Description: Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin, leads us into the borderlands of history, science, memoir, fiction, and other genres to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people invite us to inhabit? In Bad Indians Book Club, we encounter a potent challenge to all the stories settler colonialism tells.
Brief description:
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist whose books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a two-time winner of both the Oregon Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.
Review Quotes:
"A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives." ----Booklist, starred review
"Bad Indians Book Club is a compendium of worlds. From a lifetime of reading, there emerges a marriage of tapestry and map, a vision of the literary canon not as some secret handshake of the correctly educated but as a living, growing organism. . . . There's a dangerousness to a book like this. It's not enough to define the Good Indian, the Grateful Immigrant, the Untroublesome Minority. Nor is it enough to simply reject these designations. One must interrogate how they came to hold so much power, how they offer the willing participant so many crumbs of reward from colonialism's table." --Omar El Akkad, award-winning journalist and author of American War and What Strange Paradise
"A detailed and exploratory work of literary criticism, Bad Indians Book Club examines culture and colonization through a multitude of written works." ----Foreword
"Bad Indians Book Club is full of good medicine--challenging us to ask questions and bringing us home to ourselves. As Patty Krawec guides us into the deep wisdom wells of many people who journey in kinship, we consider how to hold the curiosity of care and stories, and what it means to imagine and create a future that integrates all our stories into a web of healing. Please buy this book, and celebrate the power of story in a weary yet flourishing world. --Kaitlin B. Curtice, award-winning author of Native and Living Resistance
"With Bad Indians Book Club, Patty Krawec gifts us a compelling investigation into the power of not just reading books but also doing so in community. Krawec makes the case for building your circle through reading, as a way of being in better relations with all our kin, including the land. Thinking deeply alongside other books, Bad Indians Book Club is a needed guide at a moment when books are under attack. Books are not just written culture; they are also oral culture, and Krawec illuminates this beautifully." --Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, theoretical physicist and author of The Disordered Cosmos
"This genre-crossing, shape-shifting, imagination-expanding book is for all who love to, and also need to, read. We tell stories to live, and this enlivening book reflects on all kinds of stories, each page suffused with Patty Krawec's unmistakable voice and generous, timeless wisdom." --Astra Taylor, documentary filmmaker and author of several books, including Remake the World and The Age of Insecurity
"In Bad Indians Book Club, Patty Krawec provides critical space for the ne'er-do-wells, disrupters, red sheep, box-busters, tricksters, and all of us rowdy relatives defying expectations. Indigenous people have always been proverbial thorns in the sides of colonizers, and this piercing book does an incredible job of letting the air out of today's imperialist narratives." --Taté Walker, award-winning Two Spirit Lakota storyteller and community-builder