RESOURCE LIBRARY
Below are human beings who have inspired and/or directly fostered our mission, along with organizations whose missions and impact we respect and wish to spread awareness of.
As we restore our relationship to the land, we heal. As we cultivate our consciousness, we evolve.
WE ARE THE MIDDLE OF FOREVER
Dahr Jamail & Stan Rushworth
Although for a great many people, the human impact on the Earth—countless species becoming extinct, pandemics claiming millions of lives, and climate crisis causing worldwide social and environmental upheaval—was not apparent until recently, this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story that is many generations long. They have had to adapt, to persevere, and to be courageous and resourceful in the face of genocide and destruction—and their experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation. An innovative work of research and reportage, We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever brings to the forefront the perspectives of those who have long been attuned to climate change and will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.
THE OVERSTORY
Richard Powers
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? Listen. There's something you need to hear.
COLUMBUS AND OTHER CANNIBALS
Jack D. Forbes
Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern “civilized” lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before. Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes: “Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism.” This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.
A RAIN OF NIGHT BIRDS
Deena Metzger
A novel in which two people, who are from each side of this polarity, begin a loving relationship. Sandra Birdswell is a student of climatology with an uncanny ability to sense weather events. Her mother, who died in childbirth, is a mystery to her. Her father, John, formerly a Reservation doctor, faithfully raises her despite his limitations and obligations. She first meets Terrence, a Native man and a professor of climatology, at her university classes. Years later, they are drawn together by the powerful forces of their love, for the Earth, for each other, and their mutual need to seek out the broken links of their family histories. When the UN report on climate change is released in 2007, the reality of the effects of the Anthropocene era sends a shockwave through both their lives. Their relationship to each other and to the elementals they are so intimate with ? lightning, thunder, rain, mountain ? brings them deeply and violently into a quest to live their lives in ways that disengage from colonial mind, the same mind that brought devastation to the Native peoples, and now brings all of humanity to the brink of extinction. Through their love of and deeply felt intuitive connection to the Earth, they each go to the brink of death to find their truth, to gain strength and wisdom.
INDEH
Eve Ball
A fascinating account of Apache history and ethnography. All the narratives have been carefully chosen to illustrate important facets of the Apache experience. Moreover, they make very interesting reading....This is a major contribution to both Apache history and to the history of the Southwest.
THE WORLD WE USED TO LIVE IN: REMEMBERING THE POWERS OF THE MEDICINE MEN
Vine Deloria Jr.
In his final work, the great and beloved Native American scholar Vine Deloria Jr. takes us into the realm of the spiritual and reveals through eyewitness accounts the immense power of medicine men. The World We Used To Live In , a fascinating collection of anecdotes from tribes across the country, explores everything from healing miracles and scared rituals to Navajos who could move the sun. In this compelling work, which draws upon a lifetime of scholarship, Deloria shows us how ancient powers fit into our modern understanding of science and the cosmos, and how future generations may draw strength from the old ways.
GOING TO WATER
Stan Rushworth
Confronted with a small child whose will to live is desperately compromised by dreams of the future invading her, Agana (Beginning Rain) travels from her Tsalagi (Cherokee) home a thousand years before Columbus in an attempt to save the girl's life. She sees into the child's dreams to find that events of the modern era have slipped through time into her mind, so she journeys far into the future to change the human imagination, the human dream, to expand it beyond the limitations imposed by empires and despots and all those afraid to live a life in balance with Nature. She learns to move through centuries, through many places and times, in order to confront the perpetrators of destruction on a grand scale and a small scale both, to dive deeply into their minds and hearts, and to offer them a clear vision of what they are doing and what they have done to all people, and what they will continue to do unless they face themselves honestly and with courage. She succeeds and fails, triumphs and falls, and like all of us, has to come to terms with herself on the deepest levels of reflection possible. No matter what, she must go on, for Agana knows that every moment in time touches every other moment in time, and in this, her mission is for the salvation of all children's dreams of what life can be, across every culture and era. This deeply philosophical novel is an emotional, very current, and powerful journey through our time and the times surrounding us. An Indigenous story, it spans continents and peoples, meeting the famous and the infamous, always bringing us to reflect on our own values and experience in a world struggling to find, and sustain, the beauty that pulses at the heart of all life. It is the journal of a woman with relentless courage, a sharp tongue, a clear mission, and profound love.
DECOLONIZING WEALTH
Edgar Villanueva
This second edition expands the provocative analysis of the racist colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance into other sectors and offers practical advice on how anyone can be a healer. Though it seems counterintuitive, the $1 trillion philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures ultimately doing more harm than good. Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic facade, and into its shadows: white supremacy, savior complexes, and internalized oppression. In this critically important book, he shows how to make money a tool of love, to help us thrive rather than to hurt and divide us. The second edition has two new chapters. "Medicine Beyond Money" relates inspiring examples of people using their resources to decolonize entertainment, museums, libraries, land ownership, and much more . "Story as Medicine" explains how sharing our stories is a vital part of that process. Across history and to the present day, the accumulation of wealth is steeped in trauma. Drawing from Native traditions, Villanueva empowers individuals and institutions to acknowledge and begin to repair the damage done through his Seven Steps to Healing: Grieve, Apologize, Listen, Relate, Represent, Invest, and Repair. As Villanueva writes "Everyone has a role in the process of healing. All our suffering is mutual. All our healing is mutual. All our thriving is mutual."
DIASPORA'S CHILDREN
Stan Rushworth
In his latest work, author, teacher and Vietnam-era veteran Stan Rushworth has written a memoir that is a collection of stories, reflections and prayers, and a “survival manual, a way to remember that serves the heart.” Using the experiences of his life as a springboard for illustrating the effects of genocide, war, colonization, and traumatic stress disorder, Rushworth brings to our eyes the deep suffering (and resilience) of generations of Native people, and the mindset that decimated 90% of the Native population in California alone in the first 25 years of White “settlers”. With brilliant storytelling that is full of heart and wisdom, Rushworth brings us toward a spiritual awareness that is at once a story of grief and suffering as well as a path toward redemption, as we face the truth of war, genocide, climate destruction, and the continuing colonial mindset, and find in our hearts a right relationship to the Earth and each other.
POWER
Linda Hogan
When sixteen-year-old Omishto, a member of the Taiga Tribe, witnesses her Aunt Ama kill a panther-an animal considered to be a sacred ancestor of the Taiga people-she is suddenly torn between her loyalties to her Westernized mother, who wants her to reject the ways of the tribe, and to Ama and her traditional people, for whom the killing of the panther takes on grave importance.
THE MORNING THE SUN WENT DOWN
Darryl Babe Wilson
Through this lyrical and richly textured memoir we experience both the beauty and the struggles of Darryl Babe Wilson's journey through childhood. Born into the Achumawi and Atsugewi tribes (often called the Pit River Nation) of northeastern California, Wilson spent his early years with his family in a life rich in tradition, until tragic events forced him to learn to survive among the assimilation policies of the 1950s. In The Morning the Sun Went Down, Wilson infuses stories of youthful innocence and experience with his spiritual journey that echoes across generations.
