The Wretched of the Earth and Braiding Sweetgrass are indispensable books for ongoing co-liberation struggles. Photo credits: Goodreads and Milkweed Editions

JTA’s Lara Aumann shares a few book recommendations that have been life-sustaining by expanding her organizing toolset and growing her knowledge. We hope you find these selections generative and needed, too!

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

These books, although written in different centuries and under different social contexts, both impart wisdom and praxis pertinent in the ongoing struggles against colonialism, imperialism, and the capitalist system’s numerous forms of extraction from human bodies and Mother Earth. While Fanon affirms the necessity of popular education and consciousness building for successful mass movements to deliver liberation and justice, Kimmerer beautifully illustrates how the power of reciprocity amongst all life and our planet transitions us beyond the extractive capitalist economy towards life-sustaining systems for all. These pathways of decolonization and liberation must be part of a whole systems approach that delivers justice not just for workers in unions or the formal economy, but for all forms of labor, including in the care economy, the informal sector, and all instances in which wealth is generated non-consensually through oppression, slavery, extraction, and other means. With the recent passing of the Labor Day holiday, we must recognize the lives and labor stolen from generations of Afrodescendants and Indigenous Peoples and continue to organize for reparations and direct, non-debt-creating funding–a central tenet of a just transition.