Settler Colonialism and the Founding of the United States with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The United States was founded as a settler-colonial state embedded in a Constitution that created framework for the fiscal-military state, that is, a state made for war. In the following one hundred years, the US made war on Native nations, ethnically cleansing swaths of territory and installing white settlers with free or cheap appropriated land, including warring against and annexing half of Mexico, until it reached its current geographical reach. Then, with this genocidal military establishment proceeded to annex countries of the Pacific and the Caribbean, creating the most powerful and deadly military in human history, dominating the world.
Join author and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for a conversation on the stories we tell that obscure and distort this important history.
About Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian, writer and professor emeritus in Ethnic Studies at California State University East Bay, and longtime social justice activist. She is author and editor of fifteen books, including a literary memoir trilogy: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie; Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975; and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War. Among historical works is Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment; and Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and A History of Exclusion and Erasure.