Discusses events that took place before and after Native American activism began. Includes a chronology from 1887 to 1988.

What do you know about the American Indian rights movement? You may have heard about modern pipeline protests, but this resistance has its roots in the early years of the United States, when the government began stripping American Indians of their rights and forcing them off their lands onto reservations. What are the main concerns of the American Indian rights movement today? What challenges have activists faced throughout history? Find out about how important players like Sacheen Littlefeather and Russell Means paved the way for current activists and discover how activists are still fighting for better living conditions and environmental justice today.

A powerful, insider's history of the first decade of the American Indian Movement.

While tribal-state relationships have historically been characterized as tense, most southern tribesparticularly non-federally recognized onesfound that Indian affairs commissions offered them a unique position in which to negotiate power. Although individual tribal leaders experienced isolated victories and generated some support through the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of the intertribal state commissions in the 1970s and 1980s elevated the movement to a more prominent political level. Through the formalization of tribal-state relationships, Indian communities forged strong networks with local, state, and national agencies while advocating for cultural preservation and revitalization, economic development, and the implementation of community services.

American Indians have faced injustice from the moment Europeans came to the Americas to claim land and resources. This volume traces the history of injustice against American Indians, from losing their land, to moving to reservations, to having their culture stolen from them. Readers will learn how the movement for rights began, and the challenges and successes activists faced. Primary sources and photographs from the movement will bring readers back in time to fully grasp the importance of events. The book concludes by challenging readers to think about how they could help advance American Indian rights today.

New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples 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. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US 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.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

Historian Frederick E. Hoxie presents the story of two hundred years of Native American political activism. Highlighting the activists -- some famous and some unknown beyond their own communities -- who have sought to bridge the distance between indigenous cultures and the U.S. republic through legal and political campaigns, Hoxie weaves a narrative connecting the individual to the tribe, the tribe to the nation, and the nation to broader historical processes and progressive movements.