What To Read on Indigenous America

by Professor Joy Porter
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3 books
Trying to get a handle on why things are as they are in relation to Indigenous America can seem like an impossible task. This list starts with the best book ever written explaining the big picture truth about how the non-Indigenous world has always had profound trouble understanding itself in relation to the Indigenous world. Next is a simple, beautiful Indigenous book explaining one of the key concepts both worlds have always shared- the idea of the treaty. It shows how treaties embody a worldview we desperately need to hold on to and respect in order to retain balance on Earth. The third book is an Indigenous exciting saga, a novel like no other, that frankly, contains multitudes. As with so many wildly ambitious projects, it’s far from perfect, but it remains one of the most gripping texts on the Indigenous past, present and future ever written.
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The White Man's Indian

Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present
Robert F. Berkhofer, 2011
If you read nothing else about Indigenous America, this is the one book you need to be truly well-informed. Published in 1979, its message is as vital and deeply needed today as it was then, but it presupposes you’re able to handle reasonably dense prose.  Berkhofer wrote back when academics had the time and scope to write thoughtful, insightful work that explains how things came about right from first principles. In essence, it reveals how and why the non-Indigenous world has persistently homogenized and projected their own stereotyped notions onto Indigenous peoples. If you’ve ever wondered why Indigenous Americans get called (and many call themselves) Indians, even though America is patently not India, this is the place for answers.

Treaty Words

For As Long As the Rivers Flow
Aimée Craft, 2021
Technically, this really easy-to-read, enjoyable, short, small book is for kids, but actually, the ideas in it are ENORMOUS! The author addresses the basic human problem of how to live a good life, how to achieve what her people, the Anishinaabe of Canada, call mino-biimaadiiziwin, or collective well-being. The answers lie in paying attention, listening, and abiding by treaties made in good faith with each other and with the non-human world, including rivers, animals, and the earth itself. As human life on earth careers towards a fundamental reckoning with the results of accelerating environmental imbalance since the 1950s, this accessible book reveals another way of comprehending the world. It centres the idea of environmental and other sorts of treaties with nations and entities of all sorts.

Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko, 1992
We live in crazy times about to get a lot crazier. This book by ‘National Treasure’ Laguna Pueblo mixed-heritage writer Leslie Marmon Silko, wrestled with much of it back in 1991. Ambitious is one word for this book, impossible is another - so buckle up. It tells a truly epic tale that prophesies a great reckoning as a result of the conjoined American legacies of racial violence and Indigenous dispossession. It links the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the brutal re-mapping that occurred from 1492 of America as an Indigenous continent. In spiritual terms, it portrays the implications across deep time for the United States of it possessing millions of spirits who are intent upon vengeance because of 500 years of injustice. No comparable book exists within Indigenous American literature to this, which has justifiably been called the ‘Indian War and Peace’. Not everything about it gels well with today’s sensibilities, especially the homophobic leitmotifs, but as a way to understand why the Indigenous world cannot ever be destroyed, it remains peerless.