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New Book Club to Go Titles Shine Spotlight on MMIP Crisis

December 7, 2024

It’s a national tragedy that receives too little attention: the National Crime Information Center lists roughly 1,500 Indigenous missing persons, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates that approximately 4,200 cases of missing and murdered Native Americans and Alaska Natives remain unsolved. To help spread awareness of the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP), SDHC has added five timely and topical books to its Book Club to Go library.

Book Club to Go is a packaged reading and discussion program for groups hosted by individuals, libraries, bookstores, museums, and other organizations. To increase understanding and spur conversation, SDHC has purchased multiple copies of each of the five MMIP titles with funding provided by “United We Stand: Connecting through Culture,” a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  • Firekeeper’s Daughterby Angeline Boulley – In this novel, one of TIME Magazine’s Best YA Books of All Time, an Anishinaabe teen witnesses a shocking murder, then goes undercover to root out corruption in her community. Her search for truth exposes secrets and raises concerns that investigators are more focused on punishing offenders than protecting victims.
  • Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid – For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. This “Highway of Tears” prompted McDiarmid’s piercing exploration of the ongoing failure to provide justice for the victims and their families’ and communities’ unwavering determination to find it.
  • Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon – In this first volume of the Cash Blackbear Mysteries, Cash and Sheriff Wheaton work to solve the murder of a Native man in rural North Dakota, with effects that stretch across cultures in a community traumatized by racism, genocide, and oppression.
  • The Round House by Louise Erdrich – This National Book Award winner tells the story of an attack on an Ojibwe woman and the consequences for her family and community – most notably her teenage son and her husband, a tribal judge who endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts.
  • Sing for the Red Dressby Joseph M. Marshall III – The first volume in Marshall’s Smokey River Suspense Series follows a group of tribal police and civilians as they search for 12 Native girls abducted for sex trafficking to oil field workers. The story raises issues of the interface between tribal government, the BIA, and the FBI, as well as the MMIP epidemic that has largely been ignored by the American public and media.

A full list of titles available through the SDHC Lending Library, along with details on how to host a program, can be found at https://sdhumanities.org/book-club-to-go/

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