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After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands
A necessary reckoning with America’s troubled history of injustice to Indigenous people
After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds―and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it.
Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation’s founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses.
Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.
After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds―and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it.
Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation’s founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses.
Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.
360 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
November 19, 2022
Written by a white lady but good info
August 21, 2023
One of the things I have noticed in the last ten years or so is the rise in new critical writing about the colonisation of the Americas and complex histories of Indigenous peoples. If we go back fifteen or so years, in the UK at least we were unlikely to find anything other than perhaps Dee Brown’s
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
from the early 1970s, but still many people’s introduction to these histories in the lands that became the USA (it was mine, over 40 years ago). The situation has changed markedly (but still with a long way to go), in part I suspect because of the growing body of literature emerging in the wake of new theories of settler colonialism, but also in the USA in the wake of the growing awareness of Indigenous issues after the profile of the 2016 occupation at Standing Rock and the heightened awareness of racialisation spawned by #BlackLivesMatter and similar campaigns for racial justice.
In the wake of approaches such as Brown’s, the dominant narrative has been one of genocide, quite properly – the USA’s settler colonial mission turned on the extermination of Indigenous Peoples or if that failed cultural genocide (in this, it was similar to other forms of settler colonialism), but this way of presenting the past tended to write out of the narrative the resistance of Indigenous Peoples, focused on the West in the later nineteenth century, and downplayed the survival and survivance of those Peoples. It also tended to ignore the colonisation of Hawai’i and the territories that became Alaska – but they are different stories. There have been many ways of responding to these omissions, such as work by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as well as Indigenous writers such as David Treuer and Indigenous scholar activists such as Nick Estes. Alongside this we have also seen wider recognition of Indigenous campaigns and programmes for justice. There has been a marked shift in the literature.
Margaret Jacobs opens up a further field of enquiry and analysis in this valuable addition, focusing on what has come to be called ‘reconciliation’ (an intensely problematic term). She opens with a case from her current home state of Nebraska, where at a gathering of farmers and First Nations on a local property the group plant traditional varieties of corn, and then at the end of the season gather again to harvest. The Indigenous People present are all members of or affiliated with the Ponca – a group from further north force marched south in the 1870s to Oklahoma, a western trail of tears that saw the death of around 40% of the nation. The place of corn planting was on that trail, and near of stopping point where the infant daughter of one of the Ponca leaders died: she is buried in the local town, and in line with his request at the time her gravesite still tended; there are many, many holes in the myth that everyone in that era supported the genocide and forced removals.
Jacobs focus on the Ponca allows her to paint a picture of complexity – they were a fairly small nation living near the more well-known Lakota/Dakota/Nakota peoples we still often call Sioux. Whereas their northern neighbours resisted colonial incursion and fought to protect their treaties, the Ponca were more accommodationist – and had considerable goodwill in local settler networks. Those networks then gave them profile and access to eastern opinion makers including through speaking tours by Ponca leader Standing Bear and a young church educated Ponca woman Susette La Fesche. Jacobs effectively highlights the ‘pro-Indian’ forces at this time who quickly took the view they knew better than leaders such as these, and used the moral power of these Ponca speakers’ evidence to push for a ‘softer’ civilizational form of cultural genocide including individualisation of land ownership and the horrors that were Indian Boarding Schools.
In contrast, Jacobs points to recent cases where, for instance, farmers who found themselves in political alliances with Indigenous communities over energy projects such as Keystone learned the histories of their lands and set about local forms of reconciliation and atonement – it’s not just corn planting in Nebraska, a block of that farmland has been given back to the Ponca, to be owned by the Nation, making the point that the federal and local State might be reluctant to act, but in many places there is meaningful, if limited, action being taken. She explores the potential for and of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as localised events, drawing on the Canadian experience about Residential Schools and an instance in New England. She also discusses also another Nebraska case where landowners who learned that their land included a major Pawnee burial ground retuned that land to the Pawnee nation – although there had been a century of pillaging of the site by settlers and museums, and there remains considerable resistance to returning both human remains and grave goods.
This, then, is a powerful and complex argument, not only Nebraska focused; Jacobs grew up in Colorado, site of one of the most heinous acts of the ‘Indian Wars’ – the 1864 massacre at Sand Creek killing mainly old people, women, and children of a group promised protection by the military and the territory government. While she explores the events (it is not easy reading), her more important question focuses on the absences in history teaching, Colorado State historical narratives, and the silences that surround that event and those like it. The upshot is a cautiously optimistic analysis of ‘reconciliation’ that recognises both the limits of the local and the value of those personal encounters, while also asserting the importance of those specific acts that both do a form of atonement and engage with the specificities of Indigenous experience and recognising the multiplicities being Indigenous that break the colonialist vision of the ‘Indian’ as a singularity.
Jacobs is a scholar well-grounded in her localities. Her scholarship informs this book in ways that give it credibility but not at the expense of accessibility and readership; even though she (properly) assumes we know little of the instances she discusses, her careful explanation does not become patronising. This is a rich, multi-layered eloquent exploration of the place of local political actions in everyday settings, and gives hope that pressure may be rising in the USA to finally confront its settler colonial form, both in the past and present.
In the wake of approaches such as Brown’s, the dominant narrative has been one of genocide, quite properly – the USA’s settler colonial mission turned on the extermination of Indigenous Peoples or if that failed cultural genocide (in this, it was similar to other forms of settler colonialism), but this way of presenting the past tended to write out of the narrative the resistance of Indigenous Peoples, focused on the West in the later nineteenth century, and downplayed the survival and survivance of those Peoples. It also tended to ignore the colonisation of Hawai’i and the territories that became Alaska – but they are different stories. There have been many ways of responding to these omissions, such as work by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as well as Indigenous writers such as David Treuer and Indigenous scholar activists such as Nick Estes. Alongside this we have also seen wider recognition of Indigenous campaigns and programmes for justice. There has been a marked shift in the literature.
Margaret Jacobs opens up a further field of enquiry and analysis in this valuable addition, focusing on what has come to be called ‘reconciliation’ (an intensely problematic term). She opens with a case from her current home state of Nebraska, where at a gathering of farmers and First Nations on a local property the group plant traditional varieties of corn, and then at the end of the season gather again to harvest. The Indigenous People present are all members of or affiliated with the Ponca – a group from further north force marched south in the 1870s to Oklahoma, a western trail of tears that saw the death of around 40% of the nation. The place of corn planting was on that trail, and near of stopping point where the infant daughter of one of the Ponca leaders died: she is buried in the local town, and in line with his request at the time her gravesite still tended; there are many, many holes in the myth that everyone in that era supported the genocide and forced removals.
Jacobs focus on the Ponca allows her to paint a picture of complexity – they were a fairly small nation living near the more well-known Lakota/Dakota/Nakota peoples we still often call Sioux. Whereas their northern neighbours resisted colonial incursion and fought to protect their treaties, the Ponca were more accommodationist – and had considerable goodwill in local settler networks. Those networks then gave them profile and access to eastern opinion makers including through speaking tours by Ponca leader Standing Bear and a young church educated Ponca woman Susette La Fesche. Jacobs effectively highlights the ‘pro-Indian’ forces at this time who quickly took the view they knew better than leaders such as these, and used the moral power of these Ponca speakers’ evidence to push for a ‘softer’ civilizational form of cultural genocide including individualisation of land ownership and the horrors that were Indian Boarding Schools.
In contrast, Jacobs points to recent cases where, for instance, farmers who found themselves in political alliances with Indigenous communities over energy projects such as Keystone learned the histories of their lands and set about local forms of reconciliation and atonement – it’s not just corn planting in Nebraska, a block of that farmland has been given back to the Ponca, to be owned by the Nation, making the point that the federal and local State might be reluctant to act, but in many places there is meaningful, if limited, action being taken. She explores the potential for and of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as localised events, drawing on the Canadian experience about Residential Schools and an instance in New England. She also discusses also another Nebraska case where landowners who learned that their land included a major Pawnee burial ground retuned that land to the Pawnee nation – although there had been a century of pillaging of the site by settlers and museums, and there remains considerable resistance to returning both human remains and grave goods.
This, then, is a powerful and complex argument, not only Nebraska focused; Jacobs grew up in Colorado, site of one of the most heinous acts of the ‘Indian Wars’ – the 1864 massacre at Sand Creek killing mainly old people, women, and children of a group promised protection by the military and the territory government. While she explores the events (it is not easy reading), her more important question focuses on the absences in history teaching, Colorado State historical narratives, and the silences that surround that event and those like it. The upshot is a cautiously optimistic analysis of ‘reconciliation’ that recognises both the limits of the local and the value of those personal encounters, while also asserting the importance of those specific acts that both do a form of atonement and engage with the specificities of Indigenous experience and recognising the multiplicities being Indigenous that break the colonialist vision of the ‘Indian’ as a singularity.
Jacobs is a scholar well-grounded in her localities. Her scholarship informs this book in ways that give it credibility but not at the expense of accessibility and readership; even though she (properly) assumes we know little of the instances she discusses, her careful explanation does not become patronising. This is a rich, multi-layered eloquent exploration of the place of local political actions in everyday settings, and gives hope that pressure may be rising in the USA to finally confront its settler colonial form, both in the past and present.
January 23, 2022
What would it mean if we no longer denied past abuses of Indigenous people? What if each of us were to examine what an acknowledgement of the truth would obligate us to do? Would it provide a foundation for substantive redress?
This is one of the best, most important books I've read, examining both the history of settler colonialism and reconciliation efforts in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book suggests we can move away from "organized forgetting" to an understanding of our interconnectedness. The author suggests reconciliation doesn't just mean wallowing in guilt and shame, doesn't just constitute a settling of old scores. Instead, it has potential to produce respectful relationships, support for self-determination, and movement away from mere tolerance to awareness and acceptance of gifts that are reciprocally shared.
The book digs into what it means to have one's history obscured, one's identify erased and defined by conquest, violence, dehumanization, dispossession, displacement, forced exile, confinement, eradication, elimination, and reduction to dependency, illness and starvation. What it means to face a false choice of equal treatment under U.S. law only if one is willing to renounce one's heritage, status and nation.
An enlightening element of the book is the little understood history of the early settler allies (led by white Christian and Quaker women) who actively advocated for self-determination for Indian people and honoring treaty obligations by the government. But how quickly the Friends of Indians movement lost touch with what Indians wanted and defaulted to believing they knew best, resulting in a profoundly squandered moment of opportunity for redress and restitution. As reformers looked to solve the "Indian problem" based on their own analysis and not on input from Indian people, the pressure to return lost lands and uphold treaties gave way to compensatory social programs, and substituting allotment, assimilation and forced removal, and "rehabilitation" as solutions. This perverted kind of reconciliation required no sacrifice from settlers while enabling them to claim they were saving, rescuing or doing something of worth for Indian people. What was billed as a win/win to enable Indian people to become self-supporting and assimilated into a capitalist economy instead led to deeper impoverishment, suffering, abuse, human rights violations and inter-generational trauma. This fostered wide-held perceptions of Indian people as mired in inherent deficiencies and needing to prove they were worthy of equality through assimilation. Perpetuation of Indians and settlers as distant from one another serves to further support colonialism and white supremacy.
The book provides a thoughtful examination of the insufficiencies and failures, and successes, of reconciliation efforts to date in Canada, Australia and the U.S. Here in the U.S., while a formal reckoning at a national level seems distant at best, the book highlights a groundswell of examples of not waiting for the federal government to act. Individual grassroots actions where Indian people are the experts on what reconciliation and healing mean are achieving important incremental impacts. Many believe these localized actions aimed at specific injustices can do more good than a grant sweeping gesture.
READ THIS BOOK!
This is one of the best, most important books I've read, examining both the history of settler colonialism and reconciliation efforts in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book suggests we can move away from "organized forgetting" to an understanding of our interconnectedness. The author suggests reconciliation doesn't just mean wallowing in guilt and shame, doesn't just constitute a settling of old scores. Instead, it has potential to produce respectful relationships, support for self-determination, and movement away from mere tolerance to awareness and acceptance of gifts that are reciprocally shared.
The book digs into what it means to have one's history obscured, one's identify erased and defined by conquest, violence, dehumanization, dispossession, displacement, forced exile, confinement, eradication, elimination, and reduction to dependency, illness and starvation. What it means to face a false choice of equal treatment under U.S. law only if one is willing to renounce one's heritage, status and nation.
An enlightening element of the book is the little understood history of the early settler allies (led by white Christian and Quaker women) who actively advocated for self-determination for Indian people and honoring treaty obligations by the government. But how quickly the Friends of Indians movement lost touch with what Indians wanted and defaulted to believing they knew best, resulting in a profoundly squandered moment of opportunity for redress and restitution. As reformers looked to solve the "Indian problem" based on their own analysis and not on input from Indian people, the pressure to return lost lands and uphold treaties gave way to compensatory social programs, and substituting allotment, assimilation and forced removal, and "rehabilitation" as solutions. This perverted kind of reconciliation required no sacrifice from settlers while enabling them to claim they were saving, rescuing or doing something of worth for Indian people. What was billed as a win/win to enable Indian people to become self-supporting and assimilated into a capitalist economy instead led to deeper impoverishment, suffering, abuse, human rights violations and inter-generational trauma. This fostered wide-held perceptions of Indian people as mired in inherent deficiencies and needing to prove they were worthy of equality through assimilation. Perpetuation of Indians and settlers as distant from one another serves to further support colonialism and white supremacy.
The book provides a thoughtful examination of the insufficiencies and failures, and successes, of reconciliation efforts to date in Canada, Australia and the U.S. Here in the U.S., while a formal reckoning at a national level seems distant at best, the book highlights a groundswell of examples of not waiting for the federal government to act. Individual grassroots actions where Indian people are the experts on what reconciliation and healing mean are achieving important incremental impacts. Many believe these localized actions aimed at specific injustices can do more good than a grant sweeping gesture.
READ THIS BOOK!
Read
February 7, 2023I’ve decided to give no official rating, but I would highly recommend this book for other settlers in the US. I appreciated that it was a book by a settler addressing other settlers to think about reconciliation in the United States. While I understand the focus on a security region and tribe in the first section, I do wish there had been more discussion of the different types of oppression that indigenous peoples faced in different regions of the US (all ultimately the same, but from different sources in different ways). Still, I really liked the discussion of how other countries have been successful in parts of their efforts to reconcile but also that no place has done it perfectly. Overall, I would highly highly recommend this book for others who are interested in what efforts could be made to move reconciliation forward in America.
November 29, 2022
An excellent account of relations between white settlers and Native Americans in Nebraska and a couple other nearby states. Jacobs includes a lot of history we did not learn in school and develops other incidents that we may have learned about superficially. She does not mince words when recounting various atrocities. She then moves on to boarding schools, the handling of various Native American artifacts, and other forms of cultural genocide. The book concludes with positive transactions that are occurring now and hope for the future.
February 24, 2022
After One Hundred Winters is a compelling book focused on the long abusive treatment dealt indigenous people in the U.S. along with Australia, Canada and New Zealand and the efforts toward reconciliation. Actions taken by these countries to forcibly displace indigenous people for settler expansion was just the first of the heinous crimes against these people. The author Margaret Jacobs states that the winning of the west was in reality mass murder, committed in order to appropriate the land. Even some military leaders known to be Christian and outspoken champions of women’s and black rights became American Indian killers. Margaret Jacobs relates the plight of the massacre and removal of the Poncas tribe from Nebraska in the 1870s. The story of a Poncas chief and a young Omaha woman interpreter who toured the East speaking about the travesty done to the tribes led to limited efforts to address the “Indian problem”. One attempted solution was to compensate tribes with allotments (giving each Indian 40 to 160 acres of land for a set period of time, 25 years) only led to later revoking of the land.
The second major abuse was the 100 years effort to forcibly remove children from their families for enrollment in more than 370 boarding schools scattered across the country. Upwards of 83% of American Indian children were removed from their families in a policy that only ended around 1970. Although the school attempt to educate and integrate the children in American culture, abuse and diseases were rampant and many schools had mass graves adjacent to the school where children were buried without marks. Similar efforts to remove indigenous children from families occurred in Canada and Australia but these countries finally issued an official apology for this removal in 2008, unlike the U.S. A bill is pending but stalled in the U.S. Congress currently to address these past injustices on boarding school policies.
The book ends with an excellent discussion of local meaningful efforts on reconciliation. This is an outstanding book on an aspect of our history that needs to be addressed.
The second major abuse was the 100 years effort to forcibly remove children from their families for enrollment in more than 370 boarding schools scattered across the country. Upwards of 83% of American Indian children were removed from their families in a policy that only ended around 1970. Although the school attempt to educate and integrate the children in American culture, abuse and diseases were rampant and many schools had mass graves adjacent to the school where children were buried without marks. Similar efforts to remove indigenous children from families occurred in Canada and Australia but these countries finally issued an official apology for this removal in 2008, unlike the U.S. A bill is pending but stalled in the U.S. Congress currently to address these past injustices on boarding school policies.
The book ends with an excellent discussion of local meaningful efforts on reconciliation. This is an outstanding book on an aspect of our history that needs to be addressed.
January 19, 2022
I would give this book a B+ if I were still a history teacher (which I once was). The author is particularly strong when she sticks to stories from her home state of Nebraska: her tales of the Poncas and their brave fight against colonization in the 19th century as well as of the Pawnees and their modern-day efforts to stop and reverse the horrific practice of robbing Indian graves to use what is found there in historical collections are truly insightful and quite moving. Other chapters seem to rehash content covered in other books and are not as moving. (I will admit my bias here in that I’ve read many such books: to someone new to this history, those chapters may land differently.) I think this is a good read for anyone but especially for those who are newer to the topic.
July 29, 2023
A well researched and well written book telling the history of Indigenous Peoples, mostly in the US, but also touching on events in Canada and Australia and how “settlers” abused, disrespected, massacred, desecrated graves and sacred sites, broke treaties and stole lands from them. She also referenced some of what is going on in China with the Uyghurs to how other countries and settlers have treated their Indigenous Peoples. Canada and Australia have made some apologies and reconciliation efforts, which have been lacking in the US. Ms. Jacobs tells of various massacres that have happened in which most US historians have changed the narrative, abuses at the “boarding schools” which many young Indigenous children were taken, how treaties were broken, rewritten, broken again and again, how the Indigenous Peoples are trying to heal and how some individual attempts at reconciliation are occurring. A phenomenal book to learn about what really happened in the “building” of America.
February 21, 2022
Absolutely phenomenal discussion of the history of reparations for Indigenous peoples all over the world, modern efforts, and why the United States lags so far behind, but also steps that ARE being taken and why they're meaningful. Jacobs includes both history and contemporary discussion, pointing out where settlers have gone wrong but also where things have gone right -- and how to continue to move them in a forward direction. This is very accessible and should be required reading for older history students (and those of us who are perpetual students). LAND BACK!
June 18, 2022
Not an easy read. The events the author describes make for hard reading, and there is no clear path forward for making things right. Still, the author lays out some paths that could be explored for today's mainstream culture Americans as they seek to redress the wrongs of the past against Indigenous Peoples, Hispanics, Asians and Blacks.
June 10, 2024
This book provides a lot of information and details about the history of the land I live on that I was not taught in school but wish I had been. I greatly appreciate the research that went into it, as well as the last section's focus on reconciliation efforts. Despite the horrors of the past, this book offers hope and optimism for a better future through communication and community.
May 4, 2022
A book that doesn’t sugar coat the systemic genocide of natives while also trying to chart a path of reckoning and reconciliation between the modern American and the modern Native American. Not a light read, but a necessary one.
February 12, 2022
A powerful presentation of some of the history of American injustice towards indigenous people and thoughts for ways to begin a process of justice. A good deal of it is set here in Nebraska as well.
did-not-finish
January 24, 2023DNF’d - it’s written by a white woman.
September 26, 2023
Definitely a must read for every single person living in America
March 27, 2024
An excellent and necessary read for all my fellow settlers, modeling how we can advocate for structural reconciliation while also pursuing the same on a personal level.
April 27, 2024
read for Native American history
August 9, 2025
Very good look at American treatment of indigenous natives.
January 22, 2024
Jacobs merits high praise for having successfully integrated two approaches to history telling in After One Hundred Winters.
First, her scholarship skills are evidenced by frequent references in the text to a wide array of primary and secondary sources. There are 33 pages of endnotes and 16 pages of recommendations for Further Reading. The latter is organized into various subtopics which a reader might want to pursue. There is also a 28 page index to facilitate more careful follow up after one has completed reading the book.
Second, the author’s narrative talents are apparent in the direct, often conversational prose which she employs. By starting many of the chapters with a personal story which exemplifies a larger, more general point she subsequently makes she enhances the reader’s engagement. On a few occasions she makes her argument by directly asking the reader a rhetorical question. Timely quotations from the people she interacts with and/or the sources she relies on also make After interesting.
Readers who know little about Native American history will learn a great deal from her argument which is presented carefully and thoroughly: settler colonialism based on white supremacist notions of superiority and implemented by superior military force in the late 18th through the 19th centuries led to genocide and the dispossession and displacement of Native Americans from their lands. Efforts at reconciliation in the late 19th and 20th centuries were undermined by ongoing white supremacy and greed for land. She opines that some progress has been made in the 21st century but that it has been limited.
Readers like myself who are already familiar with these processes and some of the people Jacobs discusses will still learn a more general framework in which to place their knowledge. I found the comparisons with reconciliation attempted in Canada and Australia in this century to be instructive. The examples she gives of this process in the USA in recent years in the final chapters of the book are both informative and hopeful.
An interview with Jacobs shortly after the publication of After can be found here: https://dailyyonder.com/qa-margaret-j...
First, her scholarship skills are evidenced by frequent references in the text to a wide array of primary and secondary sources. There are 33 pages of endnotes and 16 pages of recommendations for Further Reading. The latter is organized into various subtopics which a reader might want to pursue. There is also a 28 page index to facilitate more careful follow up after one has completed reading the book.
Second, the author’s narrative talents are apparent in the direct, often conversational prose which she employs. By starting many of the chapters with a personal story which exemplifies a larger, more general point she subsequently makes she enhances the reader’s engagement. On a few occasions she makes her argument by directly asking the reader a rhetorical question. Timely quotations from the people she interacts with and/or the sources she relies on also make After interesting.
Readers who know little about Native American history will learn a great deal from her argument which is presented carefully and thoroughly: settler colonialism based on white supremacist notions of superiority and implemented by superior military force in the late 18th through the 19th centuries led to genocide and the dispossession and displacement of Native Americans from their lands. Efforts at reconciliation in the late 19th and 20th centuries were undermined by ongoing white supremacy and greed for land. She opines that some progress has been made in the 21st century but that it has been limited.
Readers like myself who are already familiar with these processes and some of the people Jacobs discusses will still learn a more general framework in which to place their knowledge. I found the comparisons with reconciliation attempted in Canada and Australia in this century to be instructive. The examples she gives of this process in the USA in recent years in the final chapters of the book are both informative and hopeful.
An interview with Jacobs shortly after the publication of After can be found here: https://dailyyonder.com/qa-margaret-j...
December 31, 2022
A very strong book describing both the history of the areas where the author lives and ongoing reconciliation projects. Definitely an academic history, but deeply interesting.
December 27, 2022
Really enjoyed her analysis of settler colonialism and how settler culture today can begin to make an impact. Detailed history of the injustices towards not only indigenous peoples in the US as well as Canada and Australia.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews