I love a book with a mix of big wonder and big sorrow. I read this book; no, I gobbled this book in one day, looking out over the Atlantic.

I cried big salty tears into the sea and laughed out loud with the ocean breeze. I learned about the untold histories of Guam and the constellation of people and experiences that make up a rich life. I felt the beauty and power of the indigenous culture of Guam and I grieved the many deaths caused by the collision of climate crises, politics and greed. 

This is a little off-piste in that this isn’t exactly about cold climates; the main topic of Dodds Pennock’s book is about how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe. I first heard Dodds Pennock talk about her book at a lecture in London just a few months back and had to buy the book, which is a riveting account of the reverse migration of Indigenous Americans to Europe.  

Why include this book on the Arctic, you ask? Dodds Pennock also writes about a few Indigenous Inuit that make it to England, and I haven’t stopped thinking about the story she tells about their fraught lives in the UK and (until now) unknown or forgotten history in England. For example, she tells a gripping story of two Inuits who were abducted and brought to London in the 1570s and are buried in the city in unmarked graves at St. Olave’s Church. 

What happens when an out-of-shape, stay-at-home book reviewer is talked into trekking into one of the most remote parts of the world?

Misadventures abound in the jungle, terrifying at the time but hilarious in retrospect. This is one of the books I use for inspiration when I am considering venturing into unusual, distant areas of the globe. It demonstrates that anyone with the will to do it can explore, survive, enjoy, and even see the humor in outrageous situations.

Ursula K Le Guin does not pull any punches in The Word for World is Forest, placing the peaceful nature-oriented inhabitants of the planet Athshe firmly in the grips of the callous colonists from Terra. The Athsheans find no alternative but to fight back and reclaim their world and their forests.

I was inspired by this book, which Le Guin wrote before the environmental dangers we acknowledge today became so blatantly evident. As an author, she was prophetic and brave, the kind of author I can only aspire to be.

The Athshean characters that she creates are also courageous, reclaiming their world by forcing the Terrans to retreat from the planet. I would so dearly love to feel as connected to our planet as the Athsheans do to theirs. 

I love how this dazzling book reveals a deep truth that is known to so many women of color but obscured by the white feminist myth of individualism. There is no way we can be not related to each other, so the real question that matters for politics is not whether we will be related to each other; it is how we want to be.

Part excavation of settler colonialism—including its effects on Indigenous women—and part meditation on how to build solidarity without denying our complicity in oppressive structures, the book is visionary and even manages to be hopeful. It also draws attention to an issue that no 21st-century feminism can afford to ignore: our relationships with the land. I learned so much about what it means to show up for each other and about why we have to.

The Red Nation is a revolutionary Indigenous organization that is part of the historic 21st-century revival of Indigenous culture and political resistance that has emerged across the Americas to block oil pipelines, prevent mining projects, and basically lead the fight to save us all from climate extinction. This is their manifesto.

The Red Deal engages with many of the ideas of the “Green New Deal” proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, but starts from the standpoint of Indigenous people across the world. As a result, it puts the fight against climate change in the context of 500 years of capitalism and colonialism, and makes an inspiring case why everyone who wants a sustainable economy should support Indigenous people’s fights for their land and freedom.

Paul Kane was a Toronto-born artist who travelled from Toronto all the way to present-day Portland, Oregon, between 1845 and 1848. As the title suggests, Paul Kane was keenly interested in the indigenous peoples of the North American West. His book, published in 1859 and re-issued in 1925 and again in 1968, provided 19th-century readers with fascinating portraits, in paint and words, of dozens of Indigenous peoples.

The book is no less compelling for contemporary readers who are interested in the loss of the world and the lives of 19th-century Indigenous nations.     

Thomas King is one of the great voices of our generation, and without a doubt, the thing I loved most about this book was his voice: witty, wry, self-deprecating, caustic, clever, outraged, and honest.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the facts, characters, stories, and narratives of a difficult history, as well as reckoning with past and present injustice.

A scientist discovers that his invention, a defoliant, has contributed to exterminating an entire native reserve in British Columbia, causing the birds and turtles to leave. The battle is on between nature and science to restore the balance. But all is not well in the corporation, for the scientist’s boss has become a shopaholic to compensate for his lonely life and wonders why his wife wants to divorce him. The characters are enjoyable, the action circular, and our current political considerations are tackled in a non-didactic fashion. And the human spirit triumphs despite the chemical overload! Throughout the novel, King makes searing one-liners about unbridled capitalism: “capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”

We as a nation and society are on the road to truth and reconciliation. Critical to that journey are stories such as I Am Not a Number. The book tells the heartbreaking story of Irene, the author’s grandmother, and her brothers who were taken away from their home on Nipissing First Nation to live at a residential school, very far from home. At the school, names are not used. All students are known by numbers. This story will inspire important conversations that will help younger generations understand the horrors so many indigenous children endured in the residential schools. It is a dark part of our history, kept secret by past generations, that is only now coming to light through these powerful stories.