100 Books Like Dawnland Voices

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

This account of early Native writing by a Wabanaki scholar has had a profound effect on our work as scholars, teachers, and writers. It recovers an archive that requires us to put Native literature at the center of a white-dominated literary history. Brooks’ brilliant argument connects Native language and history of the Northeast with its geography, a vast network of interconnected waterways that served as the basis for a sophisticated communal Native system of communication. Foundational to this system is the idea of “the common pot,” shared by all Algonquian-speaking peoples, that everyone and everything is related and interdependent for survival and flourishing. Including the invading Europeans, whose writing technologies Native peoples then absorbed and adapted. 

Though we are thankful for the current movements to decolonize archives and museums, from at least 1750, Native writers have been doing this important survival work of asserting Native ways of knowing. This revelation is the subject of Wisecup’s ground-breaking study. It shows how early Native writers assembled lists, collages, and literary texts that, through juxtaposition and recontextualization, resisted the way colonial archives defined their bodies, belongings, and words as ethnographic evidence of vanishing peoples. Wisecup offers revealing ways to read the Indigenous compilations of key figures like Mohegan Samson Occom’s medicinal recipes, Ojibwe Charlotte Johnston’s poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent’s vocabulary lists. We also deeply appreciate how Wisecup ends each chapter by connecting the early writer it focuses on to contemporary Indigenous culture.

We greatly admire this born-digital “scalar book” for its attempt to build a decolonizing “counter-archive” out of one of the most in/famous western archives of Indigenous materials. Edward S. Curtis was an early 20th-century photographer, whose major collection, The North American Indian, defined the stereotypic image of the vanishing Native. It succeeded in capturing and “othering” Natives as somehow heroic and stoic, but also primitive and gone. In consultation with many Native tribes, this digital book reveals how Curtis’s work “performs,” or does that work of western archives. By juxtaposing his compelling images with short essays that contextualize and thus humanize his photographic subjects, this project allows us to acknowledge and repair the injustices of the past in the present.

Our Beloved Kin is a unique account of King Philip’s War that centers on the history of Native resistance and their experience of the conflict. Drawing on early documents and information often overlooked in previous studies, the author, a member of the Missisquoi Band of Abenaki, presents an in-depth chronicle of the war and the events leading up to it. I wish this book had been in print when I was researching my book. While it wouldn’t have changed the basic arc of the novel, it would have given me a more complete understanding of James Printer’s perspective.

This title caught my attention because we usually associate slavery with the American south. But the Puritans brought many indentured laborers from England to help build their settlements and operate their farms and businesses. When these white men worked their way to freedom, the settlers turned to indenturing Native Americans, and enslaving captives of warfare, selling some of them for goods and African slaves from the Caribbean. (I found a reference in this book that my ancestor, Dr. Mathew Fuller, participated in this trade during King Philip’s War.) Newell’s book, full of primary sources, gives excellent background on, and understanding of, the founding of New England’s culture, economy, and legal framework. Those alien ideas didn’t go so well for the original inhabitants as white settlers pushed westward. 

Addiction, grief, generational trauma… all these things exist in Talty’s work. But his prose lifts all that heaviness and makes it not only bearable, but often strangely beautiful.

His characters are raw and real, and his skill with dialogue is enviable. I love the way the book is structured as a collection of linked stories, each one informing and contributing to the rest. The book is set on the Penobscot reservation in Maine, an area often overlooked both in literature and reality.

Talty is a natural storyteller, and his voice rings with wisdom, dry humor, and honesty, giving readers rare insight into this community. 

While hundreds of books have been written on early New England, Ben Mutschler deftly paints a portrait of life in New England “with sickness at its center.” He thoroughly integrates family struggles over illness and the demands placed on local governments into the story of the social and political development of this region that has long valued public health even as it has also endured tragic circumstances.

A ground-breaking work, which demonstrates how the theoretical witch was embodied by real women, and how a seemingly bizarre fantasy was plausible in among the shapes and rhythms of daily life. This influential study is as much a social, economic and cultural history of seventeenth-century New England as it is strictly speaking a history of witchcraft – indeed, Karlsen demonstrates clearly that the latter cannot be assimilated with an appreciation of the former. Context is everything, and without it we just fall back on stereotypes and tired assumptions.

Witches and neighbours were two-sides of the same coin, the former a projection of the hostile emotions of the latter, and, as Karlsen explains, this fraught relationship was fundamentally gendered. To appreciate how some people were accused of witchcraft, we need first to explore relationships between people in the community, including relations between women. Honour, reputation, age, status and so on, were… show more.

John Putnam Demos remains the “dean” of historians of the Salem witch trials. 

Entertaining Satan remains his most impactful contribution to the study of the events of 1692 by providing their cultural context in early New England, upon which historians have built over the years expanding upon Demos’ findings.

Perhaps his greatest contribution is his interdisciplinary approach invoking the research tools of psychology and sociology, as well as cultural history. His concluding chapter, “Communities: Witchcraft over Time,” provides broadly, excellent insights drawn from his extensive research.