A People’s History, Retold in Graphics

Hank Kennedy

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States:
A Graphic Interpretation
Adapted by Paul Peart-Smith, edited by Paul Buhle
Beacon Press, 2024, $22.95 cloth.

ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ’S AN Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States was first released in 2015 as part of Beacon Press’s Revisioning History series. Other books in the series include the histories of queer and disabled people.

From the beginning, Dunbar-Ortiz’s book met with broad approval from the political left. Prominent radicals like Bill Ayers and Robin D. G. Kelley praised it.

At Counterpunch the late Louis Proyect stated the title “will be of great value to those first learning about the Indigenous perspective,” and that the publisher should “be commended for initiating the Revisioning Series and especially for publishing this stirring counter-history for a country that Karl Marx must have been envisioning when he wrote that ‘capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’”

Not everyone was so appreciative. An anonymous reviewer for Kirkus took umbrage with Ortiz’s use of “ideological” language. They thought it unfair for her to write that “indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a ‘colonialist settler-state’ the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today.”

Doubtless any member of Moms for Liberty or any other group looking to whitewash history would have similarly negative reactions. The celluloid Indian-killer John Wayne also could fit in that category considering he said: “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival.”

Surprisingly, the reviewer did not also take issue with Dunbar-Ortiz’s description of the policies of Andrew Jackson as auguring a “final solution” for the Indigenous people. Heaven help us if writers are no longer expected to call things what they are! She uses similar language because the situations are similar.

The Comics Adaptation

Paul Peart-Smith, a comics artist with a background at U.K. comics mainstay 2000 AD, has adapted An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States to comics form, with the help of editor Paul Buhle, himself no stranger to nonfiction comics.

Buhle and Peart-Smith previously collaborated on last year’s comic adaptation of Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, published by Rutgers University Press. The same craft and attention that went into that volume can be found here.

The book begins in media res at the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation when the American Indian Movement occupied the site of an 1890 massacre of 120 Lakota by U.S. Cavalry. The Occupation meant to draw attention to the repeated violations of treaties between the U.S. government and Native tribes.

Beginning the story at this point has important symbolic value, as Peart-Smith knows. The 1973 Occupation birthed a new era of indigenous activism and opened a space for historians and scholars to think more critically about the conquest of the Americas.

Dunbar-Ortiz appears throughout as our guide, reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s similar appearances in the 2008 comic A Peoples’ History of the American Empire, illustrated by Mike Konopacki, also edited by Buhle. Other historians appear as talking heads.

 The effect is something like an informative documentary, but given the comics form, readers can pore over the images in a way impossible with film.

Returning to the outraged Kirkus reviewer, a commonality that gives the present volume urgency is the similarity between the arguments made in favor of European colonization and those of Zionist ideologues, as in Joan Peters’ notorious academic fraud From Time Immemorial, which posited there was no such thing as a Palestinian people and that Zionists had entered an empty land to “make the desert bloom.”

Peart-Smith makes the connection explicit in a panel about settler colonialism that shows a Palestinian flag on top of an Israeli tank.

Nor were the Americas a “land without a people,” as Ortiz and Peart-Smith aptly demonstrate. “Contrary to the American origin myth,” they write, “European explorers and invaders developed an inhabited land.”

Prior to colonization, Native tribal nations had their own governments, some of which had progressive elements.

In some tribes “certain female lineages controlled the choice of male representatives for their clans in their governing councils.” Nationally, U.S. women wouldn’t get the right to vote until 1920.

Historical Images and Symbolic Monsters

Peart-Smith’s artwork does excellent work at reproducing historical images. At one point, he shows readers the logo of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, depicting a native man with a “harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow.” The text says “Come over and help us,” an indication of the so-called civilizing mission that white Europeans thought they were undertaking.

A connection is drawn to the imperial conquests of Cuba and the Philippines centuries later. President McKinley (Trump’s hero) argued that the occupation of the Philippines (Cost: Over 200,000 dead Filipinos) was necessary in order to “uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

Peart-Smith’s experience with 2000 AD aids him in drawing symbolic monsters that exemplify some of the book’s themes. He draws a Scots-Irish frontiersman as a gigantic grotesque, astride a Native village. Later on, Uncle Sam is shown as a killer cyborg, resisted by Native protestors.

Terror was a valuable weapon in the conquest. Scalping, first employed in the British conquest of Ireland, was a key part of these terror attacks.

Taking scalps was not just a way to terrify one’s opponents, it was also needed to claim the bounties of those killed. No scalp, no bounty. Scalping, then, was not something inherent in so-called “savages,” rather it was something introduced by their oppressors.

Terror tactics also came in the form of mercenaries used when the military wanted plausible deniability. The goals and methods were the same; the  difference was the lack of uniforms.

The effect is something similar to that engendered by the death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia. Not coincidentally, those death squads were also used primarily against poor peasants of Native descent.

The Killer Terrorists

The authors write that the “Father of Our Country,” George Washington, “resigned himself to the necessity of using what were essentially vicious killers to terrorize the region, annexing land that could be sold to settlers.” There were some things even the U.S. Army would balk at.

One of those vicious killers was John Sevier. Sevier launched an unprovoked attack on the Chickamauga in western North Carolina. He then used scorched earth tactics and employed starvation as a weapon.

This was no obstacle to Sevier serving as governor of Tennessee. His statue, still on display in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. capitol, appears in this book. Arms crossed, he looks smug, if it’s possible for a statue to do so.

The statue’s prominence is indicative of the kind of men elevated as heroes worthy of emulation in the United States. Unfortunately it wasn’t removed during the taking down of statues honoring prominent racists.

The comparisons that can be made to modern politics don’t stop there. In 1754 a leader of the Catawba asked authorities in North Carolina to stop selling liquor to the Indigenous people:

“You sell it to our young men many times…I heartily wish you would do something to prevent your people from daring to sell or give them any of that strong drink…”

Of course, the colonists had no intention of doing so. Alcohol sales meant profits, and if it weakened the Native people, so much the better. Peart-Smith draws Catawba King Hagler (1700-1763) as a proud man, even though he had been forced to beg.

The use of alcohol as a weapon against the Native people reminds one of the allegations made by writers Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Alfred McCoy and others of CIA complicity in drug trafficking in order to finance covert wars. Addiction to hard drugs, like alcoholism, was an acceptable loss, especially when their victims could be dismissed as members of a despised minority.

As another Indigenous Peoples’ Day passes by, it’s important that radicals remember that we live in a “state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.”

Not only is it important for us to remember; this is a history that must be taught, especially at a time when the Ron DeSantises of the world are trying to teach children such tranvesties as a beneficial side of the African slave trade.

Despite what countless films, novels, textbooks and even comics would tell you, the “winning of the west” was no heroic affair. Peart-Smith has done a great job of adapting Dunbar-Ortiz’s peoples history in an accessible way. It’s educational and disturbing, but never boring.

The comic ends with words from Acoma poet Simon Ortiz: “Eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of the nation will mend after the revolution.” I hope he is right.

March-April 2025, ATC 235