Surviving Genocide

“Intense and well-researched, . . . ambitious, . . . magisterial. . . . Ostler’s swift-paced yet meticulous coverage of the wars and diasporas, great and small, and attendant fluctuations in native populations has been assembled as if he intends it to be his academic generation’s manifesto. . . . For many of us, I suspect, who have researched and taught Indian–white relations most of our lives, Surviving Genocide sets a bar from which subsequent scholarship and teaching cannot retreat.”—Peter Nabokov, New York Review of Books

Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians

Selected for Choice’s 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles List

“Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide covers a full century and a huge swath of territory but is never less than comprehensive. This is benchmark history at its best.”—John Mack Faragher, Yale University

“Stunning in its depth of research and scope of learning, Surviving Genocide brings a new level of sophistication to the study of the United States’ ‘Indian wars,’ revealing the genocidal impulse at the core of the conflicts as well as the Native ingenuity that prevented an even more profound loss of life and land.”—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

“Surviving Genocide provides a panoramic survey of American-Indian relations and takes a hard look at U.S. policies that were predicated, one way or another, on the removal of Native people; at the same time, it offers important testimony on the resilience of Native people who refused to disappear.”—Colin G. Calloway, author of The Indian World of George Washington

“A landmark book essential to understanding American history, Surviving Genocide is an act of courage. Ostler’s brilliant concept of reconstructing ‘an Indigenous consciousness of genocide’ is significant for its insight into how American Indians understood, discussed, and resisted genocidal threats to their families, communities, and nations. His modern vocabulary of ‘atrocities’ and ‘killing fields’ is not for political effect but appropriate to the brutal reality of Indian policy in American history.”—Brenda Child, Northrop Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota