The best book I read this month was a powerful work of nonfiction: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say this was a hard read. Hard not because of the writing style but because of the content. This is not the history that’s presented in school books, except in very token and superficial ways.

The book is relatively short (fewer than 300 pages of narrative text) and well documented. It recounts the mistreatment and murder of Native Americans and Native American efforts to fight back from the founding of the first English colonies to the 20th century.

There’s a tone of anger in Dunbar-Ortiz’s work, which is well-justified given the events she recounts. It was difficult to read the details of the atrocities that white men committed, whether in the name of England, or the United States, or Manifest Destiny, or just plain old white supremacy.

The book does assume that the reader has a working understanding of the major events in US History. For example, it doesn’t explain much about the founding of the colonies of Jamestown or Plymouth. It focuses instead on how the founding and settling of these colonies led to the displacement of and violence against the Native Americans on whose land these colonies were established. There is no fairy tale of Pocahontas here, nor is there a feel good story about Squanto and the first Thanksgiving.

Instead, the recurring themes of white entitlement and the dehumanization of Native Americans are hammered again and again and again. Because white America was relentless in its quest for American Indian land and blood. In many ways, it still is.

This was not a happy read but I believe it is a necessary one, if we are ever going to achieve any kind of social justice, if we have any hope of creating an equitable society.