wealth/power, because government will always have more and bigger guns. In fact you’d see pro-gun, anti-government billionaires like the Kochs as your natural political allies in your gun-centric notion of political struggle against the concentrated gun power of government.”

Ames’s argument reflects contemporary reality, but it also extends from a much deeper historical dance between the wealthy and politically powerful, who dominate the economic and social order by making sure some symbolic power sedates those who actually have little financial leverage and thus, extremely limited political power.

It is the case that for rural settlers of the North American British colonies, and for U.S. American settlers after Independence, a firearm was regarded as a necessary utensil for the settler’s task—as with a hoe, an ax, a team of oxen or horses—a point made by some gun-control advocates as evidence that guns were meaningless. However, it’s illogical to assume that the gun’s utilitarian role outweighed the immediate sense of power and domination that firearms offer. The land that the hoe, the ax, the ox, and the slave’s body were used to cultivate was taken by armed force and repression; the land was already home to Indigenous societies that for millennia had been engaged in agricultural and animal husbandry, and had developed distinct languages, cultures, and traditions. That is the way of settler-colonialism, and that is the way of the gun—to kill off enemies and, in the case of the North American colonies and the independent United States, to control African Americans.”]

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, from loaded: a disarming history of the second amendment, 2018

[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.

[drdemonprince]

With this read through of Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, I was completely blown away, and radicalized all the more. I unlearned so many intentionally confusing myths about what America is and how it came to be within the book’s 300 pages. 

I came to understand that this is a country created by settler militias, not by immigrants, and that moral culpability for the harm done by the U.S. goes a lot farther than just a handful of wealthy slave-owners and especially badly behaved soldiers.

I learned about how the U.S. government’s political repression of Native peoples set a legal precedent that would one day be used to justify the torture of suspected “terrorists” at Guantanamo Bay and in Abu Ghraib. I saw more parallels between the violent settlement of the U.S. and of Israel than ever. 

More than anything, Dunbar-Ortiz’ book taught me that the colonization of the United States relied upon the committing of several key sins — uniquely cruel political and military innovations that would reverberate forward throughout history, changing everything about how warfare is conducted and how oppressed peoples are exploited across the globe. 

The fundamental sins of American conquest are: gun “rights”, private property, factionalism, and irregular warfare against “unlawful enemy combatants.” In this piece, I will discuss where each of these sins came from, why they were so essential to a successful Indigenous genocide, and the legacy we continue to see from them today: 

Gun “Rights”

As an American, I had grown up being taught that the “well regulated militias” of the Second Amendment had arisen to fight off the British soldiers during the war of independence. 

Under this version of United States history, citizens retain the right to own guns so that we might defend our property from criminals, protect “our” territories against foreign invasions, and resist tyranny from federal government. To this day, Americans evoke this interpretation of the Second Amendment as a justification for concealed carry rights, and for “castle doctrine” laws that allow home owners to shoot intruders (even unarmed ones!) inside their homes. 

In reality, the militias mentioned in the Second Amendment had formed many decades before the revolution, and were initially created to slaughter Indigenous people and clear them out from their lands. The foreign “invaders” that the Second Amendment was created to defend against were not the British colonizers, but the many Native peoples who had been living on Turtle Island for thousands of years before European conquest. 

Dunbar-Ortiz writes:

“…Native peoples are implied in the Second Amendment. 

Male settlers had been required in the colonies to serve in militias during their lifetimes for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities, the southern colonies included, and later states’ militias were used as “slave patrols.”

 The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these irregular forces into law: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’”

Full essay is free to read or listen to at drdevonprice.substack.com

[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!

[momxijinping]

And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. [emphasis mine.] Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence[1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

[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