An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States

Basis of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck

Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. The basis of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, directed by Raoul Peck, and a New York Times Bestseller, this classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden. Writing from the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants, she centers Indigenous voices over the course of 4 centuries, tracing their perseverance against policies intended to obliterate them.

Today in the United States, there are more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly 3 million people, descendants of the 15 million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. With a new foreword from Raoul Peck and a new introduction from Dunbar Ortiz, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

Big Concept Myths
That America’s founding was a revolution against colonial powers in pursuit of freedom from tyranny
That Native people were passive, didn’t resist and no longer exist
That the US is a “nation of immigrants” as opposed to having a racist settler colonial history

About the Series

Beacon Press’s ReVisioning History series consists of accessibly written books by notable scholars that reconstruct and reinterpret US history from diverse perspectives.