The library
The books behind the atlas
These pages cite books by Indigenous authors and scholars, official records, and reporting. A citation tells you where a claim can be checked. Authorship is stated honestly - who wrote, who narrated, who translated, and who is not Indigenous.
Foundations
The shelf the whole site stands on - mostly Indigenous authors, cited with publisher and year.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
A botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation braids science with Anishinaabe teachings on reciprocity, gratitude, and the Honorable Harvest. The closest thing this atlas has to a founding text.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
An Apalech clan (Wik-Mungkan, Cape York) scholar and carver explains Indigenous knowledge as a system - pattern, relationship, and yarning - rather than a museum of facts.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Re-reads the Enlightenment through the Indigenous critique of European society - especially the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk - and dismantles the myth that complex societies require domination.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
The Americas before contact: populous, urban, and deliberately landscaped. Amazonian terra preta and engineered forests replace the empty-wilderness myth with evidence.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Four centuries of US history told from the nations it displaced. The documented record of removal, broken treaties, and resistance that this atlas refuses to skip.
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
A Penobscot attorney, activist, and teacher on ceremony, prophecy, and the work of healing a severed relationship with the living world - written for readers inside and outside Indigenous communities.
Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future
An anthology of Native elders, scholars, and activists on the original instructions - the covenants each people holds with its place. Widest single-window view in this library.
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources
Ethnoecology built on decades of collaboration with California Native elders: burning, pruning, and harvesting as active cultivation of what only looked like wilderness.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
Philosophy of perception grounded in oral cultures: how alphabetic literacy shifted the human senses away from the speaking land. The philosophical spine of this atlas.
Behind the entries
Each nation entry names the books it actually teaches from, with authorship stated honestly - who narrated, who wrote, who translated.
The Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes
Braiding Sweetgrass
The Honorable Harvest, the grammar of animacy, and a working synthesis of botany and Anishinaabe teaching by an enrolled Citizen Potawatomi scientist.
The Serviceberry
Kimmerer's short, direct case for the gift economy - abundance through circulation, not growth. The clearest bridge between Anishinaabe economics and the modern degrowth debate.
The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway
An Ojibwe grandmother-grandfather (mishomis) telling of the migration, the prophecies, and the teachings, written for Anishinaabe children and adopted far beyond.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
The documented frame - treaties, removal, resistance - within which this page's history section sits.
The Yanomami of the Amazon
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman
Dictated testimony, not a book 'about' the Yanomami: a shaman explains the xapiri, the falling sky, and the sickness of merchandise in his own reasoning. Authorship is shared honestly - Kopenawa's words, worked into text with Albert.
Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
A companion voice from another Brazilian nation: short lectures against the growth illusion, arguing that humanity is a river, not a cargo cult. Krenak is Krenak, not Yanomami; the pairing is thematic, not ethnic.
The Waorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon
We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People
Her own account: a Waorani childhood, the missions, and the fight for the forest. Co-written with Anderson (her husband and Amazon Frontlines cofounder); credited as such.
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman
The deepest companion text from a neighboring forest people: another first-person critique of merchandise civilization. Kopenawa is Yanomami, not Waorani; the pairing is thematic, not ethnic.
The Inuit of Nunavik
The Right to Be Cold
The Arctic's most cited human-rights argument, from the woman who made it: memoir, ice knowledge and climate diplomacy in one voice.
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman
The thematic companion from the opposite end of the Earth: another first-person account of a homeland treated as a resource frontier. Different people, different climate, same structure of fight.
The Sámi of Sápmi
Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift
A Sámi scholar's account of why institutions built on extraction cannot see knowledge built on reciprocity - the theory behind half the conflicts in this atlas.
The Invention of Green Colonialism
A historian's documented account of conservation's colonial roots and the 'empty Eden' myth. Blanc is a non-Indigenous historian; credited as such. The Fosen case is its Scandinavian chapter in practice.
The Māori of Aotearoa
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
The book that turned 'research' itself into a colonial question and set the terms for Indigenous studies worldwide. Presented here as further reading: this page teaches from the documented cases, not from the book's contents.
Matariki: The Star of the Year
Māori astronomy in Māori terms, drawn from manuscripts kept in the author's own family - the scholarship behind the Matariki public holiday.
The Kānaka Maoli of Hawaiʻi
Hawaiki Rising: Hōkūleʻa, Nainoa Thompson, and the Hawaiian Renaissance
The fullest telling of the canoe and the renaissance. Low is a non-Indigenous anthropologist who sailed with the voyaging community; credited as such, not presented as an Indigenous-authored text.
We Are the Ocean: Selected Works
Includes 'Our Sea of Islands' (1994), the essay that inverted the colonial map of the Pacific. Hauʻofa was Tongan, not Hawaiian; the renaissance he describes belongs to the whole ocean.
The Ainu of Hokkaido
Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir
The Ainu world recorded by the man who became its first parliamentarian - written with Selden, an American Japan scholar, and credited as such.
Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People
The catalog of the Smithsonian's landmark Ainu exhibition - artifact-level documentation of a material culture. The editors are non-Indigenous scholars; it complements, and does not replace, Kayano's own account.
The Maya K'iche' of Guatemala
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
The testimonio that carried the highlands' reality to the world. Menchú narrated; Burgos-Debray, a Venezuelan-French anthropologist, recorded and edited - both roles credited. Some details of the memoir were later contested by the anthropologist David Stoll; the historical record above rests on the UN-sponsored CEH, not on contested details.
Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
The K'iche' creation account, surviving in a sixteenth-century manuscript by anonymous K'iche' authors. Tedlock is a non-Indigenous translator working from the K'iche' text; the words remain the ancestors'.
Aboriginal Australia: Many Nations
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Aboriginal thinking on its own terms - relation, pattern, yarning - with the author's own protocols kept visibly in place: he tells you what he cannot tell you. Quotes here are from the publisher's official chapter sample.
Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia
The practitioner's account: what reading country for fire actually involves, and what two centuries of suppression cost.
Songlines: The Power and Promise
Songlines as knowledge infrastructure, from the National Museum of Australia's senior Indigenous curator.
The Ovaherero and Nama of Namibia
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism
The fullest account for general readers of the 1904-08 genocide and its archival trail. Both authors are non-Indigenous historians (British-Nigerian and Danish); the Ovaherero and Nama voices themselves appear through the documents they preserved.
Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890-1923
The standard scholarly history of how the Herero survived the genocide and rebuilt a nation. Gewald is a Dutch historian; credited as such.
On the desk
Being read for entries still in research. Listed as reading in progress - nothing on these pages teaches from them yet.
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance
Nation-based governance and land-based education argued from Nishnaabeg practice, not generic 'wisdom'. Being read for a future entry on Nishnaabeg resurgence.
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline
Two centuries of Oceti Sakowin resistance read into Standing Rock. Being read for a future Plains entry.
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion
The classic contrast of place-based Indigenous spiritualities with missionary religion. Still sharp fifty years on.
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth
An Indigenous-authored climate platform: decolonization as climate policy, not metaphor.
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
One man's initiatic testimony - read as exactly that, not as a description of all Dagara practice.
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
The imposed language as colonialism's deepest weapon; pairs with the language-revival cases already in the atlas.
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
Archival documentation of state-sanctioned destruction in California, 1846-1873. Credited as a non-Indigenous historian's documentary work.
The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
A rigorous complement to the First Knowledges titles on managed country. Credited as a non-Indigenous historian's synthesis.