Banned Book Club "An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United Sates"

Bryn Durgin leads the Banned Book Club. This month’s selection is “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.”

In this monthly book club dedicated to reading and protecting the most important and threatened books for our generation, November’s pick is An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The first history of the United States was told from the perspective of indigenous peoples. The acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reframes our history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative for centuries. Recipient of the American Book Award and a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
While we’ll meet in person at our new store location at 117 S. Pineapple Ave, you can choose to join via Zoom instead. The only cost: The price of the book ($16), which includes your copy of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States to be picked up any time before our meeting.
About An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States :
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen 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. Dunbar-Ortiz reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted the expansion of the U.S. empire.
With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”
About Book Bans:
Book bans in public schools have recurred throughout American history, and remain an issue of concern to us at Bookstore1Sarasota. Over the past year, the scope of such censorship has expanded rapidly. In response, PEN America has collated an Index of School Book Bans, offering a snapshot of the trend. The index documents decisions to ban books in school libraries and classrooms in the U.S. from July 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022. Check it out and join us in our efforts to protect free expression and students’ first amendment rights. You can view the index here: https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/.
………………………………………………………………..
All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to take your place. Please email bryn@sarasotabooks.com ASAP and hopefully, we’ll see you next time.
Click here to go to the Bookstore1Sarasota website: https://www.sarasotabooks.com/.