Books to Expand Thanksgiving Conversations
With Thanksgiving coming up, here are a few book recommendations to help make sure a broader story is being shared, one informed by Native stories and authors. Here are just a few I love:
- Bowwow Powwow: by Brenda J. Child. This is a delightful, rollicking tale about a young girl and her dog going with her Uncle to a powwow where she learns more of the stories and traditions of her Ojibwe people. The text is in both English and Ojibwe.
- The Earth Under Sky Bears Feet: Native American Poems of the Land by Joseph Bruchac. This book is a gorgeous collection of poems about the land, sky, and water from 12 different tribes accompanied by beautiful watercolors.
- Squanto’s Journey by Joseph Bruchac: This book feels especially important to read with children this year. This book tells the Thanksgiving narrative we’re so familiar with but from the first-person perspective of Squanto, the Patuxet man, whose role in the entire chapter of that time can hardly be overstated.
- The Winona LaDuke Chronicles: Winona LaDuke is a two-time candidate for vice president, the author of many books, an Anishinaabe elder, and a leading voice on issues relating to climate change, Indigenous rights, local food systems, and biodiversity. This collection of articles and essays is a mini graduate course in organizing, resilience, and why anyone who cares about the environment needs to listen to the Indigenous people who are the original inhabitants of a particular area and know and love that land well.
- Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice: This latest book from Kaitlin Curtice, one of the modern-day people featured in Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints, is truth-telling combined with memoir and a message that we all belong, but there is still a lot, a lot of accounting to be done for Christianity’s central role in the destruction of Indigenous people as well as justifying slavery. (In case you missed it, Kaitlin's profile is one I recently put up for free to read and share for non-commercial purposed. You can read it here.)
- The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich: This book is the first of a series about the daily life of an Ojibwe girl, Omakayas, who is eight when the books begin. I now believe that the only responsible way to read the Little House on the Prairie books is to also read the Birchbark House books (set in a similar time period). These books are beautifully written by Erdrich, and, like the Little House books, the reader learns all kinds of details about daily life and how Omakayas’s family lives.
Holding us all up, and see you on the other side of this election! No matter what, they'll be holy troublemaking work to do, and we're still going to need to catch courage from each other!