Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz corrects the historic record. The precolonial continent wasn't untamed, uncultivated:
"There was a road from Alaska down to southern Mexico; roads that went from east to west, north to south . . . Not paths . . . not roads just for hunting paths or migrations." These were trade routes, reports Dunbar-Ortiz. "They had stops; they had places to stay . . . And trade items from central Mexico ended up in what is now Quebec and the Great Lakes area and vice versa." She explains that “Ninety-nine percent of the indigenous population in North America were farmers who lived in towns and had grain storages, and very sophisticated governance.”
There existed what she calls "indigenous socialism". "This is why native property wasn't recognized: Because it was collectively owned and then they tried to allot it. They literally put in the Dawes Act (the Allotment Act) that selfishness had to be created for civilization to flourish among the native people."
The destruction of that economy through war, denial of self-determination, dispossession, criminalization and violence against women affected no group more than indigenous people, but they weren't the only ones. Colonialism, she argues, served as "an escape valve for the mother country.... Peasants thrown off their lands with the enclosure of the commons were assuaged with an offer of land "where they could be lord," she says. But poor settlers too were duped. "Corporations are predators to everyone now," she said.
“I think you cannot talk about capitalism without colonialism. Even Marx said that the primary accumulation of capital came from the looting of the Americas and the enslavement of the Africans and of native peoples. In the first century of Spanish-Portuguese colonization, native slavery was legal. It was replaced by African slavery. Once the church wanted to enslave the natives, have them build their missions and so forth.”
She says “The expropriation of Native land, turning it into private property/a commodity, as well as the savagizing of Native people, and the enslavement of human bodies, African bodies, as private property/commodities as well as a labor supply form the core of white supremacy in the founding, development, and present of the United States.”
The first chapter in the book, “Follow the Corn,” lays out:
“The multiple forms of democratic governance and social relations developed by Indigenous peoples in North America are breathtaking. For one thing, they are all rooted in matriarchy. Matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy, nor simply substituting female people for male people. Rather it is a profound comprehension of the biological factors that can lead to domination and authoritarianism. Training the male to be part of a community requires extensive ritual and discipline; it is not “natural,” rather socially constructed. It doesn’t happen automatically. And the concept of the earth as the source of sustenance, “mother,” that must be respected and managed. Some of the experiments and results of social developments in North America (and the hemisphere) are adaptable to modern society, perhaps especially in cities. Native peoples built cities, towns, federations of towns, based on the common good. ”
From interviews here and here
Roxanne-Dunbar-Ortiz website is here
In another interview she describes her politics more clearly.
" I continue - mainly out of stubbornness - to call myself a Marxist. I still think it's very important to keep focused on capitalism and the importance of class analysis. It's in that sense that I still pay tribute to Marxism. It's sort of like if I was a physicist. All physicists are Newtonians. They are Newtonians plus everything that came after, but they wouldn't feel ashamed of that. That's the kind of debt I feel toward Marx, who clarified the role of capital. We have to build upon that, not forget it. I think it's forgotten too much in our social movements, or not even considered in the first place. In the so-called anti-globalization movement there was a lot of misunderstanding about the actual nature of capitalism. By its very definition capitalism is global, and globalization is a new phase of capitalism. There's this impression that, before today, there was humane capitalism. The implication is that a return to that period would put a human face on capitalism and put an end to these bad things that have recently developed. I think that it has stunted people's political growth, at least in the US, to not have any grounding in Marxism.
I kind of wince at the term "socialism" because it's usually taken to mean "democratic socialism" and "liberalism." What I'm talking about is more like the old US Socialist Party, which was revolutionary and democratic. It didn't have the aspects of Leninism that became so undemocratic. And, of course, I feel I have very deep feminist politics, so I often describe myself as a Marxist-feminist or feminist-Marxist. In terms of anarchism, I identify much more with anarcho-syndicalism, but it's such a loaded term that it always needs explanation. If I were living in the 1870s, 1880s or 1890s, I would call myself an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist. But, unless you're in a circle that knows anarchism, it's hard to use that term without really confounding people who associate it with riots and mayhem, disorganization, and the like.
It's not easy to define one's politics anymore and I think that's a good thing. It used to be easier. One of our problems is sectarianism - defining one's politics so closely that they become based on exclusion. On the other hand, people who use the terms "inclusive politics" or "socialism" tend to mean a watered down politics that isn't revolutionary. So, I think it's probably good to not have such a concise definition. I prefer calling myself a revolutionary."
In yet another interview she talks of democracy and elections:
“When people turn to look for the roots of American socialism, they too often turn to the founding fathers and the founding documents – what I call a form of the origins story. That's not what I mean by a rooted tradition of socialism. I know that the Wobblies fought for free speech but they were not so interested in the Constitution as a safeguard of their human rights and their right to speak and not have the government shut them up. They were anti-statist. They were anarchists. They believed that you don't have to have a constitution that says you have the right to speak up in order to demand that right or any of your rights. You don't need a document to say that. That is your right intrinsically. It's not something that just flows out of the Constitution. That's what they asserted... I think the IWW was really right about politics in the United States. They understood it was a pitfall and in their constitution absolutely prohibited getting too involved in electoral politics. Members could vote if they wanted – and most of them voted for the socialist party candidate – but they were told not to invest their organizing skills or their energy into electoral politics and they didn't field candidates. I think we need to get away from that completely....When I said this in Stockton, a couple of people said, "Oh, this is the most important right we have, the right to vote." I know that in the civil rights movement it was important and I think it's probably still important in local elections. You can make a difference in your local school board or your local government, but on big national campaigns you have a choice between the lesser of two evils. It's one thing to compromise and find common ground on an issue and another thing to constantly demean yourself by supporting someone who's your enemy. I think it really drags us down and wastes a whole lot of energy.”
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