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It's Indigenous Peoples' Day. Here's a thread by a settler South Asian scholar on Indigenous Studies texts we should all be reading, learning from, citing, and most importantly translating into our everyday lives and political commitments.
Haunani Kay-Trask's From a Native Daughter (1993) is a brilliant and searing critique of US imperialism in the Pacific and the colonization of Hawaii by white American planters. You might know Trask from this TV clip that keeps going viral online:
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a writer, poet, and scholar, maybe most well-known for her short story collection The Power of Horses & Other Stories (1990), but has played an incredibly crucial role in the development and institutionalization of Indigenous Studies...
...programs at American universities. Her landmark book Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth (2001) was heavily attacked by conservatives/denialists upon its publication, because it plainly lays out the history of dispossession, land theft & genocide.
This recent podcast interview between Cook-Lynn and her daughter Margaret Cook about her life's work and activism is really worth listening to. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1qYpFbNAzfMweW7LjOd0gA?si=w_tRIfKKQqWMJ0N5iQxJNQ
Phil Deloria's Playing Indian (1998) tackles the stereotyped representations & performances of American Indian figures in US culture. Not unlike blackface and minstrelsy, "playing Indian" is one of the ways that the US has culturally justified its oppression of Indigenous people.
Phil Deloria's father Vine Deloria, Jr. was himself one of the most prolific and well-known scholar-activists of his time. His book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) is req. reading. It touches on a host of issues, incl. Native religion...
...which was a major focus of his work. His later book God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973) is, as the title suggests, a study of Native views on religion & the sacred and an early (in terms of academic scholarship) critique of scientism.
Staying in that same era of the 1960s-70s and the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM), you have George Manuel's The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974), co-written with Michael Posluns, which frames the stakes of Indigenous activism in the 20th century and details...
...some of the major epistemological differences in terms of land, property, selfhood between European settler-colonial and Indigenous worldviews. It also fleshes out the concept of the 4th World as distinct from the 3rd. It was re-published last year by UMN press with...
...a new introduction by Glenn Coulthard, whose own recent book Red Skin, White Masks (2014) is an important & thoroughgoing critique of the discourse of recognition & reconciliation politics in contemporary Canada. It also develops the concept of grounded normativity.
When it comes to my primary field, postcolonial studies, it is Jodi Byrd's book The Transit of Empire (2011) that intervenes in our complacent & self-absorbed focus on *resource* colonies like South Asia to correct & expand PoCo's purview to Indigeneity & settler colonialism.
My favourite Indigenous studies book of the last decade has been Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus (2014), which I wrote a review essay on but couldn't get published. It is a strong reframing of polisci & anthro work on citizenship & centers political sovereignty as a core issue
A scholar whose work has had maybe the broadest reach outside the field of late is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. As in much of her work, in As We Have Always Done (2017) she keeps a constant focus on Anishinaabe language, ways of thinking & being, decentering the settler state...
...and Euro-colonial modes of thinking which, as 3rd world theorists like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o also recognized, permanently keep a true decolonization out of reach by holding the mind captive. Her Islands of Decol Love & Dancing on Our Turtle's Back are great places to begin reading
Many who don't read in Indigenous Studies might still know of or have heard Winona LaDuke speak. (She was at NYU around a year ago.) She has authored so many books, but the one that made the biggest mark on me is The Militarization of Indian Country (2011).
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014) is crucial reading as a broader history of Indigenous peoples & nations in the geography claimed by the US & their encounters with the settler state. Follow her: @rdunbaro.
@KimTallBear's work in Native American DNA and elsewhere is necessary for gaining a clear understanding of how the logic of DNA testing (like its legal predecessor, blood quantum laws) undermine Indigenous sovereignty by putting a legal/pol issue into biologistic terms.
@nickwestes' Our History is the Future is one of the most discussed recent books in the field. It tracks the long-arc of Indigenous anticolonial resistance that led to Standing Rock & #NoDAPL. His discussions on @The_Red_Nation podcast are excellent, as is that collective's work.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith is a Māori scholar in Aotearoa whose book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) has been widely received and taught. Recently her contract was not renewed by the Univ of @waikato. Support the campaign to secure her position. 
A journal article which deserves mention here because of the importance of its argument & wide circulation is @tuckeve & Wayne Yang's Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (2012). It pushes back against the overuse & abstraction of the term to recenter the return of land & concrete...
...material forms of decolonization. Decolonizing the curriculum, for instance, is immensely important but it isn't decolonization. That would involve restoring Indigenous sovereignty in a real & tangible way. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630
This list will always be incomplete since there are so many brilliant Indigenous writers & scholars out there—none of whom I was never assigned until I was fortunate to meet one of my mentors, Dean Saranillio. Here are a few books by non-Indigenous scholars in the field, incl him
