About this Event
A book club about the environment and climate crisis! We read a mix of non-fiction, novels, essays, speculative fiction, sci-fi and graphic novels that provide a diverse lens on the people, places, and spaces that are affected by our changing climate.
This book club is hosted by Jess Schreibstein. Jess just finished a graduate degree in Sustainability from Harvard at the end of 2022 and served as Communications Lead of our local Sunrise Movement chapter during the 2020 election cycle. She has been hosting this book club virtually since 2020 and is excited to bring an in-person version to her favorite local bookstore!
The February book is The Right to Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier.
About The Right to Be Cold :
A “courageous and revelatory memoir” (Naomi Klein) chronicling the life of the leading Indigenous climate change, cultural, and human rights advocate
For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of Inuit, the elders say that the weather is Uggianaqtuq—behaving in strange and unexpected ways. The Right to Be Cold is Watt-Cloutier’s memoir of growing up in the Arctic reaches of Quebec during these unsettling times. It is the story of an Inuk woman finding her place in the world, only to find her native land giving way to the inexorable warming of the planet. She decides to take a stand against its destruction.
The Right to Be Cold is the human story of life on the front lines of climate change, told by a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential Indigenous environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world. Raised by a single mother and grandmother in the small community of Kuujjuaq, Quebec, Watt-Cloutier describes life in the traditional ice-based hunting culture of an Inuit community and reveals how Indigenous life, human rights, and the threat of climate change are inextricably linked. Colonialism intervened in this world and in her life in often violent ways, and she traces her path from Nunavik to Nova Scotia (where she was sent at the age of ten to live with a family that was not her own); to a residential school in Churchill, Manitoba; and back to her hometown to work as an interpreter and student counselor.
The Right to Be Cold is at once the intimate coming-of-age story of a remarkable woman, a deeply informed look at the life and culture of an Indigenous community reeling from a colonial history and now threatened by climate change, and a stirring account of an activist’s powerful efforts to safeguard Inuit culture, the Arctic, and the planet.
The Right to Be Cold is available for purchase at greedyreads.com!
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Greedy Reads Remington, 320 West 29th Street, Baltimore, United States
USD 0.00
