Today is Indigenous People’s Day. In acknowledgement of this, we’d like to introduce our next book club selection, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese.
This book is a little different than our usual picks (I.e., not explicitly about education or integration) and we wanted to share our reasoning behind choosing it. We hope by focusing on unlearning some of our settler-focused colonial history and investigating the Indigenous perspective of this land and its history, we can show up better in our communities and with our kids.
White supremacy culture has to obscure the true history of our country in order to survive. Part of dismantling White supremacy culture in ourselves (and thus being better prepared to show up in multiracial integrated spaces) is unlearning the history we were taught in school and replacing it with the truth. If we do not know our history, we will repeat it. Most of us who grew up in the United States are woefully ignorant when it comes to the history of Native people in this country, and so we present this as a space for us come together and begin to educate ourselves on this topic. We chose the Young Peoples’ version as we want to make it conducive for our community to share the knowledge they gain with the young people in their lives.
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