Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with an online discussion of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. The discussion will be facilitated by Delesslin George-Warren and Kassidy Maeghan Plyler of the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project. Registrants will receive a Zoom invite before the event begins.

About the facilitators:

DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren is a queer artist, researcher, and organizer from Catawba Indian Nation whose work ranges from performance to installation art to community education to food sovereignty to language revitalization. Since 2017 he has been the Special Projects Coordinator for the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project where he facilitates the Catawba Language Project, several food sovereignty initiatives, and other community education projects. He has performed, lectured, and exhibited throughout the U.S. including the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, College of Charleston, Vanderbilt University, Ithaca College, and more. In 2018 DeLesslin was recognized as a 2018 “40 Under 40” by the National Council on American Indian Enterprise Development. In 2017 he was selected as a Dreamstarter by Running Strong for American Indian Youth and in 2016 he was recognized as a “25 Under 25” by United National Inter Tribal Youth.

Kassidy Maeghan Plyler has been culturally involved with the the Catawba tribe since the age of 2. She enjoys being able to share Ctawba traditions with others and educating the public about Native American history.

The Catawba Cultural Preservation Project was founded in 1989 to ‘protect, promoter, preserve, and maintain’ the rich cultural heritage of the Catawba Indian Nation.’ Since its inception the Cultural Center has provided thousands of educational programs and services to the Catawba and non-Catawba public.

From the Publisher: “The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.”