Medcalf: Next book club selection to focus on 'America's most overlooked community'

In conversations about the breadth and impact of racism and oppression, it is not easy to shock Black folks.

But the Black panelists who participated in the first event of the Mary Ann Key Book Club in 2021 were stunned when Ramona Kitto Stately, an educator and a member of the Santee Sioux Dakota Nation, discussed the plight of her people.

"For us," the project director for We Are Still Here Minnesota said during our panel for the event, "it has been 14,000 years in Minnesota."

The Native American community is America's most overlooked community, even though it's this country's founding community and first community. An ongoing effort to strip our children's curriculums of information about Indigenous history has only reinforced the urgency to preserve, document and broadly convey the details of a journey too often ignored.

In response to that effort, the next book in the Mary Ann Key Book Club — named after my great-great-great grandmother, who was enslaved in the 1800s in Alabama and Georgia — we have decided to read, "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People," by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese.

Our book club — a partnership with Hennepin County Library, Friends of the Hennepin County Library and the Star Tribune — has continued to grow since its start last year in response to a community's desire to learn and move forward after George Floyd's murder.

With nearly 2,000 members and counting, it is clear that a multitude of Minnesotans have invested in an effort to ensure that our future is defined not by the events of the past few years but by our collective response in the years ahead.

I am a member of a marginalized community, but it is also a community with a collection of voices in prominent positions on visible platforms to tell our story and discuss our history. Our Indigenous community has not been afforded a similar opportunity.

"This book tells the story of the United States as a colonialist settler-state, one that sought to crush and subjugate Indigenous populations," Mendoza and Reese say in the book. "In spite of all that was done to them, Indigenous peoples are still here. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples. This is a history of the United States."

I paused when I read that in the introduction. When you are anything but white, you quickly realize that you have been offered a perspective of history that is only told through the eyes of white scholars, white historians, white thinkers, white leaders, white explorers and white authors. And you begin to believe that your community's history is somehow a separate history. That's why I love this declaration in the book that says, correctly, that you cannot even begin to understand American history without highlighting our Indigenous community.

Our goal with this book, the youth version, also is to encourage families, children and young people to participate and learn. Beyond that ambition, we aim to elevate some of the critical voices of a community that plays a significant role in Minnesota's past, present and its ambitions for the future.

We will talk about the book with Reese in a conversation April 19. On May 12, we will host a panel event moderated by Stately. The panel will also feature Sharon Day, executive director of Indigenous Peoples Task Force; Marlena Myles, a digital artist who amplifies Indigenous history and language through her work; Katie Phillips, an assistant professor of American Indian history at Macalester College; and Pearl Walker-Swaney, who is Lakota, Dakota and Anishinaabe and a birth worker and yoga instructor.

You can find the details of both events and sign up for the book club at the website for the Mary Ann Key Book Club. The Hennepin County library system has copies of the book.

"I have a lot of notes," Stately told me as we talked last week about "An Indigenous Peoples' History."

I hope people will participate in this effort and listen to her and a community that is often unheard.

This book details an imperative account of Indigenous history. But Stately told me it is not just the past but the current economic, social and cultural impact of the Indigenous community that should be discussed. That matters. And there's a message of resilience in this book, that the survival of the Indigenous community was not by happenstance or coincidence but determination.

"You will also read of the many ways in which Native nationals and communities have fought for their survival," Mendoza and Reese write in the youth version of Dunbar-Ortiz's book. "After all, people do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a struggle! Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies shaped by their resistance to colonialism."

Perhaps the folks who seem to fear that history will understand that it is not some optional addendum to what they believe about the origins of this country but an inextricable component of this nation's narrative.

It cannot be ignored.

Myron Medcalf is a local columnist for the Star Tribune and a national writer and radio host for ESPN. His column appears in print on Sundays twice a month and also online.

myron.medcalf@startribune.com

Twitter: @MedcalfByESPN