Please respond to a fellow student post at least (100 words)
Rubric:
An A response will go beyond stating agreement or disagreement with the author’s post and will point to a specific piece of evidence from the reading that either supports or challenges the author’s response.
A B response will go beyond agreement or disagreement with the author’s response but will only discuss the reading in a general manner, lacking specifics and or failing to meet the word count.
A C response will rest on personal opinion rather than specifics drawn from the text or will fail to meet the word count.
Caleb Rust
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz quickly introduces her reader to the question “How might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society†(Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, p. 2). She wants us to think about that question as we process the content in her narrative. She continues her introduction by explaining colonialism and how the act was a genocide and a theft. She describes how the European settlers used an unconscious idea such as manifest destiny to support the idea that the land was free to all and this land is our destiny. She then continues on to explain how in our colonial version of history, we write it as if we actually bargained for the land in some cases when in fact it was actually just theft. There are multiple times throughout the introduction that Dunbar-Ortiz mentions genocide and then goes on to define genocide. She wants us to make the connection between genocide and how the Native Americans were treated during US history while the US was trying to expand across North America. One part that I found interesting so far was that genocide was not created as a term until UN Convention did so in 1948. The UN convention lists genocide as “any of five acts is considered genocide if ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group†(Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, p. 8). With all of this on our mind from just the introduction, she hopes that we will consider that maybe the narrative we have been taught about our history might not be completely accurate.
