Attacks on people’s stories are attacks on people. Just ask a librarian

(Sierra Club) – Your traditions and place in the American storyline are not real or valid. The history of your people is fiction.That is the message a Houston, Texas suburb is sending to Native American kids. Just three days after Indigenous People’s Day, Oct. 17 was the deadline to move the book Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs to the “Fiction” section in Montgomery County’s public libraries. The problem is the book is not fiction.Related Stories My White ancestors on my dad’s side of the family arrived at the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts 400 years ago this year. When they arrived, the Wampanoag people had already been there for 12,000 years.The Wampanoag were the first tribe the Pilgrims encountered when they arrived on the Mayflower. According to the book’s publisher, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story tells, from an Indigenous perspective, “the true story of the Indigenous Nations of the American Northeast, including the Wampanoag nation and others, and their history up to present day.”The book’s author is a Wampanoag Tribe historian with 50 years of experience in her field. Colonization has been classified as a work of nonfiction by the Library of Congress and major library systems across...