Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer

BOOK REVIEW-Five Stars
Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer
America’s ruthless history of “Manifest Destiny” with land free for the taking with Winchester repeating arms was unquestionably out and out genocide. This malevolent greed had no limit and was sold to the public as their inalienable right over savages.
This must read book is an honest look at America outside the bubble.
Excerpts:
I think it is safe to say that many Ojibwe would go back to using wooden spears and birch bark canoes if non-Natives simply fished with cane poles from shore, with bits of pork rind on the end of their hooks, only as far west as the Ohio River.



Tom Shingobee has in his possession a grocery receipt totaling seventeen dollars that his father had to settle by signing over his 160-acre farm. During World War I, when many of the men were away fighting in Europe, the timber stands were cut down by large timber outfits. One man remembers coming home to his beloved forests only to find a desert of slash and brush and not a tree in sight for miles.



In all, during the forty-seven years the Dawes Act was on the books (the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934, officially stopped allotment but did not formally rescind the policy), Native Americans lost more than 90 million acres of tribal lands, about two-thirds of the lands held by Indians when the Dawes Act was passed; Indians lost, roughly, land that equals the size of the state of California. Ninety thousand Native Americans were left landless and largely homeless. The problems of this kind of landlessness were felt well into the 1970s and are still felt today. During that time, many Indian families were found to be living in cars, under porches, and crammed eight and sometimes ten to a room in dilapidated shacks across the country.