Our Exiled NDNZ Reading List & Archive: Tracing a Modern Indigenous Legacy

If you’ve ever tried explaining to someone that you’re building a digital library while nursing an oat flat white in a packed London café, you’ll know it’s a strange and beautiful contradiction. Our team has spent countless afternoons doing exactly that, huddled over laptops in spots like Monmouth Coffee Company, trading PDFs of rez fiction and debating the ethics of digital preservation. We’ve come to believe that archiving isn’t just a clerical task for modern-day Native Americans—it’s a radical act of self-definition. This page isn’t a dusty back catalogue destined to languish on a forgotten server. It’s a living, breathing library that we tend to constantly, pruning dead links and planting new seeds for the Exiled NDNZ community across the UK.

Why We Built This Archive for Modern-Day Native Americans

When Exiled NDNZ started, it wasn’t a website. It was a loose constellation of diaspora creatives trying to find each other in a city that often conflates Indigenous identity with a historical footnote. We needed a permanent home, a place where our conversations wouldn’t vanish under the weight of an algorithm or a deleted group chat. Digital erasure isn’t an abstract threat for modern-day Native Americans; it’s the slow disappearance of nuance, the flattening of our artistic legacy into a single, static stereotype. We built this archive to push back, to anchor our presence on a platform we control, ensuring that the stories we share remain accessible whether you’re reading in Kentish Town or Kent.

The Urgency of Digital Preservation

We’ve watched entire Tumblr blogs dedicated to Indigenous art criticism disappear overnight. We’ve seen vital Twitter threads on repatriation get suspended without explanation. For a dispersed community, losing a digital hub feels like losing a physical gathering place. Our urgency comes from knowing that if we don’t capture the essays, the exhibition reviews, and the raw Instagram live critiques, the record of our contemporary movement in the UK simply won’t exist. We aren’t just saving files; we are actively building the primary source material that future generations will need to understand how we lived and created right now.

From Private Group Chats to Public Legacy

The intimacy of a WhatsApp group is hard to replicate, but the knowledge shared there shouldn’t stay locked behind a phone screen. Long before we had a proper domain, our team circulated reading lists in direct messages. We’d pass around scans of out-of-print catalogues from Native artists who had shown in Europe, or we’d argue about a specific passage in a novel well past midnight. Turning that private chatter into a public legacy felt vulnerable, but we realised that gatekeeping these resources contradicted our mission. This archive is essentially the group chat matured, organised, and opened up for anyone needing a starting point.

Essential Books by Contemporary Native Voices

Our editorial voice doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It’s forged in the pages of books we physically hand to each other, spines cracked and margins scribbled in. When we talk about the modern Indigenous experience, we’re standing on a foundation built by storytellers who translate the chaos of our reality into sharp, unforgettable prose. These texts aren’t just recommendations; they are the lenses through which we view our own work at Exiled NDNZ, shaping how we critique art and how we understand our place in the UK landscape.

Fiction That Redefines the Rez

You cannot understand our team’s conversations without understanding the impact of Tommy Orange’s There There. We passed a single battered copy around so many times that it eventually disintegrated near Borough Market. That novel cracked open the concept of the urban Native experience in a way that resonated deeply with those of us navigating London’s concrete maze. We also constantly return to the sharp, haunting short stories of Stephen Graham Jones and the visceral family sagas of Louise Erdrich, all of which dismantle the idea that Native fiction belongs strictly to a rural past.

Poetry and Theory We Keep Returning To

When we need to remember why we do this, we read Joy Harjo. Her poetry functions as a true north for our editorial compass, blending the historical with the cosmic in a way that makes the political feel deeply personal. Alongside Harjo, we keep the theoretical work of Glen Sean Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson close at hand. Their critiques of colonial recognition politics give us the vocabulary to interrogate how Indigenous art is framed in British institutions, pushing us to ask harder questions about who holds the power to contextualise our work.

Visual Art & Photography Books That Inspire Us

We are visual people first. Long before we write a single word, we’re looking. The monographs and catalogues stacked on our shelves in London flats serve as a visual counterweight to the Eurocentric art history we were often fed in school. These books teach us how to see beyond the colonial gaze, offering a blueprint for how to document our communities with agency, humour, and a healthy dose of defiance. They inspire the aesthetic direction of our own digital presence and inform the visual literacy we try to cultivate in our readers.

Challenging the Colonial Lens

Wendy Red Star’s work is a masterclass in this reclamation. Her photographic self-portraits and interventions into archival images use bold colour and biting satire to talk back to the anthropologist’s camera. We spend hours dissecting how she layers humour over historical trauma without diminishing either. Similarly, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s documentation of his large-scale installations and community actions shows us how to provoke without performing damage. His work reminds us that contemporary Indigenous art can be monumental, messy, and futuristic, refusing the quiet, minimal boxes Western galleries often try to place us in.

Our Favourite Exhibition Catalogues from Tate Modern

We still talk about the catalogue from the Soul of a Nation era, but more recently, Tate Modern’s engagement with global Indigenous practices has provided vital physical artefacts for our archive. While we maintain a critical eye on institutional framing, we can’t deny the value of a well-produced monograph that captures the scale of an artist’s vision. Whenever a major institution highlights a contemporary Indigenous artist, we scramble to secure the catalogue not just as a souvenir, but as a record of that moment in the ongoing dialogue between our communities and the British art establishment.

Deep Dives into UK & Indigenous Intersections

Living in the UK as modern-day Native Americans means constantly navigating a layered and often uncomfortable shared history. We don’t exist in a bubble; we walk streets that have been tied to Turtle Island for over four centuries. Unpacking these connections is essential to understanding the legacy we are building here. It’s not about validating the colonial project, but about acknowledging the complex, and frequently tragic, intersections that have brought Indigenous bodies and artefacts to this soil, often against their will.

Gravesend, St. George’s Church, and the Pocahontas Legacy

One of the most surreal and sobering sites we visit is St. George’s Church in Gravesend, Kent. Standing before the Pocahontas statue and contemplating her burial site forces a reckoning with the earliest moments of this transatlantic exchange. She wasn’t a tourist; she died here, far from her homeland, and her legacy has been heavily romanticised by British folklore. For our team, visiting Gravesend is a pilgrimage that strips away the Disney myth and reminds us of the real human cost embedded in the history of Native American travel to the UK. It grounds our work in a solemn reality that contrasts sharply with the vibrant creativity we usually celebrate.

Navigating the British Museum’s Indigenous Collections

Walking into the British Museum is a conflicting experience for us. The Native American art and artefacts housed there, from ancient textiles to ceremonial objects, are breathtaking in their craftsmanship, yet their presence is a constant, painful reminder of extraction. We guide our readers to look critically at these displays, to question the placards, and to see the living cultures behind the glass. Similarly, we direct serious researchers toward the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which holds a vast and deeply complex array of Indigenous material culture. We believe in using these collections as sites of study and critique, rather than passive viewing.

Playlists, Podcasts, and Audio Storytelling

Legacy isn’t just visual or textual; it vibrates through sound waves. Our team is just as likely to bond over a shared playlist as we are over a book. Audio carries an immediacy and an intimacy that bridges the gap between our London base and the homelands. Whether it’s the crackle of a rez radio voice or the heavy bass drop of a powwow step remix, the auditory side of our archive captures the rhythm of modern Indigenous life in a way that static text often misses.

Podcasts That Feel Like a Kitchen Table Talk

We are devoted listeners of the Media Indigena podcast. It’s the roundtable discussion we wish we were sitting in on, dissecting current affairs with a sharp, Indigenous-centred wit that never pulls its punches. It feels like a kitchen table talk where everyone is too smart, too funny, and too honest for mainstream media. We archive and reference episodes frequently because they model exactly the kind of fearless, nuanced conversation we want to foster within the Exiled NDNZ community.

Music Blending Powwow and UK Bass Culture

The presence of A Tribe Called Red, now The Halluci Nation, in London’s music scene was a watershed moment for many of us. Seeing a crowd in Brixton or Shoreditch lose themselves to a mix of pounding powwow drums and heavy UK bass culture was a revelation. It proved that our sonic traditions don’t just survive in the diaspora; they evolve into something entirely new and electrifying. Their albums are permanent fixtures in our archive, representing the perfect synthesis of Indigenous rhythm and urban electronic rebellion that defines so much of our aesthetic.

How We Curate the Exiled NDNZ Legacy

Maintaining this archive isn’t a passive act of hoarding. It requires a rigorous, sometimes exhausting, curatorial process. We are building a legacy for a community that has been misrepresented for centuries, so we take the responsibility of fact-checking and contextualising extremely seriously. This isn’t about amassing a massive quantity of links; it’s about cultivating a trusted space where our readers know the information has been vetted through a specific, community-focused lens. We pull back the curtain here to show you how we decide what makes the cut.

Our Vetting Process for Community Accuracy

Every resource we include goes through a verification process that prioritises Indigenous sources. We cross-reference claims with tribal historians, primary documents, and established Native-led media outlets. We often find ourselves cross-checking historical data against the detailed records and recommendations sourced by institutions like the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, while applying a critical lens to the museum’s own framing. Our process involves a lot of late-night messaging, asking elders or subject matter experts for clarity, ensuring we aren’t perpetuating a colonial misinterpretation by accident.

What We Refuse to Archive (And Why)

We are not a neutral repository, and we refuse to archive material that violates our core ethics. We deliberately exclude:

• Ceremonial knowledge never meant for public consumption: If it’s sacred and secret, it has no place on a website.
• Content by pretendians or fraudulent voices: We actively verify claimed affiliations and refuse to platform individuals who have been identified by their communities as dishonest about their heritage.
• Exploitative journalism: Pieces that traffic in trauma without consent, or that frame our communities as helpless relics, are not welcome here.

This selectivity is not censorship; it is a boundary. Our legacy cannot be built on the same extractive practices that harmed our ancestors.

We see this archive as a collaborative dialogue with our UK readers. It is not a static monument to a frozen past, but a dynamic, evolving conversation that grows with every new book we discover, every exhibition we critique, and every song that moves us. The legacy of Exiled NDNZ lives in the gaps between these resources, in the discussions they spark, and in the community they help to build. Keep reading, keep listening, and keep talking back to us—this library is yours as much as it is ours.

FAQ

Do you only archive content created by modern-day Native Americans?

Our primary focus is elevating Indigenous voices and creators, but we occasionally include non-Native resources if they provide essential critical context or archival value that directly supports our community’s understanding. However, we always clearly label the source and apply a critical lens to non-Indigenous perspectives.

How can I suggest a book or podcast for the Exiled NDNZ archive?

We actively welcome suggestions from the community. You can reach out through our contact channels with the title and a brief note on why it resonates with you. Our team reviews every submission, though we only include items that align with our curatorial values and pass our vetting process for accuracy and authenticity.

Why does the archive include UK institutions like the British Museum if they hold contested artefacts?

We include them because they are a reality of the landscape we navigate as modern-day Native Americans living in the UK. Ignoring their existence doesn’t help our community. We provide context for engaging with these spaces critically, encouraging readers to understand the history of extraction while studying the art and artefacts housed there.

Is the Pocahontas memorial in Gravesend actually a burial site?

Yes, St. George’s Church in Gravesend, Kent, is widely recognised as the burial site of Pocahontas, who died there in 1617. A statue commemorates her legacy, though we encourage visitors to approach the site with a critical understanding of how her story has been romanticised and separated from the harsh realities of colonial history.