By Christian Coleman

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s OG text has had more than one life. Published in 2014, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is the third installment of Beacon’s ReVisioning History series, created by Beacon Press director Gayatri Patnaik. Now, a decade later, there is more than one way to read and radically reframe four hundred years of US history through the lens of Native American struggle and resistance. The book has even been adapted to two other genres, too!

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Dunbar-Ortiz credits fellow heavyweight activist and writer Howard Zinn as the inspiration for her book. She teased him about the disappearance of Native Americans after 1890 and their reappearance decades later during the Red Power movement in his A People’s History of the United States. Did they hibernate and come out later in the twentieth century? He told her she needed to write that history because he did not know how and would like to know what happened. An Indigenous Peoples’ History won the 2015 American Book Award and the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Six years later, it took its long-overdue place on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Sometimes it takes a while for the work of someone like Dunbar-Ortiz to get the widespread recognition and praise it deserves.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People

Educators already knew there was something special about Dunbar-Ortiz’s book. They saw how crucial it was in filling a serious gap in the US history curriculum. Their enthusiasm tipped us off to give it the YA treatment. When it came out in 2019, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young Readers racked up a triple score of starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the School Library Journal. It even caught the attention of the anti-woke bandwagon and was banned in Texas. You know you’re doing something right when your truth-telling is seen as a threat to the mythologized status quo. Although written for young adults, it pairs well with the original for those who would like maps and diagrams to visualize Indigenous history. Adapted by educators Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, this edition comes with several guides available to download for free from Beacon’s website.

• Teachers’ Guide
• Lesson Plan for Indigenous Peoples’ Day
• Lesson Plan for Thanksgiving
• Lesson Plan for the 400th Anniversary of the Mayflower

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: 10th-Anniversary Edition

Two years before the tenth-anniversary edition was published, filmmaker Raoul Peck’s docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes aired on HBO. It references An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States as source material along with another Beacon book, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Naturally, Peck had to write a foreword for the tenth-anniversary edition. He’s the filmmaker Dunbar-Ortiz admires most in the world. She also wrote a new introduction reflecting on the transition from the Obama years to the Trump years, which will bear much more relevance as we brace for another four years of the white supremacist in chief.

Yes, this is the half mentioned in this blog post’s title. For you audiophiles out there, the tenth-anniversary edition came out with an audiobook narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett. He narrated the audiobook of another installment in our ReVisioning History series, Kyle T. Mays’s An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation

Riding on the running streak of our visual adaptations of historian Marcus Rediker’s books, we felt the need to scratch the graphic-novel itch for Dunbar-Ortiz’s book. Nonfiction graphic novel editor Paul Buhle, who worked on Rediker’s graphic novels, approached British comics artist Paul Peart-Smith about it. Peart-Smith had already established his cred in video games, animation, kids’ history with the Horrible Histories series in the UK, and his acclaimed graphic adaption of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. In his joint New Books Network interview with Dunbar-Ortiz, Peart-Smith talked about which readers he had in mind and one of the main challenges of the adaptation:

“I think anyone fourteen and upwards can get something from this book. . . . I tried to avoid, of course, it turning into a complete horror story and over-raking the violence. Not only because of the sensitivities involved, but also because I didn’t want to sensationalize any of that. The thing with comic books is that they have a long history of sensationalizing violence, and it’s part of the entertainment value. But this isn’t that kind of book. It was a balancing act, but I hope that I pulled it off.” 

He more than pulled it off. Condensing hundreds of pages into stunning full-color artwork was no small feat. And Dunbar-Ortiz, who is depicted as the main narrator throughout the panels, loves how it turned out. So do we!

About the Author 

Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.