TLIT Book Club Discussion: An Indigenous People's History of the United States
Howdy Dollheads!!
As promised here's the posted version of Last Week's Bookclub discussion of An Indigenous People's History of the United States!Here are the books for further reading we mentioned in during the discussion:Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown (1970). A book that helped bring the atrocities of US expansion to public awareness.
1491, Charles C. Mann (2005). An account of the Americas before Columbus.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer (2019). Native life after 1890 told, focus on the people's survival and perseverance.
The Rediscovery of America , Ned Blackhawk (2023). National Book Award winner. Shows the central role of Native peoples to all of U.S. history.
Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes (2019). Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement views in the tradition of Indigenous resistance.
Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt (2020). An account of Indian Removal as a deliberate, bureaucratic project.
Indigenous Continent, Pekka Hämäläinen (2022). Reframes history of conflict as a contest and ongoing resistance movement that Native powers often won, challenging what we’re often taught.
The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King (2012). Accounts of Indigenous–settler relations across North America.
There There, Tommy Orange (2018). A contemporary novel of urban Native life in Oakland.
Not “A Nation of Immigrants”, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2021). The author’s follow-up.
And here's a list of other historical accounts that counter the common narrative:
A People’s History of the United States , Howard Zinn (1980). The OG for revisiting historical propaganda.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen (1995). Read this years ago, it makes you high school history teacher look like a LIAR.
The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021). Haven't read this but supposed to be good... a deconstruction of the standard story of human social evolution.
Open Veins of Latin America — Eduardo Galeano (1971). An indictment of five centuries of extraction and empire in the Americas.
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander (2010). A look at mass incarceration as a redesigned system of racial control.
Caste, Isabel Wilkerson (2020). Recasts American racial hierarchy as a caste system. One of the Book Club Squad said tis great.
The Counter-Revolution of 1776 , Gerald Horne (2014). An argument that the American Revolution was, in part, a bid to protect slavery.
Orientalism, Edward Said (1978). The foundational text on how Western nations constructed ‘the East’ to justify worldwide empire and domination.
The End of the Myth, Greg Grandin (2019). Revisits the frontier myth from Indian wars to the border wall.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas (1552). A primary-source eyewitness to Spanish atrocities in the carribean.
Hope you're all having a great week! The book club discussion for THE DEVILS by Joe Abercrombie will take place next week starting at 7:30 PM EST/ 4:30 PM PST. Hope to see you there!
Also- keep an eye out later this evening... there may be more to this TLIT Tuesday...
-Luke