NAH Book Club

Through a wide-ranging selection of books, the NAH Book Club invites participants to explore diverse peoples, histories, contemporary issues, and creative expressions across Native Nations and Indigenous communities. Topics may include identity, sovereignty, culture, history, resilience, futurity, and lived experience, with each text offering an opportunity to learn, question, and connect.

At its core, the NAH Book Club is about creating a reading community. Meetings are designed to foster thoughtful interdisciplinary discussions, mutual respect, and shared learning in a welcoming and inclusive environment. The Book Club is open to students, faculty, staff, and community members and welcomes readers of all levels of familiarity with Native and Indigenous peoples and topics.

This program is open to all eligible persons regardless of race, color, or national origin. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request. Please contact the Native American House at nah@illinois.edu.

This semester, the NAH Book Club will read Probably Ruby: A Novel by Lisa Bird-Wilson, a Métis and nêhiyaw (Cree) writer whose work appears in literary magazines and anthologies across Canada. Probably Ruby: A Novel is a book about a bold, unapologetic woman taking control of her life and story, and marks the debut of a major new voice in Indigenous fiction.

Registration is limited to 15 participants due to space constraints at the NAH.

(Registration coming soon) 

Participants will receive a FREE copy of the book!

Facilitators

Book Club discussions will be co-facilitated by:

• Morgan Bear (Meskwaki, Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa)
  Assistant Director, Native American House
• Ashlee Shoemaker (Diné), Undergraduate Student
  Major: Mechanical Engineering, NAH Ambassador
• Zoe Kraft, Undergraduate Student
  Major: Psychology, NAH Ambassador

Meeting Dates, Location & Format

The NAH Book Club will meet from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Native American House (1206 W. Nevada Street, Urbana, IL) on the following dates:

• Wednesday, September 23
• Wednesday, October 21
• Wednesday, November 11

Each meeting will follow the same structure:

• 5:00 p.m. — Check-in and food available in the kitchenette
• 5:30–6:30 p.m. — Guided book discussion and group photo