books to read if you want to learn more about native issues

The Way We Civilise by Rosalind Kidd
This book explores treatment of Australian aboriginal people by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. I hadn't read much at all about aboriginal issues in places besides North America, so I was really interested to check this out. Not surprisingly, the horrible, dehumanizing treatment Australian native peoples received bears a strong resemblance to colonial North American policy, with an emphasis on both physical and cultural genocide (residential schools and other programs designed to destroy aboriginal language and culture). Kidd uses a lot of government reports and documents as sources for her analysis (Chomsky styles, only she's actually capable of forming a non-convoluted sentence), which is always an effective strategy. You can always dispute subjective points, but even the government would have a hard time trying to effectively argue with their published information.

Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene by Ila Bussidor and Ustun Bilgen-Reinart
This book is about the relocation of the Sayisi Dene people of northern Manitoba in the 1950s by the Canadian government. It's incredibly sad and difficult to get through in places, but really worthwhile. Bussidor actually grew up in the community in question, and there are a lot of other primary sources used as well, which accentuates how recent these events were. The Dene people were suddenly airlifted from a remote forest community to a collection of shacks next to a cemetary just outside Churchill, Manitoba, and this book deals with the deplorable conditions they were subjected to and their (understandable) inability to adjust to their new life. As hard as this was to read, it's a good reminder that colonialism and genocide of aboriginal people were not issues confined to the U.S. (Canadians often seem to downplay our history of genocide to focus on the atrocities of the American West). It's also necessary to remember how recently events like these took place, as it also seems like we try to pretend that these horrible acts took place in the distant past to avoid taking responsibility for the actions of our recent ancestors.


Anything by Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill is one of my all time favourite authors, so it's hard to narrow down what you should read by him. He's aboriginal, very radical, and a professor. He writes in a way that's smart but not academic, and he's really sarcastic and witty a lot of the time as well, which I thoroughly enjoy. Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader would be a good starting point (it contains an insanely funny and biting essay about racist naming practices for sports teams wherein he points out that if we're quick to embrace racist sports team names like Washington Redskins that perhaps we should expand our repetoire to include such equally offensive teams as the Wisconsin Wetbacks and St. Louis Sluts). Fantasies of the Master Race is also excellent. It deals exclusively with representations of aboriginal people in white culture, ranging from Hollywood movies to the new age men's movement. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas is both a history of colonialism and analysis of the term genocide and how it's been appropriated, and it's really interesting as well.