Why does reading matter? More to the point, why does reading specifically Indigenous material matter? As Daniel Heath Justice would say, Indigenous literatures matter because we matter. Because the things that we write down and the stories we tell are one more way that we push back—against the forces that try to erase us, against the people who try to invent us with a purpose and intention that doesn’t serve our needs. Reading does matter, and reading radically with purpose and intention can change your life.

I have friendships based entirely on books. As somebody who has always loved to read, I’ve read widely and intentionally over the years—friends and family sharing books back and forth. Together we have tried to better understand unfamiliar landscapes. We have looked for new centres to revolve around and extend out from—centres that will help us enact our humanity in ways that do not deny it to others.

Reading in this way—focusing on books from a particular place or people—requires a willingness to clear mental space. This idea is contained within dawisijigem, which is an Ojibwe word that translates into English as “to clear space,” like clearing off a table before a meal, or moving books off my desk or side tables to make room for new piles.

Like many readers, I often have several books going at one time, layering fiction with nonfiction, or setting conversational books alongside more academic material. This puts the books into conversation with each other, which leads to new ideas or ways of understanding the topics, other ways of reading and understanding familiar texts. We might disagree, but that disagreement is a kind of relationship rather than a point of contention. Through dawisijigem, we clear mental space; curiosity encourages us to make room for new ideas to permeate into our thinking rather than to just let them float on the surface.

All of this collided when my friend Kyle (white, Canadian settler) asked me to recommend one or two books that would help them get a better understanding of Indigenous experience and thought. As I stood in front of my disorganized shelves and piles of books, trying to think of what I could recommend, I had a problem. The question Kyle was asking was actually pretty broad. Which experiences? Indigenous thought about what?

There was no one single book I could think of recommending over the others, because there are so many things we think and write about. There are, as Justice says in the epigraph, so many ways that we counter erasure and give shape to our own ways of being in the world. There are many similarities to how we live in the world, many shared values. But how we interpret and live out those values sometimes differs drastically even within communities, let alone through the many languages, cultures, traditions, and more.

So, through dawisijigem, rather than through recommending one or two favorite books, I invited Kyle to push aside what they were expecting and turn toward a variety of writing and writers—to explore not a single Indigenous story but a thousand worlds of writers speaking from the borderlands outside any dominating centre. When we read into unfamiliar communities, there is always the risk that we may misinterpret and misunderstand the unfamiliar landscape. This is why reading many books by many authors across different genres and putting them into conversation with each other is so helpful. Important information that we might have missed or misread becomes clearer.

Kyle asked me this question just as fall was turning into winter, so I began to imagine a yearlong probing of these unfamiliar landscapes. I stood in front of my bookshelves, and in front of the piles of books that seem to accumulate with every conversation I have. I started to group the chaos on my shelves into themes that made sense, according to the month in which I thought they should be read but also according to a kind of progression in which I thought they should be read. We began with an overview provided by Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) in his book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Knowing that our literatures matter because we matter, because our knowledge about how to be human matters, provided a foundation for taking seriously the storytelling that came next. I had intended to build toward some kind of end or resolution, and the books I suggested for that final month focused on Indigenous sovereignty. But in the podcast series that emerged from this list of books, the final conversation never happened.

Maybe that’s okay. Indigenous thought rarely moves in a linear way, as if we should begin at the beginning and then come to an end. We go off on tangents and then circle back to our main idea. Sometimes we tell stories that don’t seem relevant, but they turn out to be. We tend to be cyclical, and what turned out to be our final conversation is much like our first: Knowing that we matter as Indigenous people means that our stories matter.

I don’t think about “sovereignty” anymore anyway, because it’s a loaded word rooted in the very hierarchies I want to resist. I think about autonomy—the right to refuse, to be a Bad Indian—and it seems to me that this is what we did. We begin and end with the knowledge that our stories matter—not for how they might rescue a dying world but because we matter, and the worlds we have yet to build also matter.

This is an excerpt from Bad Indians Book Club chapter 1: Dawisijigem.