Thread by @gindaanis

Twelve months of Indigenous reading.

January: Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice. This overview of a range of Indigenous lit is a good foundation and will set you up for the next 11 months.

https://twitter.com/ungerkyle/status/1332081142728626183

Now is also a good time to pick up poetry. Janet Marie Rogers, Tenille Campbell. Cheryl Savageau. Billy Rae Belcourt. Flip through them throughout the year.

February. History.

An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States
Our History is the Future
Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
All Our Relations (Talaga)
Treaty No 9 (Long)
Dammed (Luby)

Additional reading that is not Indigenous, but helpful:

1491
Property and Dispossession

March. Memoirs are personal history.

Heart Berries, Walking in My Own Moccasins, Up From the Ashes, The Tao of Raven, One Native Life, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

April. Things are thawing, waking up.

Braiding Sweetgrass.
Badger - Daniel Heath Justice, and pre order Racoon. Part of a series by Reaktion Books about animals. Daniel brings an Indigenous lens to his contributions

May. We're thinking about mothers.

Half breed. The new edition.
Split Tooth
The Beginning and End of Rape

June. Fathers.

Medicine Walk and Starlight by Richard Wagamese. Anything by Richard Wagamese. This is Richard Wagamese month.

July and August. Fiction to read on your vacation or under a tree.

There, There, Birdie, Dark Emu, Bone Game, Johnny Appleseed, Moccasin Square Gardens, Monkey Beach, Trail of Lightning, Robopocalypse, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass.

September. Graphic Novels

Kagagi, This Place, The Outside Circle, 500 Years of Resistance, Moonshot: the Indigenous Comics Collection, Trickster, A Girl Called Echo.

October. Harvest time.

Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People
Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States

November. What is it to be Indigenous.

Native American DNA
Distorted Descent
Mohawk Interruptus
Native (Curtice)
Seven Fallen Feathers
The Ties That Bind (Afro Indigenous)
How We Go Home

December. Sovereignty: A new beginning.

Indigenous Nationhood
Unsettling Canada/ Reconciliation Manifesto
Red Pedagogy
God is Red (stop when you get to ancient aliens)
Sand Talk

Most of these are from my bookshelves. And most of these I have read. Doing this revealed some serious gaps, like Afro Indigenous authors.

There's a lot I did not include because this is a list for settlers and not everything is for everyone.

This is also very North American-centric. Again, gaps in my bookshelf. Indigenous peoples are global. We exist in Africa, the Americas, the Pacific, northern Europe, Russia, basically everywhere. We are the underlying layer that colonialism pushed aside to get at land.

and I put them in a particular order that makes sense to me, a progression of knowledge building and context, things that will have different impact if you read the things that came before. A different order might make more sense to you, but this is what made sense to me.

It's a book club now.

you can sign up here: daanis.ca/ambe/