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CURRENT READ.
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip's War
By Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
By Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
PREVIOUS READS.
Dawnland Voices: Indigenous Writing from New England and the Northeast
Edited by Siobhan Senier
Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little-known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England’s Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions. Dawnland Voices introduces readers to the compelling and unique literary heritage in New England, banishing the misconception that “real” Indians and their traditions vanished from that region centuries ago.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803246867/ and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://dawnlandvoices.org/
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip's War
By Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
By Robin Wall-Kimmerer
Named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub. 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, a mother, and 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 a rich braid of 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 a wider 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.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass and at independent Maine booksellers.
The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth
By David Boyd
“The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth" gathers the unique wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, environmental activists, lawyers, and small farmers in order to make a case for how and why humans must work to change our current structures of law to recognize that nature has inherent rights. It includes essays and interviews from esteemed thought leaders such as Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, Cormac Cullinan, Edwardo Galleano, Nimo Bassey, Thomas Goldtooth, and Shannon Biggs.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://canadians.org/rightsofnature and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://therightsofnature.org/tag/david-boyd/
Anoqcou: Ceremony is Life Itself
By gksidtanamoogk
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
An Upriver Passamaquoddy
By Alan Sockabasin
Drawing on his memories and an oral tradition, Allen Sockabasin returns to his Passamaquoddy village of Mud-doc-mig-goog, or Peter Dana Point, near Princeton, Maine. When Allen was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, his village was isolated and depended largely on subsistence hunting and fishing, working in the woods, and seasonal harvesting work for its survival. To the outside world, they lived in poverty, but Allen remembers a life that was rich and rewarding in many ways, and he explains why preserving the Passamaquoddy traditions and language is so critical to his people's survival in modern times.
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
Changes in the Land
By William Cronin
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.
Changes in the Land" offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance. With the tools of both historian and ecologist, Cronon constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how the land and the people influenced one another, and how that complex web of relationships shaped New England's communities.
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://changesinland.wordpress.com
Neither Wolf nor Dog
By Kent Nerburn
Against an unflinching backdrop of 1990s reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Indian, locked in their own understandings yet struggling to find a common voice. In this award-winning book, acclaimed author Kent Nerburn draws us deep into the world of a Native American elder named Dan, who leads Kent through Indian towns and down forgotten roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Along the way we meet a vivid cast of characters — ranging from Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, to Annie, an eighty-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin with no running water. An unlikely cross between On the Road and Black Elk Speaks, Neither Wolf nor Dog takes us past the myths and stereotypes of the Native American experience, revealing an America few ever see.
Available in Maine Libraries and at independent Maine booksellers
We Talk, You Listen
By Vine Deloria
"We Talk, You Listen" is strong, boldly unconventional medicine from Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), one of the most important voices of twentieth-century Native American affairs. Here the witty and insightful Indian spokesman turns his penetrating vision toward the disintegrating core of American society. Written at a time when the traditions of the formerly omnipotent Anglo-Saxon male were crumbling under the pressures of a changing world, Deloria’s book interprets racial conflict, inflation, the ecological crisis, and power groups as symptoms rather than causes of the American malaise: “The glittering generalities and mythologies of American society no longer satisfy the need and desire to belong,” a theory as applicable today as it was in 1970.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259850/ and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
By Sherri Mitchell Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset
A narrative of Indigenous wisdom that provides a road map for the spirit and a compass of compassion for humanity. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day, such as environmental protection and human rights. Sharing the gifts she has received from elders around the world, Mitchell urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. For those seeking change, this book offers a set of cultural values that will preserve our collective survival for future generations.
Available for sale at: https://sacredinstructions.life/books/ and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence
By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Many promote Reconciliation as a “new” way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.
Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state.
Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.
Available for sale at: https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781894037501/leanne-simpson/dancing-our-turtles-back-stories and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
The Nightwatchman
By Louise Erdrich
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant use, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Available in Maine Libraries.
Available for sale at independent Maine booksellers.
Notes on a Lost Flute
By Kerry Harding
Not without controversy, Hardy brings together his expertise in forestry, horticulture, and environmental science to tell us about New England when its primary inhabitants were the native Wabanaki tribes.
Available at Maine libraries and independent Maine booksellers.
The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
By Lisa Brooks
Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leaders—including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess—adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.
She shows that writing was not a foreign technology but rather a crucial weapon in the Native Americans’ arsenal as they resisted—and today continue to oppose—colonial domination.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-common-pot and at independent Maine bookstores
Edited by Siobhan Senier
Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little-known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England’s Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions. Dawnland Voices introduces readers to the compelling and unique literary heritage in New England, banishing the misconception that “real” Indians and their traditions vanished from that region centuries ago.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803246867/ and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://dawnlandvoices.org/
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip's War
By Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
By Robin Wall-Kimmerer
Named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub. 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, a mother, and 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 a rich braid of 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 a wider 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.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass and at independent Maine booksellers.
The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth
By David Boyd
“The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth" gathers the unique wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, environmental activists, lawyers, and small farmers in order to make a case for how and why humans must work to change our current structures of law to recognize that nature has inherent rights. It includes essays and interviews from esteemed thought leaders such as Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, Cormac Cullinan, Edwardo Galleano, Nimo Bassey, Thomas Goldtooth, and Shannon Biggs.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://canadians.org/rightsofnature and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://therightsofnature.org/tag/david-boyd/
Anoqcou: Ceremony is Life Itself
By gksidtanamoogk
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
An Upriver Passamaquoddy
By Alan Sockabasin
Drawing on his memories and an oral tradition, Allen Sockabasin returns to his Passamaquoddy village of Mud-doc-mig-goog, or Peter Dana Point, near Princeton, Maine. When Allen was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, his village was isolated and depended largely on subsistence hunting and fishing, working in the woods, and seasonal harvesting work for its survival. To the outside world, they lived in poverty, but Allen remembers a life that was rich and rewarding in many ways, and he explains why preserving the Passamaquoddy traditions and language is so critical to his people's survival in modern times.
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
Changes in the Land
By William Cronin
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.
Changes in the Land" offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance. With the tools of both historian and ecologist, Cronon constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how the land and the people influenced one another, and how that complex web of relationships shaped New England's communities.
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://changesinland.wordpress.com
Neither Wolf nor Dog
By Kent Nerburn
Against an unflinching backdrop of 1990s reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Indian, locked in their own understandings yet struggling to find a common voice. In this award-winning book, acclaimed author Kent Nerburn draws us deep into the world of a Native American elder named Dan, who leads Kent through Indian towns and down forgotten roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Along the way we meet a vivid cast of characters — ranging from Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, to Annie, an eighty-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin with no running water. An unlikely cross between On the Road and Black Elk Speaks, Neither Wolf nor Dog takes us past the myths and stereotypes of the Native American experience, revealing an America few ever see.
Available in Maine Libraries and at independent Maine booksellers
We Talk, You Listen
By Vine Deloria
"We Talk, You Listen" is strong, boldly unconventional medicine from Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), one of the most important voices of twentieth-century Native American affairs. Here the witty and insightful Indian spokesman turns his penetrating vision toward the disintegrating core of American society. Written at a time when the traditions of the formerly omnipotent Anglo-Saxon male were crumbling under the pressures of a changing world, Deloria’s book interprets racial conflict, inflation, the ecological crisis, and power groups as symptoms rather than causes of the American malaise: “The glittering generalities and mythologies of American society no longer satisfy the need and desire to belong,” a theory as applicable today as it was in 1970.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259850/ and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
By Sherri Mitchell Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset
A narrative of Indigenous wisdom that provides a road map for the spirit and a compass of compassion for humanity. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day, such as environmental protection and human rights. Sharing the gifts she has received from elders around the world, Mitchell urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. For those seeking change, this book offers a set of cultural values that will preserve our collective survival for future generations.
Available for sale at: https://sacredinstructions.life/books/ and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence
By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Many promote Reconciliation as a “new” way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.
Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state.
Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.
Available for sale at: https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781894037501/leanne-simpson/dancing-our-turtles-back-stories and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
The Nightwatchman
By Louise Erdrich
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant use, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Available in Maine Libraries.
Available for sale at independent Maine booksellers.
Notes on a Lost Flute
By Kerry Harding
Not without controversy, Hardy brings together his expertise in forestry, horticulture, and environmental science to tell us about New England when its primary inhabitants were the native Wabanaki tribes.
Available at Maine libraries and independent Maine booksellers.
The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
By Lisa Brooks
Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leaders—including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess—adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.
She shows that writing was not a foreign technology but rather a crucial weapon in the Native Americans’ arsenal as they resisted—and today continue to oppose—colonial domination.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-common-pot and at independent Maine bookstores
UPCOMING READS.
Savage Kin
By Marge Brujack
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/savage-kin
Gatherings
By Shirley Hager
https://utorontopress.com/us/the-gatherings-3
Decolonizing Wealth:Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
By Edgar Villanueva
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery
By Margaret Ellen Newell
Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier
By Ian Saxine
By Marge Brujack
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/savage-kin
Gatherings
By Shirley Hager
https://utorontopress.com/us/the-gatherings-3
Decolonizing Wealth:Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
By Edgar Villanueva
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery
By Margaret Ellen Newell
Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier
By Ian Saxine
