Fans pick 100 books like Assembled for Use

I love this book because of how beautiful and hopeful it is. The author pulls together amazing stories from her life to gradually weave an understanding of the meta-crisis we find ourselves in. I was captivated by the way she contrasts her family’s indigenous American culture with our modern approaches to both science and the economy.

I love Robin’s prose, which is exquisitely written. But perhaps what I value the most is the fact that she writes with optimism, giving me the courage to get up every day and think about how to put her wisdom into practice.

This account of early Native writing by a Wabanaki scholar has had a profound effect on our work as scholars, teachers, and writers. It recovers an archive that requires us to put Native literature at the center of a white-dominated literary history. Brooks’ brilliant argument connects Native language and history of the Northeast with its geography, a vast network of interconnected waterways that served as the basis for a sophisticated communal Native system of communication. Foundational to this system is the idea of “the common pot,” shared by all Algonquian-speaking peoples, that everyone and everything is related and interdependent for survival and flourishing. Including the invading Europeans, whose writing technologies Native peoples then absorbed and adapted. 

We highly recommend this capacious “counter-archive” of Native writing because it definitively lays to rest the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” Covering more than four centuries, it includes work from ten tribal nations from Maine to Connecticut in the form of early political petitions and land deeds to contemporary poetry and blogs. We love that its editor, a non-Native scholar, drew on the expertise of eleven Native editors from tribal communities for its diverse content, sourced from oral narratives, manuscripts stored in garages, and passed-around bootlegged copies. We also love that the book inspired a website for the extra material and for new work being produced now. In this sense, the website is a living document that illuminates the long history and vibrant presence of Indigenous writing.

We greatly admire this born-digital “scalar book” for its attempt to build a decolonizing “counter-archive” out of one of the most in/famous western archives of Indigenous materials. Edward S. Curtis was an early 20th-century photographer, whose major collection, The North American Indian, defined the stereotypic image of the vanishing Native. It succeeded in capturing and “othering” Natives as somehow heroic and stoic, but also primitive and gone. In consultation with many Native tribes, this digital book reveals how Curtis’s work “performs,” or does that work of western archives. By juxtaposing his compelling images with short essays that contextualize and thus humanize his photographic subjects, this project allows us to acknowledge and repair the injustices of the past in the present.

What I loved most about this book is true of all Louise Erdrich novels: she creates such warm, complicated, fully human characters that I delight in their presence and grieve when I have to leave them at the book’s end.

In this novel, history hit home in a devastating way when the U.S. government in the 1950s decided to solve its “Indian problem” by simply reclassifying Native people as no longer Indian—a kind of paper genocide that wiped out Indigenous people’s cultural identity and tribal rights, such as land rights.

Sadly, this is all historical fact; the fiction comes in when Erdrich re-imagined in riveting detail the (also true) story of how one small tribe in North Dakota fought back.

I met Carole LaFavor, Ojibwe, when I was writing for community newspapers and local magazines. I wrote a profile of LaFavor detailing her activism work in the Native community. Later, we were both in a writing group. I first heard some of the early writing she was doing for Evil Dead Center. She was the first Native woman I met writing crime and she inspired me to keep going on the book I was writing at the time.  University of Minnesota Press re-released Evil Dead Center in 2017 with the forward reading, “to underscore the significance of her writing to the Indigenous literary canon, to remind us of the power of her activism for HIV-positive Native peoples, and to return her important claims for the centrality of Two-Spirit peoples, bodies, and histories to the public eye.” - Lisa Tatonetti

This book gives a nice accounting of American Colonialism and their response to the People who inhabited this country prior to being discovered (sic). I was especially enlightened by the undertaking of explaining the Second Amendment from an understanding of the times and the people. Seeing how the three fears of the times no longer exist.

I can never decide which of Erdrich’s books is my favorite, but The Plague of Doves is definitely a major contender. Erdrich’s novelistic style is more like a chorus than a solo: she presents various stories involving different characters in different times, but the stories are in orbit around the central conflict, in this case, a pair of horrific crimes committed long ago. Yet even when the content is dark, her writing is so beautiful that my primary feeling reading it is joy. For me, the title of this book perfectly captures that contradictory experience. 

Bagonegiizhig, better known as Hole in the Day, is an extremely charismatic figure in the history of Minnesota, yet few know of his life and leadership. In The Assassination of Hole in the Day, Ojibwe historian and scholar Anton Treuer skillfully reveals the rise and downfall of this clever, polarizing figure. An expert at his craft, Treuer provides readers with an excellent historical context to understand the world in which Hole in the Day lived. Then, Treuer shows readers how Hole in the Day rose to prominence and why he should not be overlooked by the annals of history.  

I used to moderate a book club for museum members at what is now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Love Medicine was chosen by one of our exhibition artists. This astonishing debut is a masterwork about family, poverty, and passion.

The book is set where my grandparents came from, Minnesota and the Dakotas, and illustrates how settlers from Europe (my ancestors) continued to disrupt and destroy Native lives well into the 20th century. Ojibwe spiritual beliefs and Catholicism tangle as tightly as the characters that embody them. Spanning from 1934 to 1985, this novel should not be missed by anyone interested in Native American history.