Indigenous Peoples’ Day

“Colonialism: A Love Story” by writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt of the Driftpile Cree Nation. Like much of Belcourt’s work, “Colonialism: A Love Story” mixes theory with poetics to explore the enduring violences of colonialism on the queer NDN body.

Poems for Indigenous Peoples’ Day at poets.org.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, natural scientist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The author argues that understanding other beings leads to an understanding of the generosity of the earth, and that we must learn to give our own gifts in turn.

“Writing Myself Into Existence: An Essay on the Erasure of Black Indigenous Identity in Canadian Education” by Etanda Arden, who identifies as Black and Indigenous and describes the imperative of making spaces for pride and recognition and for a Black Indigenous curriculum, which applies to both the Canadian and U.S. systems.

New York Public Library Recommended Reading List Honoring Indigenous Peoples.

All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke: an account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation featuring chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others.

“A Peril that Dwelt Among the Navajos”: an L.A. Times exposé by Judy Pasternak, author of Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and Betrayal of the Navajos. Pasternak documents the effects of uranium mining on Indigenous land. 

An Indigenous Elsewhere: A Conversation with Sandy Grande and Bhatki Shringarpure published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In this interview, Quechua National, scholar, and author of Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande, reflects on education, feminism, capitalism, and identity.

Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange’s (Cheyenne and Arapaho) second novel, traces an Indigenous family’s lineage from the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) to present-day Oakland. 

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) offers a radical critique of the present and a reimagining of the relationship between the human and water.

A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 by Claudio Saunt, looks at the encounters of Muscogee (Creeks) with Europeans and capitalism. Saunt explains how a division between Creek “haves” and “have-nots” developed and helped stoke the 1813-1814 “Redstick War,” which combined a revolt of the have-nots against private wealth with a fight against U.S. encroachment.

Indigenous Presses listed at IndigenousJournalists.org.

Native-led news site Buffalo’s Fire.

Arizona Luminaria, A first-of-its-kind database dedicated to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, and Transgender People in Arizona.

The documentaries Bad Press (about censorship of Native stories and resistance to censorship) and More Than a Word (about eliminating racist sports mascots).

Raye Zaragoza, a singer-songwriter of mixed heritage, including O’odham. She wrote the song “In the River” in 2016 to show support for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.