The Book Club just wrapped up its second conversation with We Survived the Night author Julian Brave NoiseCat. We dug further into many of the big political questions raised by the book and by Julian’s travels, among them the complex relationship between Native and national politics, the future of indigenous cultural expression, and the notion he calls “remythologizing” — recapturing the stories by which peoples and communities define themselves and their worlds. We talked about:
Author Thomas King’s recent revelation that he has no Cherokee ancestry, and how “pretendians” take opportunities from Native people
The complexities of deciding who does and does not count as indigenous in the United States and Canada — and how the laws governing who does are a continuation of the campaigns of erasure against Native people
How North Carolina’s Lumbee people and their conflict over tribal recognition with their Cherokee neighbors complicate the story of Southern politics — and highlight the need to understand the American story through a Native lens
The competing mythmaking around the “disappearance” of the Roanoke colonists — and how settler societies have been unable to imagine the idea of assimilation into indigenous societies
Whether the latest “Native renaissance” in literature and media is coming to a close in the Trump era, and what the prospects are for indigenous creators in mass media in the coming years
You won’t want to miss any of it. Just click on the video player above to watch the entire conversation.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.