GenevaBookClub: David Treuer is a 50 year-old writer, critic and academic who is one of the most prolific writers (and critics) of the contemporary American Indian experience. A response to the classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, a well-known eulogy of American Indian culture. A strong counterpoint to the idea that everything of their original culture was destroyed, corrupted and stolen with modern American Indians as degenerate walking-dead dependent on drugs, alcohol and government handouts. 445 pages published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 National Book Award and longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal.

GenevaBookClub: Tommy Orange is a 38 year old American novelist and writer from Oakland, California. This is his first book. Told as a series of loosely connected stories centered around Oakland, California that all come together by the end of the book. Many of the characters are young, not full-blood and living on the margins of modern America. 300 pages, published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

GenevaBookClub: David E Stannard is a 79 year-old professor. This is a massively controversial work starting with the title! He argues that the European colonization of North and South America resulted in the death of 100 million indigenous peoples. This was mostly due to diseases, but even some of that was a conscious part of the settler strategy to eliminate indigenous populations. Stannard makes no attempt to moderate his language or sentiments but, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this book is pivotal to any discussion of the settlement of the Americas.