The military established a pattern during and after the Vietnam War of forcibly removing indigenous peoples from sites deemed strategic for the place… - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of US Americans.

I am one of the 5 to 10 percent of the adult U.S. population of the 1960s who, by the end of that decade, had come to consider herself a lifelong revolutionary, part of a global revolution against greed, war, patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Many of us were guided by a wide spectrum of anti- capitalist, anti-imperialist theorists, among them Amilcar Cabral, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Herbert Marcuse, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Marx and Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Rosa Luxemburg, Lucy Parsons, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. (Prologue)

I was also becoming more and more troubled by male chauvinism in the movement… Returning to the United States and organizing in the Boston area, I got angrier and angrier at men in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the anti-draft movement, the motto of which was, “Girls say yes to boys who say no.” I hadn’t felt oppressed so much directly, but of course I was, although I had been treated as a kind of “honorary” man. Once I started taking a feminist stand I got condemned. It was pretty hard to take at the time. And male chauvinism had terrible consequences for the women’s movement and for the development of the left, because it took some of the strongest feminists out of the Left and made the Left unwelcoming to newly politicized young women.