Commentary: “An Indian Among Los Indigenas”

Ursula Pike’s debut An Indian Among Los Indigenas follows 25-year-old Ursula during her two year stay in Bolivia as a volunteer with the Peace Corps and poses the question: What does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn?

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Commentary: As Long as Grass Grows + full-metal Indigiqueer

The Decolonize This Book Club read Dina-Gilio Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock paired with Joshua Whitehead’s debut poetry collection called full-metal Indigiqueer for our June and July meetings. Together, the two texts ask the question: How do we save the world when the apocalypse has already happened?

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Commentary: Malcolm and Me

Malcolm and Me, by Robin Farmer, is a YA/middle-grade historical fiction set in 1973-1974 Philadelphia, following young Roberta Forest in her eighth-grade year at a Catholic high school.

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Commentary: Care Work + Kimiko Does Cancer

For the March Decolonize This Book Club, we read a collection of essays, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Kimiko Does Cancer: A Graphic Memoir by Kimiko Tobimatsu.

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Commentary: Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

Love After the End is a collection of nine short speculative fiction stories written by Indigenous, queer, and Two-Spirit writers and storytellers. The question explored in each story is, as Joshua Whitehead tells us in his introduction, “What does it mean to be Two-Spirit during the apocalypse?”

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What's Chava Possum Up to Today?

This week I published a sneak peek at a brand new fictional serial called The Bellview Lunch Lady Rebellion, about how four lunch ladies' plan to rid the school of its army recruitment officer turns into a community-care revolution. Follow the story and learn more about army recruitment in our schools @lunchrebellion on Twitter.

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Commentary: The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed Masood

Masood’s novel follows two immigrant families as fundamentalism and nationalism take root seemingly everywhere, pushing families into dire situations, where right and wrong aren’t so simple. The struggle for one’s soul is central to this story. It’s also a love story, a tale about family dynamics, an exploration of Islam from multiple perspectives, and a commentary on American violence.

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Commentary: In Search of Appalachia

I entered In Search of Appalachia with excitement at the prospect of reading about Appalachia by an Appalachian, rather than through the eyes of outsiders, as is so often the case in media, who typically present Appalachia as a backward and dirty place— one characterized by lacking, rather than a destination draped in rich culture. But I left In Search of Appalachia with a furrowed brow, disappointed in the missed opportunity of really grappling with our history as colonizers on the frontier.

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