As November arrives in the Libraries, we invite you to celebrate Native American Heritage Month with us. We acknowledge that our campuses occupy the ancestral lands of the Gabrieleno (Tongva) Band of Mission Indians. Explore the history and present of the Tongva people at their official website (and in last year's post).
Prior to European settlement, the Tongva were one of hundreds of distinct tribal nations who spanned the continent and often interacted with their neighbors across vast distances. Find the names of the ancestral people of familiar locations on the California Native American Heritage Commission Atlas Map.
If we travel up the coast to where Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties were established, we arrive at the ancestral lands of the Chumash people. Learn about the Chumash on their website, and be sure to visit the brand new Santa Ynez Chumash Museum in Thousand Oaks.
Below, watch the Story of Indian Residential Schools and Forced Assimilation through the experience of Chumash Elder Beatrice Marcoe, who was sent to one such school in Riverside, California.
In person
Online
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by
New York Times Bestseller. Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck. Recipient of the American Book Award. The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
Living Nations, Living Words by
Braiding Sweetgrass by
A New York Times Bestseller. A Washington Post Bestseller. A Los Angeles Times Bestseller. Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub. A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020." A Food Tank Fall 2020 Reading Recommendation. Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book--gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred--and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). 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.
Firekeeper's Daughter by
A PRINTZ MEDAL WINNER! A MORRIS AWARD WINNER! AN AMERICAN INDIAN YOUTH LITERATURE AWARD YA HONOR BOOK! A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB YA PICK! An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller. Soon to be adapted at Netflix for TV with President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground. "One of this year's most buzzed-about young adult novels." --Good Morning America. A TIME Magazine Best YA Book of All Time Selection. Amazon's Best YA Book of 2021 So Far (June 2021). A 2021 Kids' Indie Next List Selection. An Entertainment Weekly Most Anticipated Books of 2021 Selection. A PopSugar Best March 2021 YA Book Selection. With four starred reviews, Angeline Boulley's debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter, is a groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community, perfect for readers of Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange. Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of a fresh start at college, but when family tragedy strikes, Daunis puts her future on hold to look after her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi's hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug. Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source. But the search for truth is more complicated than Daunis imagined, exposing secrets and old scars. At the same time, she grows concerned with an investigation that seems more focused on punishing the offenders than protecting the victims. Now, as the deceptions--and deaths--keep growing, Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she'll go for her community, even if it tears apart the only world she's ever known.
Native Voices by
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Native American Studies. NATIVE VOICES is a comprehensive collection of the most urgent Indigenous American poetry and prose spanning the mid-20th Century to today. Features forty-two poets, including Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, and Orlando White; original influence essays by Diane Glancy on Lorca, Chrystos on Audre Lorde, Louise Erdrich on Elizabeth Bishop, LeAnne Howe on W. D. Snodgrass, Allison Hedge Coke on Delmore Schwartz, Suzanne Rancourt on Ai, and M. L. Smoker on Richard Hugo, among others; and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists.
We Are Water Protectors by
Historically, the United States and other settler governments failed to recognize the rights of Indigenous people to possess their own cultural artifacts and human remains. Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples now enshrines these rights. Museums work with descendant communities to comply with the UN Declaration and respect descendants' wishes for repatriation of those artifacts and remains.
Sources:
Autry Museum of the American West: Repatriation
National Museum of the American Indian: Repatriation
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
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