Here are 100 books that Thinking in Indian fans have personally recommended if you like
Thinking in Indian.
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In 1971, when I graduated from law school, I received a fellowship to help staff a Legal Aid office on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I lived there for nearly four years, representing tribal members in tribal, state, and federal courts. I then worked for 45 years on the National Legal Staff of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). One of my major responsibilities was helping Indian tribes and their members protect and enforce their rights, and I filed numerous cases on their behalf. During that time, I taught Federal Indian Law for more than 20 years and also published The Rights of Indians and Tribes.
This novel won the National Book Award and it’s easy to see why. Written by a Native author about reservation life, it discusses a crime that occurred that—like many reservation crimes—went unsolved for a long time.
The book is informative and compelling, and it weaves Native practices and culture into the story. I found it particularly interesting because it includes characters and themes that resonated with my experiences.
Winner of the National Book Award • Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book
From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where I am on the faculty of The American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and its former director. Because of my expertise in federal Indian law, I have been a consultant in certain legal matters involving Native issues. Some of the many books I teach and have written about are on my Shepherd list. My work is sustaining: writing and teaching about Native life and literature is a way of joining a crucial conversation about the survival of the planet through living a socially, politically, and economically balanced life.
I am recommending this book of beautifully written essays on the environment by the Chickasaw novelist, poet, and essayist Linda Hogan because it is the best book on the subject I know.
Dwellings focuses on the Indigenous relation to the natural world, one of kinship, a subject at the core of my thinking. “Here is a lesson,” Hogan tells us, “what happens to the people and what happens to the land is the same thing.” This is a lesson the West has not learned; and its ignorance of this lesson or its refusal to learn it has led us to the brink of climate collapse.
Reading Dwellings carefully and thoughtfully is a way I rehearse how to live with, not against the environment.
Award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan's first work of nonfiction explores the author's lifelong love for the living world and all its inhabitants. As an Indian woman, grandmother, and environmentalist, Hogan questions "our responsibilities to the caretaking of the future and to the other species who share our journey." In stories about bats, bees, porcupines, wolves, and caves, Hogan honors the spirit of all living things. Dwellings is about the idea and meaning of home. The earth is our universal home, this book tells us. Dwellings teaches us about cultures whose understanding of the world are often at odds…
I am Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where I am on the faculty of The American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and its former director. Because of my expertise in federal Indian law, I have been a consultant in certain legal matters involving Native issues. Some of the many books I teach and have written about are on my Shepherd list. My work is sustaining: writing and teaching about Native life and literature is a way of joining a crucial conversation about the survival of the planet through living a socially, politically, and economically balanced life.
I value Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education by the Cherokee writer Diane Glancy because it is an empathetic history, one that compels me to understand its subjects from their perspective, Plains Indian prisoners taken captive defending their lands from the U.S. invasion and shipped to Fort Marion Prison in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1875. There, the prisoners were subject to a regime of reeducation in order to “kill the Indian and save the man,” as the head of the prison and founder of the Carlisle Indian School Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt stated it.
This regime subsequently became the model for the Indian boarding schools. But Glancy brings home that this model of “dislocation” is “at the heart of [all] education,” such as mine: a Jewish boy educated in an Episcopalian school where the curriculum without a thought erased my own culture.
At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as "trouble causers," arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.
Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
I am Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where I am on the faculty of The American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and its former director. Because of my expertise in federal Indian law, I have been a consultant in certain legal matters involving Native issues. Some of the many books I teach and have written about are on my Shepherd list. My work is sustaining: writing and teaching about Native life and literature is a way of joining a crucial conversation about the survival of the planet through living a socially, politically, and economically balanced life.
From Sand Creek by Acoma Pueblo citizen Simon Oritz is one of my favorite books because in a little over 90 pages of poetry constructed in concise, elliptical form it captures the history of America that is largely erased from official narratives: the history of foundational American violence at home and abroad. Perhaps this narrative is becoming more visible now, particularly with the rise of films about this largely marginalized history. At its roots, this is the history of Native American genocide, epitomized by the massacre of peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Natives by the Colorado Volunteers at Sand Creek in 1864.
The massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children by U.S. soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864 was a shameful episode in American history, and its battlefield was proposed as a National Historic Site in 1998 to pay homage to those innocent victims. Poet Simon Ortiz had honored those people seventeen years earlier in his own way. That book, from Sand Creek, is now back in print.
Originally published in a small-press edition, from Sand Creek makes a large statement about injustices done to Native peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny. It also makes poignant reference to the spread…
I'm addicted to discovering what lies within the unknown. The biggest mystery, I believe, that baffles us today is not necessarily what lies at the edge of the universe but what lives within this one here. I enjoy attempting to solve large problems and if I can’t compute a result at least understand what the problem suggests. In the realm of the unknown, I'm an expert of nothing. In hours of research and reading and writing, one comes to a point in their process of learning with the realization that it does not matter how much one learns, there will always be that much more, logarithmically multiplied exponentially by the rate of acceleration, to learn.
Since the days of Ronald Regan, trickle-down economic theory has been a pipe dream of the uneducated and I don’t even have a degree. Mark Mattern does a great job inverting the theory of trickle-down in explaining that indeed wealth piles from the bottom up not drip down from the top. I recommend reading this book before you read mine for the simple fact that instead of inverted trickle-down theory, I describe how water moves like a stream through an ecosystem. If it is not properly pitched from the mountaintop to the valley, with proper displacement of creatures below, and flow rate through the foothills, we are inevitably left dependent on drinking from a wasteland.
One of the most durable myths of US political economy is that we take from the rich and give to the poor - penalising the rich for their hard work and rewarding the undeserving. Mark Mattern turns that story on its head. Documenting the everyday, institutionalised ways that income and wealth are transferred upward in the United States, Mattern shows how in fact the bottom subsidises the top.
His provocative analysis, describing in detail the processes and policy choices that systematically favour the rich, is both a tale of "Robin Hood in reverse" and a call for a more equitable,…
I am an American-trained Indonesian anthropologist, teacher, writer, researcher, and academic nomad who has lived and taught at a Saudi university. I have travelled since childhood. When I was a kid or teenager, I journeyed to various places and cities for schooling away from my home village (and parents) in the isolated highlands of Central Java. I also travelled for shepherding my goats which I did after school. So, I love to travel, learn many things from my travel, and as a teacher of Anthropology of Travel, I have always been fascinated by literature on travel whatever its forms ranging from pilgrimage and nomadism to migration and tourism.
Jeddah in the western Arabia has long been an entrance for Muslim pilgrims around the world as well as a terminus for global-international trade routes for centuries or even millennia due to its strategic location in the coastal Red Sea. Yet, surprisingly, the region has not been the subject of a serious academic inquiry. Scholars of Saudi Arabia generally focus on Mecca and Medina, two most important pilgrimage sites for Muslims. To my knowledge, this book is the first biography of Jeddah that traces the city's urban history, development, and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its contemporary era. The author in particular examines how Jeddah’s different groups of travelers (migrants, pilgrims, etc.) interrelated in a changing urban space and how their economic behaviors and activities contributed to the shape of the city’s socio-political framework.
Known as the 'Gate to Mecca' or 'Bride of the Red Sea', Jeddah has been a gateway for pilgrims travelling to Mecca and Medina and a station for international trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean for centuries. Seen from the perspective of its diverse population, this first biography of Jeddah traces the city's urban history and cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to its present-day claim to multiculturalism, within the conservative environment of the Arabian Peninsula. Contextualising Jeddah with developments in the wider Muslim world, Ulrike Freitag investigates how different groups of migrants interacted in a changing…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
I have been trying to understand India’s evolution especially its economic path for the last half-century— by reading, traveling, and writing on aspects of that evolution. Originally this started with the Cold War concern about how a democracy would navigate using a democratic political system. So I took appropriate courses in college and graduate school, worked in India in the Peace Corps, and then spent a little under a decade teaching about it a doing research. For the following five decades I have continued my interest and publishing and studying. Whether I have understood much is for others to determine but these are my five book nominees.
This is ostensibly the third book documenting the history of a North Indian village from 1950 until today, but it also records much of the anthropological literature documenting the development in other villages in India over that period which parallels that in many other villages of South Asia. Viewed in the context of statistical data which is collected on a much broader scale this confirms the remarkable economic evolution India has experienced from basketcase to development model.
Development economics is about understanding how and why lives change. How Lives Change: Palanpur, India, and Development Economics studies a single village in a crucially important country to illuminate the drivers of these changes, why some people do better or worse than others, and what influences mobility and inequality.
How Lives Change draws on seven decades of detailed data collection by a team of dedicated development economists to describe the evolution of Palanpur's economy, its society, and its politics. The emerging story of integration of the village economy with the outside world is placed against the backdrop of a rapidly…
I am a scholar of international human rights and comparative genocide studies. My father was a refugee from the Holocaust. So I was always interested in genocide, but I did not want to be another Holocaust scholar. Instead, I introduced one of the first university courses in Canada on comparative genocide studies. From a very young age, I was also very interested in social justice: I was seven when Emmett Till was murdered in the US. So when I became a professor, I decided to specialize in international human rights. I read a lot of “world literature” fiction that helps me to empathize with people in places I’ve never been.
North Korea is a combination of the Soviet Gulag and Auschwitz. Under the reign of the three Kims (grandfather, father, and son), North Koreans have endured malnourishment and starvation since the 1990s. Most of this would been avoidable if the government hadn’t had ridiculous economic policies forbidding private enterprise, and also imprisoned anyone who criticized the Kims’ rule.
Remick is a journalist who introduces North Korea to a general audience by interviewing six refugees. I “assigned” this book to one of my ladies’ book clubs and they found it very interesting and easy to read.
An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books)
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
'Human development' indicates an advancement that I would like to find in any kind of progress. Different disciplines define 'human development' in different ways, but my research is to identify the common core in order to link both the individual- with the social dimension, and natural evolution with changes due to personal choices and policies. Through such research, I have been able to take a new perspective on my academic subjects: economic growth and happiness. My belief is that it is possible to make human development, economic growth, and happiness go together. But unfortunately, this is not what is occurring, and understanding why is key.
I like this book because it does not simply show how income inequality affects happiness inequality, thus suggesting that unhappiness is just a sign of material disadvantage.
The book also links income and happiness to hope, which is a feeling that motivates people to plan and invest for the future.
To convince the sceptical reader about measuring hope and happiness, Carol Graham provides an abundance of empirical evidence.
But being an economist, in addition to telling emblematic stories, she reports evidence based on large samples and international data.
It is a challenging book, but rewarding, because it helps to understand both how the exhaustion of the American Dream will affect the future, and where to look for new hope.
How the optimism gap between rich and poor is creating an increasingly divided society The Declaration of Independence states that all people are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and that among these is the pursuit of happiness. But is happiness available equally to everyone in America today? How about elsewhere in the world? Carol Graham draws on cutting-edge research linking income inequality with well-being to show how the widening prosperity gap has led to rising inequality in people's beliefs, hopes, and aspirations. For the United States and other developed countries, the high costs of being poor are most evident not…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
My passion for Central American politics and history derived quite directly from the conflicts in the region from the late 1970s onwards. Previously I had worked in Bolivia, where I had studied as a doctoral student, and although many people still view Latin American countries as pretty homogenous, I quickly discovered that they are very far from being so. I had to unlearn quite a bit and acquire new skills, although luckily, indigenous languages are really only dominant in Guatemala. Now we can be rather less partisan although many injustices remain.
It is very rare for economists to write clearly and intelligibly for lay readers. It is even rarer that the complexities of the Central American economies are lucidly explained at both macro- and micro-levels, with a critique that is profound and alternatives that are viable. Although some things have changed in the last thirty years, it is simply not possible to understand contemporary Central America without knowledge of its previous political economy.
In this book Victor Bulmer-Thomas uses his previously unpublished estimates of the national accounts to explore economic and social development in the five Central American republics from 1920. He examines in detail variations in economic policy between countries which help to account for differences in performance. The major political developments are woven into the analysis and linked to changes in internal and external conditions. Growth under liberal oligarchic rule in the 1920s, heavily dependent on exports of coffee and bananas, was accompanied by modest reform programmes. The 1929 depression, which hit the region hard, undermined most of the reforms and…
