Common Reading 2020-21: Listen. Learn. Act.

Offers profiles of one hundred Native American women involved in social activism, literature, politics, medicine, and the arts.

Profiles more than 200 Native American women born in the United States and Canada. Covers both historical and contemporary figures.

In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women.

What roles do literary and community texts and social media play in the memory, politics, and lived experience of those dispossessed? Fitzgerald asks this question in her introduction and sets out to answer it in her study of literature and social media by (primarily) Native women who are writing about and often actively protesting against displacement caused both by forced relocation and environmental disaster. By examining a range of diverse materials, including the writings of canonical Native American writers such as Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook, this work brings new focus to analyzing how indigenous communities and authors relate to land, while also exploring broader connections to literary criticism, environmental history and justice, ecocriticism, feminist studies, and new media studies.

Sharing Our Stories of Survival is a comprehensive treatment of the socio-legal issues that arise in the context of violence against native women--written by social scientists, writers, poets, and survivors of violence.