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The New Yorker of November 2, 2020, has a book review by Philip Deloria titled “Defiance.” The book is Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation (Knopf) by Peter Cozzens. Without actually naming the 1619 Project, Deloria's review challenges its key assumption – that the United States confronts single “original sin”, slavery, that is “...threaded through centuries of systemic racism and extending to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis”.

Instead, Deloria's book review cites a foundational sin that precedes slavery. The sin he pointed out struck home with me because its remaining legacy I often saw in my early life in South Dakota. The sin he named stretches from 1492 to the present. Its long history includes a lot of names very familiar to me – Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Black Elk – up to Russell Means, the Oglala Lakota activist for the rights of Native Americans who was born in the Pine Ridge Reservation and died 2012 in my hometown, Rapid City.

As Deloria notes, our initial sin began with American conquest, which was based on land plunder of native residents even before slavery existed. Before 1492 there were likely over 60 million inhabitants of the Americas, of which 90% were eliminated by 1650, leaving less than 6 million of the original native americans. Yes, diseases that we brought with us caused many deaths – but so also multiple massacres, forced departure from their homelands, and creation of reservations on land viewed as worthless.

I haven't read the book yet. I have read multiple reviews of the book, in which Peter Cozzens is consistently referred to as both an excellent historian and an entertaining author. My initial read of book's preface and prologue confirmed his appeal as a writer.

So my take is that Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation Kindle Edition is well worth reading if you are at all interested in getting a different perspective on our nation's evolution. It is about two brothers, Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader, and Tenskwatawa, his prophet brother who envisioned a new and better Indian world. Together, they were pursuing a native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders.

#100daystooffload Day 13.