Good literature can change a life; it changed mine!

Recently, I includ­ed in a book review that the book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz was life-chang­ing for me, and a read­er asked me to explain that.

I love to tell how a book affects me, and espe­cial­ly that one!

I grew up in a polit­i­cal­ly mod­er­ate home; how­ev­er, in my teens, I became involved in fun­da­men­tal­ism and then evan­gel­i­cal­ism.  Fortunately, I have been a read­er since before kinder­garten, and I kept study­ing, read­ing, and ques­tion­ing.  I am thank­ful to say I grew away from all of that years ago.

It is a grad­ual evo­lu­tion, though. Even after I no longer attend­ed that type of church nor espoused their brand of pol­i­tics, I found I had a great deal more to learn.

I read that par­tic­u­lar book as part of an assign­ment dur­ing my pro­fes­sion­al life at the pub­lic library.  I took online class­es reg­u­lar­ly from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and pur­pose­ly always took the fre­quent­ly updat­ed ones that cov­ered new children’s and young adult lit­er­a­ture to keep up with my book selec­tion for the library. 

That par­tic­u­lar book, with its excel­lent cita­tions, opened my eyes more ful­ly to our actu­al his­to­ry as a nation.  I read in hor­ror what white male patri­archy imposed on Native Americans, blacks, Asians, brown peo­ple, etc. — not to men­tion upon women as well. I relearned things I thought I already knew. I griev­ed over what is our true her­itage, and I pur­posed to keep study­ing, to be more of an activist, and to speak out on behalf of the marginalized.

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People is avail­able at the Clark County Public Library in book and dig­i­tal form. It can be pur­chased at most book­stores or online from Bookshop.org, a con­ve­nient way to buy books and sup­port inde­pen­dent booksellers.