Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is Abby Martin. This is the audio version of each episode of the Empire Files hosted on Telesaur English. You can watch every episode at the Empire Files. TV.

As Americans gear up to celebrate Thanksgiving, a day symbolizing a friendly autumn feast between Native Americans and colonial pilgrims,

were reminded of the true plight and untold story of destruction of a culture that this country is really founded upon.

To gain insight on the history and current struggle of Native peoples, I'm here in San Francisco with Roxanne

Dunbar Ortiz, leading indigenous scholar, activist, and author.

Her latest book is titled an Indigenous People's History of the United States.

We grew up learning that Columbus discovered America and that whatever society existed before that was primitive and barbaric.

Talk about what native society really looked like at that time.

It was just the opposite. The whole hemisphere was actually ancient in terms of cultural

development and population migrations there, unlike the theory of the Bering Strait and of

the wandering Neolithic.

That's mainly from North America that settler colonialism wanting to make the native disappear.

Columbus came first to the Caribbean, which was a swarm of trade routes and interchanges among all those people of the islands.

And very few people know that of the seven designated areas of the beginnings of ancient agricultural civilizations.

We know when we grew up, well, Tiger's Euphrates River, of course.

That's the one we know best because supposedly that's where Europeans got culture from,

a very contested area still.

But we also know about China, had two areas of agricultural civilization development, and in North Africa.

But the other three were in the Americas.

One was in the Andes, agricultural civilization, one central Mexico, Mesoamerica, and the other,

the entire eastern half of what is now the United States.

So actually they were conquering, when they came to North America actually they were conquering when they came to North America, they

...