Indigenous knowledge

All that stuff you were taught in school about North America being an empty, idyllic wilderness? Not true. In fact, there were millions of people living in the Americas before European contact. The hemisphere prior to 1492 was more populous, more urban, and more ecologically managed than anyone imagined. Mann's book redraws the map of human civilization and, we'd argue, is a must-read.

In summer 2019, Oklahoma-born Joy Harjo became the first Native American appointed as the United States Poet Laureate. Outdoor readers are most familiar with Harjo for her memoir, Crazy Brave, but the Muscogee (Creek) Nation member is also an award-winning playwright, musician, and activist. An American Sunrise, her new collection of poems, traverses the kind of committing and uncomfortable terrain Harjo has been exploring her whole life: “Through the immense and terrible echo of injustice a meadow bird sang and sang.” Some argue outdoor recreation should be the one place we can go to get away from politics. Harjo, whose family was violently forced west on the Trail of Tears, reminds that the sacred exists in step with the profane. “That’s how blues emerged, by the way—Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess.” Stormy, radiant, singing in rhythms ancient and new, Sunrise is a call to a future restored and whole.

David Stuart's archaeological study of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization of the American Southwest. Stuart argues that Chaco Canyon was the center of a complex, interconnected society that collapsed when its resources ran out — a parable with obvious modern parallels.

Barry Lopez spent five years traveling in the Arctic, and the book he wrote about it is one of the great works of American nonfiction. It's about ice and light and musk oxen and Inuit hunters, but it's also about the nature of imagination — how a landscape this extreme remakes the people who enter it.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker reframes environmental justice through an Indigenous lens, arguing that the mainstream environmental movement has consistently failed Native communities. From treaty rights to pipeline protests, a clear-eyed history of who gets to define 'environment.'

Hampton Sides follows Kit Carson across the nineteenth-century West — from the fur trade to the Mexican-American War to the brutal subjugation of the Navajo. It's a page-turner built on a tragedy, and Sides never lets the adventure obscure the violence.

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together indigenous wisdom and botanical science to argue that plants and people are meant to be in relationship. Each essay is an act of attention — to moss, to strawberries, to the grammar of animacy in the Potawatomi language. The book that made a generation rethink what it means to be a naturalist.

Mark Spence's history of how America's national parks were created by removing the indigenous people who lived in them. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier — each park was somebody's home before it was nobody's. Essential and uncomfortable.

Craig Childs follows the trail of the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert — from Chaco Canyon to the Mogollon Rim — looking for evidence of where they went when they left. Part archaeology, part desert travel, part detective story about a civilization that didn't vanish so much as disperse.

The book that launched a thousand forays into the desert canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona chronicles David Roberts’ unlikely evolution from bleeding edge alpinist to Native American archaeology geek. The young Alaskan climbing gun fell hard for the grit of red soil, the call of a canyon wren, and most of all the powerful, obsessive allure of the Ancestral Puebloans who wrote the canyon walls with paint and sculpted soaring cliff dwellings. His book beautifully conveys how curiosity becomes passion, how intrigue becomes compulsion, and for budding fans of the Southwest and the people once known as Anasazi there’s no better place to start.

Wade Davis on the indigenous cultures disappearing around the world — from the high Arctic to the Amazon to the mountains of Tibet. Davis argues that the loss of cultural diversity is as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity. Passionate, erudite, and urgent.

Through photography, interviews, crew stories, and a foreword by Desmond Tutu, the hardcover Mālama Honua shares the travels of a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūle’a. Built in the 1970s, this sailing canoe was created to revive the art and science of ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques: understanding the distinct patterns of ocean swells, reading the stars for clues, predicting the weather from animal behavior and wind. No GPS, National Weather Service, or Apple products allowed. Because as one of the book’s modern day navigators says, “If you can read the ocean…you will never be lost.” The book begins in 2014 and covers a multi-year boat journey to communities in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and South and North America, steered onward by captain Nainoa Thompson, the first native Hawaiian since the 14th century to sail without modern instruments from Hawaii to Tahiti. Visually luscious, educationally inspiring, and totally badass—how many times have you relied upon your smartphone today?—this book is a treasure of hard-won knowledge and experience.

Ian Frazier spent years on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, befriending an Oglala Sioux man named Le War Lance. The result is a book about poverty, history, humor, and the resilience of a people who've survived everything America has done to them.

Three stories converge at a remote canyon in the Grand Canyon — a Japanese hermit, a pair of hikers, and a murder. The landscape is the constant; the human stories are the variables.

Working beside his mother at an apple plant in Yakima, Washington, teenage Noé Álvarez dreamed of a life different from that of his Mexican immigrant parents. He became a first-generation college student, but struggled until he discovered Peace and Dignity Journeys, a grassroots, months-long marathon that takes indigenous participants from Canada to Guatemala. Scraped together by volunteers and little funding, PDJ connects runners to the land and native communities along the way. Sporting neon yellow shoes, one change of clothes, a journal, and a sixteen-hundred-page dictionary—“that, I argued to myself when I packed, contained all the books in the world”—Álvarez struck south from British Columbia with an eclectic band of Dené, Gitxsan, Tohono O’odham, Purépecha, Maya, and Apache runners. Read this soul-searching memoir for a deeper look at the capacity to suffer and transcend through movement, and for a range of real-life characters whose stories will stay with you long after the running ends.

Roberts exploring Ancestral Puebloan ruins across the canyonlands — cliff dwellings, granaries, rock art. Each site is a detective story about a people who left and didn't leave a forwarding address.

Chatwin's investigation into Aboriginal Australian song-paths — the invisible routes that crisscross the continent, sung into existence by the ancestors. Part travel, part anthropology, part philosophical notebook. Chatwin at his most ambitious and most controversial.

Silko's memoir of walking the desert near her Tucson home — rattlesnakes, rain clouds, turquoise stones, and the Laguna Pueblo worldview that infuses everything she sees.

Based on the Massey Lectures — the argument that indigenous cultures hold knowledge essential to human survival, and that their disappearance impoverishes everyone. Davis at his most urgent and eloquent.

During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To read Two Old Women is to stumble in the snowdrifts of Arctic Alaska, smell the sweet scent of birch woodsmoke, and fear the sharp twinges of starvation. Based on an oral Athabaskan legend, it’s a story rooted in Gwich’in culture, handed down to author Velma Wallis by her mother. And Wallis, who grew up in the six-hundred-fifty-person village of Fort Yukon, knows a thing or two about survival. As a teenager in the 1970s, she moved into her father’s remote trapping cabin, where she spent nearly a dozen years living off traditional subsistence skills. This short novel is a vital and classic tale, carrying embers from an ancient campfire onward into the night.