Stephyn Quirke: Could you describe your background in the indigenous rights movement, and how that has informed your academic research?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: I was an anti-war, civil rights and women’s liberation activist during the 1960s while a graduate student at UCLA. It was actually my dissertation research that led me to involvement in the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974. I was recruited at that time to serve as an expert witness in a federal hearing on the 1868 Treaty, which is what the Wounded Knee uprising had been about. That involvement brought me to focus on oral history as the bedrock of my academic research and writing.

S.Q.: You talk a lot in your book about the importance of naming colonialism and genocide, which is not something everyone is accustomed to doing in U.S. history. Could you tell readers why we need these terms to understand U.S. history?

R.D-O.: These are technical terms of international human rights law that were codified in the post-World War II period in the response to the massive people’s liberation movements in Asia, Africa, the Pacific and Caribbean. They delineate precisely what native peoples in North America have experienced under United States colonization.

S.Q.: I recently learned about the history of the Black Hills in South Dakota, a natural formation sacred to the Lakota, and the compensation arrangement you described in your book after it was blasted with dynamite and renamed Mount Rushmore. Could you give readers a brief sketch of this story, and what it says about the kind of justice we need for indigenous peoples?

R.D-O.: As the period of decolonization began, and with the founding of the United Nations, the United States government responded to indigenous nations’ demands for land restitution or self-determination by establishing the Court of Indian Land Claims, but with the proviso that no land would be returned, or monetary compensation for Indigenous lands confiscated without consent by treaties or agreements. The Lakota Sioux did not file for a claim because they did not want financial compensation, rather the return of the Black Hills. Militant actions over two decades, culminating in the Wounded Knee siege of 1973, and the subsequent founding of the International Indian Treaty Council to take the 1868 treaty to the United Nations, led to the 1980 Supreme Court decision, which acknowledged that the United States had taken the Black Hills illegally, but ordered only monetary compensation, which the Sioux refused. The U.S. established a trust fund with the funds, which have now grown to over a billion dollars. This is one of many land issues that must be resolved with restitution of land; in nearly every case, the disputed territories are sacred sites for the particular Native Nation, including the Black Hills. And, in nearly every case, these lands are held by the federal or state governments, not private land holders or municipalities.