Better Read Than Dead: A Radical Book Club

Join us for the first installment of Better Read Than Dead, a series of gatherings around book selections that offer a deeper perspective on the exhibitions on view each season. Each meeting will be hosted and facilitated by local artist and poet John Hill.

Our inaugural reading will focus on The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill.

TO TAKE PART IN THIS BOOK CLUB:

Buy or borrow a copy of the comic book, pre-register to take part in the meeting, and bring your questions and your observations for discussion with a small group of fellow readers. John will also facilitate dialogue and bring questions for consideration, connecting this season’s selection with WAHC’s winter exhibitions, These Conditions Can Be Changed by Dylan Miner and One Big Union: The Revolutionary Graphics of the IWW.

THE BOOK:

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is a powerful and historically accurate graphic portrayal of Indigenous resistance to the European colonization of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish invasion under Christopher Columbus and ending with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario in 2006. Gord Hill spent two years unearthing images and researching historical information to create The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, which presents the story of Aboriginal resistance in a far-reaching format. With strong, plain language and evocative illustrations, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book documents the fighting spirit and ongoing resistance of Indigenous peoples through 500 years of genocide, massacres, torture, rape, displacement, and assimilation: a necessary antidote to the conventional history of the Americas.

Gord Hill is a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation on the Northwest Coast. An author, artist, and militant, he has been involved in Indigenous resistance, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements for many years, often using the pseudonym Zig Zag.

ABOUT JOHN HILL:

John Hill is a queer, Indigenous, working class poet and artist from Hamilton, Ontario. He is Oneida nation, Turtle clan from Six Nations of the Grand River. His poetry deals with colonization, queerness, anger, hope, and the enchantment which lies beneath the surface of so-called modern civilization.

Stay tuned for our Spring/Summer book club date in the coming months. The next selection will be Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

For more information, contact Florencia Berinstein, Executive Director at (905) 522-3003 ex. 23 or florencia@wahc-museum.ca