Last week, families and students in Klukwan gathered in the library to meet members of a rapidly growing nonprofit that hosts pop-up book shops and gives away free Indigenous-centered books.
It was one stop in a 10-day tour of the region by the NDN Girls Book Club, a national organization which partnered with Southeast Alaska’s largest tribal government to give away more than 3,500 books.
“[It’s] a tour from Yakutat to Hydeburg,” said Tristan Douville, Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska special projects manager. “So pretty much as north as you can go and as south as you can go.”
The project came about through a friendship Douville has with Kinsale Drake, the Diné poet and playwright who founded the book club. “I saw the immense success she had distributing books for free on the Navajo Nation reservation last year and I’ve been asking how I can get her to use that same model to distribute Native-authored books in Southeast Alaska,” he said.
Douville, Mischa Jackson and Jasmine James at Tlingit & Haida have been working with the book club team for eight months to solidify the details of a tour.
James, Tlingit & Haida’s youth engagement division manager, said the logistics are about as complicated as they can get. Last year, when the book club team was traveling across the Navajo and Hopi nations distributing books — they could drive
“Southeast is much different than what NDN Girls Book Club was able to do last year where they had their massive pink truck that was rolling through Indian country from community to community,” she said.
That’s a sentiment Drake echoed, writing in an email that it took a lot of planning and sending out requests for books from publishers months in advance and fundraising to get the books into each community.
She said Tlingit & Haida coordinated everything from ferries to small planes to rental cars to get the group, and their books, around.
All told, the group had more than 3,500 books to give out – donated through publishers like Scholastic, Harper Collins’ Heartdrum Books and Levine Querido. They also bought books to give away. They raised funds for the trip selling merchandise designed by Juneau-based Lingít and Deg Hit’an artist Crystal Worl, who designed a formline logo.
James said the project was partially funded through an Alaska School Board grant called Full Service Community School.
“That’s part of the connection to all the communities, they’re also partners under the full service schools grant,” she said.
Each book drop is set up like a pop-up book shop. “That’s what made it go viral last year,” Douville said. “These free book giveaways were just popping up, like a Scholastic Book Fair but run by and for Native people.”
There’s a heavy emphasis on the color pink as well, as evidenced in the NDN Girls Book Club branding.
“It’s like, pink everything,” Douville said. “It’s like a Native pink explosion, popping up at community libraries, high schools, gyms and I think a couple of chapter houses on the Navajo Nation reservation were some of the site locations.”
The tour came at a moment organizers said felt particularly impactful given the cuts in funding to the National Endowment for Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences that are, in turn, impacting local library budgets like Klukwan’s, which is now open for just four hours a week.
Douville said when Tlingit & Haida started working on the book-drop tour last summer, they had not predicted that these federal funds would be cut – but that the investment in literacy and particularly in promoting tribal sovereignty has only become more important since that time.
“Tribes have been around way longer than the U.S. government and the U.S. government might be facing some instability in its funding right now, but tribes have always been here, and tribes will always be here, so I think it’s a great time for tribes and Native people to show up for our communities in whatever way we can,” Douville
said. “For us at this moment right now – that’s executing the first Alaska book drop.”
In previous interviews, Drake has talked about founding the book club in 2022 after doing her thesis at Yale on retaining Native students in higher education. She agreed with Douville, saying the work of bringing literacy, and pathways to creating it, to Indigenous people seems more important now than ever.
“It’s heartbreaking and it angers me to witness what is happening to our literary and arts programs,” Drake wrote in an email. “Especially the targeting of resources for BIPOC, queer, trans creatives and youth. It is our mission at Book Club to support the communities however we can, to leverage the resources we have access to, and to continue doing the work we do in the face of that kind of injustice.”
Drake said it was difficult to leave Alaska.
“I think immersing ourselves in these communities was an important part of the experience — we would go out in the pouring rain and pull crab traps with folks, we would share meals, we would go on hikes to important landmarks,” she wrote.
They had to shift plans a few times. “Angoon, for example, was in a mourning period when we were supposed to visit, so we shifted the dates to later this year,” Drake wrote. “Instead, we were able to visit a few more schools around Juneau.”
“We never just want to drop items and leave — that’s not the point of Book Club,” Drake wrote. “We care about the community and making new connections through storytelling and coming together around books.”
Next, the group wants to do a book drop in Oklahoma.
“We have so many ideas for the next few years, including expanding efforts into Canada for First Nations communities,” she said. In Alaska, Douville said he’d like to see the momentum of the book club’s first visit linger.
“While this is a really big splash, it’s just the first splash that it’s supposed to create a wave of incentivization of reading and love for reading again,” Douville
said. “We’re working on summer reading lists, prizes for summer reading programs, figuring out how we can incentivize this community reading culture again.”
One way he thinks the culture of reading could be spread is through the Lingít Koo.éex’ gathering and potlatch.
“We do distribution of goods and foods and stuff. I would love to see a paradigm shift in our koo.éex’ where people start to give out books by Indigenous authors,” he said.