As a Jew growing up in the United States, I’ve spent a long time reflecting on how genocide, culturecide, and assimilation operate across majority-minority relations. My focus on Indigenous politics in my career as a political scientist stems from a devotion to pluricultural democracy as a way that people can live together well. I want to be part of a world where we can bring our whole selves to our societies and don’t have to cut out certain parts of our identities to be accepted. And I like to read well-researched, compellingly written books that offer insight into how communities do that.
I wrote...
Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States
Public school classrooms around the world have the power to shape and transform youth culture and identity. Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States examines how Indigenous language classes in Mexico and the United States are arenas for cultural connection that encourages resistance to culturecide—the killing of culture—in a variety of ways. For example, cultural access strengthens Indigenous students’ self-esteem and expands the spectrum of youth engagement, including civic, cultural, and political participation. In short, Indigenous language access foments identity-based agency for Indigenous youth that allows them to better resist settler colonial narratives, while youth from other backgrounds are able to become allies or co-conspirators in Indigenous cultural survival.
I read Braiding Sweetgrass at a time when I felt crushed by the discriminatory agendas playing out politically in the United States. I was despondent about the possibility of people learning how to live together in the face of so much trauma and entrenched division. This book gave me hope for pluricultural democracy again. Kimmerer’s artful descriptions of daily practices of cultural reclamation remind me that resistance is not always a visible or enormous revolution. Sometimes it is the silence of being able to name the uses of the vegetation we walk past.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
This book should be required reading for every high school junior in the United States! If I had read this as a teenager, I would have understood the political landscape of the US much earlier in life. Dunbar-Ortiz shows the real history of the US through Indigenous perspectives. In doing so, she shows why dismantling White supremacy is so hard, and so necessary at the same time. This is an accessible, powerful book that could be passed around multiple generations of families, stirring up all kinds of new dinner-time conversations.
Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck
Recipient of the American Book Award
The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history…
Cutcha Risling Baldy is shaking up the terms of engagement for Indigenous cultural reclamation in far Northern California. A Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk scholar and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Risling Baldy describes both the why and the how of Indigenous cultural survival in this book.Through a detailed description of girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies, Risling Baldy’s commitment to resisting settler colonialism shows a path forward for Indigenous communities.
"I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you." So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy's deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women's coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe's Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories.
Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed…
Ka’m-t’em both describes how communities can heal from colonization, and is itself a product of that healing. This book brings up so many emotions: shame around White violence, hope to build a community of support for Indigenous peoples, and longing for a decolonized future. The chapters featuring youth voices at the end of the book are particularly moving, as we hear from teenagers in their own words as to why they are willing to fight for their identities, and what everyone can do to help.
Many generations ago, along the Klamath River, there lived a wise woman who wove the most beautiful baskets known to humankind. Her baskets were woven so tightly that water could not penetrate them. She was aging and had many experiences to share. Through prayer, she began to weave a basket for the people. The wise woman worked day after day, weaving, praying, and singing. As her strong hands moved gracefully over her materials, she shared a story to be retold, a song to be sung again, and a lesson to be learned. When she finished, she had created a large…
Michelle Jacob’s book taught me about how we can blend scholarship with practice on a personal level. Her book gives me hope that humans are creative, resilient, fierce creatures who can find their way through oppression. Through personal stories, I learned both about Yakama cultural survival, and see many general lessons for other minority communities around the world.
The Yakama Nation of present-day Washington State has responded to more than a century of historical trauma with a resurgence of grassroots activism and cultural revitalization. This pathbreaking ethnography shifts the conversation from one of victimhood to one of ongoing resistance and resilience as a means of healing the soul wounds of settler colonialism. Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing argues that Indigenous communities themselves have the answers to the persistent social problems they face. This book contributes to discourses of Indigenous social change by articulating a Yakama decolonizing praxis that advances the premise that grassroots activism and…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
