The Lakota People’s Law Project Decolonized Reading List for 2025

Date: 01/31/2025
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The Lakota People’s Law Project Decolonized Reading List for 2025

Whether you’re an activist, an educator, or just a human being who wants to better understand this moment and how we got here, these tiles can help you learn, connect, resist, and inspire.

At a time when many of us are looking for answers, inspiration, connection, and ways to get involved in our communities, the Lakota People’s Law Project and Sacred Defense Fund have put together a list of books to help you get there. In our journey together, by getting a better idea of where we’ve been, we can chart a clearer path forward.

This "Top 25 for 2025" list of nonfiction books focuses on a variety of topics, including Indigenous-centered histories of Native America, Indigenous resistance, the decolonizing work of reconnecting us with the land and each other, and topics such as abolition, the Japanese American fight for reparations after internment, the work of AIDS activists, the LGBTQ2S revolution, the Black Panthers, the civil rights movement, the occupation of Puerto Rico, and how to build support and protection for marginalized and oppressed communities. Most of the authors are BIPOC, LGBTQ2S, and/or women.

The book list is loosely organized into three parts:

  1. Books about our relations with Unci Maka (our Grandmother Earth) and each other

  2. Books about history

  3. Books about organized resistance

WHERE TO READ THESE BOOKS

Most of these books are available in a variety of formats such as print, eBooks, and audio books. We recommend giving your business to an Indigenous-owned bookstore, some of which you can find right here.

We’ve also included links for each book to at least two of the following:

Powell’s City of Books: This is a wonderful independent West Coast bookseller.

City Lights: We also love this legendary independent bookstore in San Francisco.

Amazon and Audible: We’re including links to Amazon and Audible because, for some people, these will be the easiest or most cost-effective ways to access the materials. Most books are available through Audible at the Amazon link. We believe it’s important that these books be read by as many people as possible, though we do recommend giving your business to an Indigenous and/or independent bookseller whenever possible.

In some cases, we have also provided links to the following, either of which we also recommend to obtain your books:

Libby: You can read for free with Libby! It’s a free public library-based reading app that links with your library card. Access free eBooks, audio books, newspapers, and more.

Barnes & Noble: An in-person and online bookseller of print, eBooks, and audio books. You can request a title be shipped to your local store, or to your home.

Slightly edited book descriptions via respective book publishers and Amazon.

BOOKS ABOUT RELATIONS WITH THE EARTH AND EACH OTHER

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We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth

by Dahr Jamail (Editor), Stan Rushworth (Editor)

A powerful, intimate collection of conversations with Indigenous Americans on the climate crisis and the Earth’s future

An American Library Association Notable Book, “We Are the Middle of Forever” places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, “We Are the Middle of Forever” will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.

Get this book from:

Libby

Barnes & Noble

City Lights

Powell’s Books

Amazon

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As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. “As Long As Grass Grows” gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on our lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy.

Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, the author argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.

Get this book from:

Libby

City Lights

Barnes & Noble

Powell’s

Amazon

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Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science

by Jessica Hernandez Ph.D.

An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why western conservationism isn't working — and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, personal stories, and family histories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors.

Through case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices and lived experiences of Indigenous Latin American women and land protectors, Hernandez makes the case that if we're to recover the health of our planet — for everyone — we need to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands and restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect.

Get this book from:

Barnes & Noble

City Lights

Amazon

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Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health

by Devon A. Mihesuah

Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted Indigenous communities’ ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained.

Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of Indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare.

The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as Indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

by Patty Krawec

The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."

Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest

by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Diana Beresford-Kroeger — a world-recognized botanist and medical biochemist — has revolutionized our understanding of the natural world with her startling insights into the hidden life of trees. In this riveting memoir, she uncovers the roots of her discoveries in her extraordinary childhood in Ireland. Soon after, her brilliant mind bloomed into an illustrious scientific career that melds the intricacies of the natural world with the truths of traditional Celtic wisdom.

"To Speak for the Trees" uniquely blends the story of Beresford-Kroeger’s incredible life and her outstanding achievement as a scientist. It elegantly shows us how forests can not only heal us as people but can also help save the planet.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the ‘paths of least resistance,’ there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience. Taking stock of recent environmental justice scholarship, “Toxic Communities” examines the connections among residential segregation, zoning, and exposure to environmental hazards. Renowned environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor focuses on the locations of hazardous facilities in low-income and minority communities and shows how they have been dumped on, contaminated, and exposed.

Drawing on an array of historical and contemporary case studies from across the country, Taylor explores controversies over racially-motivated decisions in zoning laws, eminent domain, government regulation (or lack thereof), and urban renewal. She provides a comprehensive overview of the debate over whether or not there is a link between environmental transgressions and discrimination, drawing a clear picture of the state of the environmental justice field today and where it is going. In doing so, she introduces new concepts and theories for understanding environmental racism that will be essential for environmental justice scholars. A fascinating landmark study, “Toxic Communities” greatly contributes to the study of race, the environment, and space in the contemporary United States.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

BOOKS ABOUT HISTORY

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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

David Treuer

A sweeping history — and counter-narrative — of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to the present.

In “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee,” Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the U.S. military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

by Nick Estes

A work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance that shows how two centuries of Indigenous struggle created the movement proclaiming “Water is Life.”

In “Our History is the Future,” Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the #NoDAPL movement from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. While a historian by trade, Estes also draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires), making “Our History is the Future” at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity)

by Ned Blackhawk

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Turtle Island’s Native Peoples are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America

Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that

• European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success;

• Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire;

• the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior;

• California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War;

• the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West;

• twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy.

Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation's Capital

by Elizabeth Rule

Washington, D.C. is Indian land, but Indigenous peoples are often left out of the national narrative of the United States and erased in the capital city. To redress this myth of invisibility, “Indigenous DC” shines a light upon the oft-overlooked contributions of tribal leaders and politicians, artists and activists to the rich history of the District of Columbia, and their imprint ― at times memorialized in physical representations, and at other times living on only through oral history ― upon this place.

Inspired by author Elizabeth Rule's award-winning public history mobile app and decolonial mapping project Guide to Indigenous DC, this book brings together the original inhabitants who call the District their traditional territory, the diverse Indigenous diaspora who has made community here, and the land itself in a narrative arc that makes clear that all land is Native land. The acknowledgment that DC is an Indigenous space inserts the Indigenous perspective into the national narrative and opens the door for future possibilities of Indigenous empowerment and sovereignty.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico

by Ed Morales

Since its acquisition by the U.S. in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative U.S. economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In “Fantasy Island,” Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for U.S. manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the U.S. federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests.

Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street

by Victor Luckerson

In “Built from the Fire,” journalist Victor Luckerson tells the true story behind a potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history.

The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. Ed bought a newspaper to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry, and his son Jim, an attorney, embodied the family’s hopes for the civil rights movement. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood. Today the newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists to revive it once again.

Get this book from:

City Lights

Amazon

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Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America

by Candacy Taylor

It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and “Overground Railroad” celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations and systemic racism in America.

Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the “Black travel guide to America.” At that time, it was both dangerous and difficult for African Americans to travel, because Black travelers couldn’t eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for Black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

By Dee Brown

The landmark, bestselling account of the crimes against American Indians during the 19th century, now on its 50th Anniversary.

First published in 1970, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Kneeis Dee Brown's eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of American Indians during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. It was the basis for the 2007 movie of the same name from HBO films.

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown introduces readers to great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes, revealing in heartwrenching detail the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that methodically stripped them of freedom. A forceful narrative still discussed today as revelatory and controversial, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Kneepermanently altered our understanding of how the American West came to be defined.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights. Spanning more than 200 years, “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like "manifest destiny" and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms U.S. history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.

Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the 20th century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers — Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth — united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

BOOKS ABOUT RESISTANCE

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Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement

By Suzanne Cope

Two unsung women whose power using food as a political weapon during the civil rights movement was so great it brought the ire of government agents working against them. In early 1969, Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that time.

More than a thousand miles away, Aylene Quin had spent the decade using her restaurant in McComb, Mississippi, to host secret planning meetings of civil rights leaders and organizations, feed the hungry, and cement herself as a community leader who could bring people together — physically and philosophically — over a meal. These two women’s tales, separated by a handful of years, tell the same story: how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change. The leadership of these women cooking and serving food in a safe space for their communities was so powerful, the FBI resorted to coordinated extensive and often illegal means to stop the efforts of these two women, and those using similar tactics, under COINTELPRO — turning a blind eye to the firebombing of the children of a restaurant owner, destroying food intended for poor kids, and declaring a community breakfast program a major threat to public safety.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution

by Bryan Shih

Even fifty years after it was founded, the Black Panther Party remains one of the most misunderstood political organizations of the twentieth century. But beyond the labels of “extremist” and “violent” that have marked the party, and beyond charismatic leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, were the ordinary men and women who made up the Panther rank and file.

In “The Black Panthers,” photojournalist Bryan Shih and historian Yohuru Williams offer a reappraisal of the party's history and legacy. Through stunning portraits and interviews with surviving Panthers, as well as illuminating essays by leading scholars, “The Black Panthers” reveals party members' grit and battle scars-and the undying love for the people that kept them going.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy

by Rinku Sen

“Stir It Up” — written by renowned activist and trainer Rinku Sen — identifies the key priorities and strategies that can help advance the mission of any social change group. This groundbreaking book addresses the unique challenges and opportunities the new global economy poses for activist groups and provides concrete guidance for community organizations of all orientations.

Sponsored by the Ms. Foundation, “Stir It Up” draws on lessons learned from Sen's groundbreaking work with women's groups organizing for economic justice. Throughout the book, Sen walks readers through the steps of building and mobilizing a constituency and implementing key strategies that can effect social change. The book is filled with illustrative case studies that highlight best organizing practices in action and each chapter contains tools that can help groups tailor Sen's model for their own organizational needs.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle

Lillian Faderman

The fight for gay, lesbian, and trans civil rights — the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heartbreaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers — is one of the most important civil rights issues of the present day. Based on rigorous research and more than 150 interviews, “The Gay Revolution” tells this unfinished story not through dry facts but through dramatic accounts of passionate struggles, with all the sweep, depth, and intricacies that only an award-winning activist, scholar, and novelist like Lillian Faderman can evoke.

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s, the counter reaction of the 1970s and early '80s, the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic, and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic

by Jack Lowery

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic.

Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations

by John Tateishi

Author John Tateishi, himself the leader of the JACL Redress Committee for many years, is first to admit that the task was herculean in scale. The campaign was seeking an unprecedented admission of wrongdoing from Congress. It depended on a unified effort but began with an acutely divided community: for many, the shame of "camp" was so deep that they could not even speak of it; money was a taboo subject; the question of the value of liberty was insulting. Besides internal discord, the American public was largely unaware that there had been concentration camps on U.S. soil, and Tateishi knew that concessions from Congress would come only with mass education about the government's civil rights violations.

Beyond the backroom politicking and verbal fisticuffs that make this book a swashbuckling read, “Redress” is the story of a community reckoning with what it means to be both culturally Japanese and American citizens; how to restore honor; and what duty it has to protect such harms from happening again. This book has powerful implications as the idea of reparations shapes our national conversation.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

by Kaitlin B. Curtice

In an era in which "resistance" has become tokenized, popular Indigenous author Kaitlin B. Curtice reclaims it as a basic human calling. Resistance is for every human who longs to see their neighbors' holistic flourishing. We each have a role to play in the world right where we are, and our everyday acts of resistance hold us all together.

Curtice shows that we can learn to practice embodied ways of belonging and connection to ourselves and one another through everyday practices, such as getting more in touch with our bodies, resting, and remembering our ancestors. She explores four "realms of resistance" — the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral — and shows how these realms overlap and why all are needed for our liberation. Readers will be empowered to seek wholeness in the various spheres of influence they inhabit.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book: Revised and Expanded

by Gord Hill

“The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book” powerfully portrays flashpoints in history when Indigenous peoples have risen up and fought back against colonizers and other oppressors. Events depicted include the the Spanish conquest of the Aztec, Mayan and Inca empires; the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico; the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890; the resistance of the Great Plains peoples in the 19th century; and more recently, the Idle No More protests supporting Indigenous sovereignty and rights in 2012 and 2013, and the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016.

With strong, plain language and evocative illustrations, this revised and expanded edition of “The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book” reveals the tenacity and perseverance of Indigenous peoples as they have endured 500-plus years of genocide, massacre, torture, rape, displacement, and assimilation: a necessary antidote to conventional histories of the Americas.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

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Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

by Derecka Purnell

In “Becoming Abolitionists,” Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.

Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

BONUS BOOK

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Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (Abolitionist Papers)

Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? “Let This Radicalize You” is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

The book is intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

Get this book from:

Powell’s

Amazon

About the Lakota People’s Law Project

The Lakota People’s Law Project is dedicated to reversing the slow genocide of the Lakota People and destruction of our culture. The Lakota People’s Law Project is an Indigenous-led partner with Native communities and tribes to protect sacred lands, safeguard human rights, promote sustainability, reunite Indigenous families, and much more. Lakota Law is a project of the 501(c)3 Sacred Defense Fund. For more, please visit: https://lakotalaw.org

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