Peoples of the World Spring Forth: Indigenous People’s Reading Group

Description

The Indigenous Peoples’s Reading Group has grown from the enthusiastic call for the need of greater understanding of the long history of the peoples of North America and other continents of the world who were of those continents before and remain after the European colonists came to settle and bring this capitalist relations to every corner of the globe. Our group began following a stirring presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz September of 2014 where she introduced An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States.

Reading List

Each book will be read and discussed per stated dates, completing a twelve-session reading of historical and fictional works of indigenous peoples.

May 6 & 13
The Dead Do Not Die: Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist

Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a point of departure, Lindqvist takes a haunting tour through the colonial past, retracing the steps of Europeans in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward and thus exposing the roots of genocide via his own journey through the Saharan desert.

May 20 & 27
The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Tutuola’s first novel—based in the tradition of Yuruba oral story telling, we follow the mystical journey of a palm wine drinker through a nightmarish world shaped by the clash of western and Nigerian culture.

june 3 & 10
The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus

A novel of psychological fiction depicting the culture clash between native peoples of the East Indies who have intimacy with the spirit world, and the “reason and pragmatism” of a Dutch colonial official.

June 17 & 24
Walking With the Comrades by Arundhati Roy

A non-fiction chronicle of the campaign by the Indian government, allied with mining companies, against some of the country’s own forest tribal people. A story not covered in India’s weak domestic press.

July 1 & 8
The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing

The first novel by Doris Lessing. Published in 1950, it portrays the psychic distortions and violent obsessions of the colonialist mind, drawing equally on Lessing’s Marxist analysis of the racist society in Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and her first reflections on the image of her parents, who settled there from England after World War I.

July 15 & 22
Terra Nullius by Sven Lindqvist

Lindqvist traveled 7,000 miles through Australia in search of the lands the British had claimed as their own because it was inhabited by “lower races,” the native Aborigines—nearly nine-tenths of whom were annihilated by whites.