Book Review: What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland by Waziyatawin, Ph.D.

Reviewed by A. Iwasa

Living Justice Press 2093 Juliet Ave. St. Paul, MN 55105

This is one of the books I picked up after leaving the Sacred Stone Spirit Camp in an effort to try to contextualize the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) within the history of genocide against Native Americans.

This is the runaway best book I’ve ever read about Minnesota, and like most good books, offers people tons of options to follow up with, in this case with both sources cited for further research and models for restorative justice.

This book should be required reading for every settler in Minnesota, and we need to be seeking out similar books for those of us who dwell elsewhere in the United States and trace our ancestry from over seas.

I believe this book warrants a second reading on my part, being both dense and devastating in its information, but only 192 pages and technically easy to read. Some of the other books I’ve been reading to help with this research include Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner.