Everything in US history is about the land-who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how i… - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

U.S. leftists do not want to really acknowledge that they live within not only an imperialist state, but also one founded on being a colonizing state. Actually, indigenous land struggles had never stopped in the United States; social activists and leftists had little interest in Indians, and their struggles were simply not publicized, but beginning in the late 1950s they became more frequent and more widespread and began to be noticed, leading up to the Wounded Knee uprising in 1973.

"Colonization," "dispossession," "settler colonialism," "genocide"-these are the terms that drill to the core of US history, to the very source of the country's existence. (Author's Note)

This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is a screen that obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the Indigenous population, and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism for Native Americans.