The Chosen and the Damned

From the award-winning author of This Land Is Their Land, a sweeping, singular chronicle placing race at the center of Native American U.S. history.

At the onset of their encounter, Europeans did not yet conceive of themselves as Whites, and Native Americans did not consider themselves "Indians." As a genocidal struggle for political, territorial, religious, and cultural dominance took shape over the course of generations, White Americans developed a sense of racial superiority and national mission-of being chosen. Indians, from this perspective, were damned and fated to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization.

In his game-changing new book The Chosen and the Damned, David J. Silverman traces four centuries of Native American history, from the bloody wars for territory that were waged across the colonies to the war of extermination justified as "Manifest Destiny"; from the creation of reservations and forced recruitment into boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. He reveals how Native people cultivated a distinctive "Indian" identity that contributed to their resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, while also producing contentious disputes within tribes about whether people of mixed race can truly be called kin.

The epochal story of race in America has most often been seen as a battle between Black and White. The Chosen and the Damned restores the defining role Native people have played, and continue to play, in our national history. It is a powerful, heart-wrenching story, long overdue.