INTRODUCTION
This reading guide is designed to accompany author Thomas King and illustrator William Kent Monkman’s book A Coyote Columbus Story. We hold the belief that anti-racist practice is a process of learning (and unlearning) over time. Reading Is Resistance sees reading as an opportunity to seed deeper conversations and possibilities for action around racial justice.
Lesson content was written by Zapoura Newton-Calvert and was designed to start and deepen anti-bias/anti-racist conversations in families and other learning communities.
BOOK THEMES
COLONIZATION, INDIGENEITY, DECOLONIZATION, HISTORY
BOOK SUMMARY
This story is a funny, true, and important retelling of the settler colonist “Christopher Columbus” myth. Told from the perspective of Coyote, the trickster and creator of the world, we see the ups and downs of the human, animal, Coyote, and Columbus interaction and see that history is shaped by the teller.
The illustrations are bright and silly and the story is quick and witty. Story sharers will be able to dive into any number of depths around the mythology of the “encounter” and country’s “founding,” in addition to the responses of the natural and human creatures native to this land.