2022 National Indigenous Peoples Month Celebrations

From the Ashes

A powerful, heart-breaking and heart-warming memoir by Jesse Thistle. He writes about his past trauma, addiction; and re-connecting to his Indigenous culture and family.

Indigenous Healing: Exploring Traditional Paths

As a non-Indigenous person, this book was deeply powerful for me to begin to understand the destructive and destabilization forces of colonization and residential schools on communities, as well as the healing that can come from returning to a traditional indigenous world view.

Unreconciled by Jesse Wente

Remembering Indigenous Women in North American History

Jane Kirkpatrick provides a beautiful portrait of the important role that Indigenous women played in the fur trade, expanding European interests west in the early 1800s. Marie Dorion struggles to hold her family together on an epic journey west; she fights to be heard in a male dominated economy; and ultimately she establishes herself as a woman worthy of remembering. I love historical non-fiction, and "A Name of Her Own" presents North American history from a perspective that is often neglected.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.