I’ll be honest, I’m biased when it comes to Patty Krawec’s Bad Indians Book Club. The bias is simple: there’s a reference in here to my Live. Laugh. Lurk. shirt, and seeing something I created reflected in the pages of a book like this hits differently. It feels like being seen, even in a sideways way, and it colors the way I read the whole work, especially as someone doesn’t just admire Patty’s work, but adores her as the amazing human being she is. I’m not going to lie, when she mentioned her reference to my shirt, there was a lot of squeeing on my part.
Krawec’s Bad Indians Book Club is based on a list of Indigenous reading recommendations that led to a bookclub and podcast. But it goes far beyond a collection of book reviews and conversations. It weaves together story, critique, memory, and myth to explore the deeper possibilities of storytelling. As Krawec notes in the book, “books change us because we engage with them, we wrestle and argue with them”, and through that engagement, we are carried between histories and futures, between trauma and survival, and between the stories we inherit and the ones we actively choose to carry forward.
Which explains why I was fascinated with how she threads in Deer Woman, not as folklore but as a living presence who teaches, unsettles, and bears witness. It feels right that Deer Woman serves as the guide, given her familiarity across many Native cultures and within the mainstream. Like many beings in our stories, she is neither purely good nor evil but exists in the balance between, carrying lessons in both her warnings and her protections. She is often seen as a protector of women and children, reminding us that our stories guard us as much as they challenge us. Those interludes don’t feel like pauses between essays; they are part of the argument itself. They remind us that myth carries knowledge and that story is a form of survival.
Another thing that stands out is the breadth of her lens. Krawec doesn’t limit herself to memoir or fiction. She brings in science, history, gender, and the difficult questions about how knowledge is framed and who gets to claim authority. She makes it clear that books are never neutral; they are tools that shape worlds. Reading, then, becomes an act of resistance, one that requires intention and acute awareness of whose perspectives and experiences are being centered and whose are not and why.
There are moments where Krawec names contemporary voices and communities that often exist just outside the spotlight. That’s where the Live. Laugh. Lurk. reference comes in, and that’s why my bias matters. To be part of that conversation, even briefly, is to be reminded that our creative expressions, our humor, our small acts of survival, they’re part of the larger weave. Krawec refuses to let Indigenous voices be tokenized, flattened or erased. She shows that we are everywhere: in the archives, in libraries, in the land, in podcasts, in shirts, in myth.
It isn’t always an “easy” read. But that’s part of the point, to see reading as more than just a pastime. Krawec creates space for readers to see themselves differently, to ask more complex questions about what it means to read with responsibility and care.
Krawec challenges us to read with intention, to notice the silences, and to bring the stories pushed to the margins back into the center. Her work reminds us that stories aren’t just inherited, they’re chosen, shaped, and lingered in until we’re ready to step forward. Bad Indians Book Club is about more than reading books; it’s about opening ourselves to the worlds that Indigenous writers create, engaging with histories and experiences often left out of mainstream narratives, and understanding that story, myth, and memory are acts of survival. In reading it, we’re invited to sit with discomfort, recognize resilience, and imagine the new worlds that emerge when we honor the stories that have always been there.
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