Welcome to November, Decipher City gals and guys (and all my non-bianaries, too). Our podcast this month, in response to Thanksgiving, is a review of Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s text An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Dunbar-Ortiz is a feminist and historian who was active in the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. This book, published in 2015, shows how a settler-colonial mentality, combined with white supremacy and powered by industrial capitalism, resulted in the systematic removal, death, and cultural suppression of native peoples in the United States. Check out the podcast in the player/link below:
- DC is trying to learn more about indigenous history and contemporary movements for indigenous rights, and we are always looking for new resources. For a super awesome map of the location historical indigenous groups, check out the Native Land map, authored by Victor Sauca (and follow his blog): https://native-land.ca/. For information about indigenous rights campaigns, check out the group founded by Melanie K Yazzie and Nick Estes, The Red Nation, at: https://therednation.org/
- For more information of why and how Thanksgiving is a settler-colonial holiday, check out Malie Arvin’s essay on truthout: https://truthout.org/articles/the-future-is-indigenous-decolonizing-thanksgiving/.
- The header image for this blog post is an aerial of a former uranium mine in Moab, Utah. From the 1940s until the 1980s, millions of tons of uranium were extracted from Navajo lands, often by Navajo people themselves. This is just one of many historical examples of a situation in which indigenous people are forced to bear the environmental risks and costs of industrial progress. For more on this subject, check out the EPA’s page: https://www.epa.gov/navajo-nation-uranium-cleanup