Smithsonian Magazine’s “10 Best Books About Travel of 2021” ★ Winner of the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest
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Smithsonian Magazine’s “10 Best Books About Travel of 2021” ★ Winner of the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest ★
From the Author: When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, 'knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.' In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to boiling point, she began to ask: what does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn?
An Indian Among los Indígenas, Pike’s memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. It is also the debut of an exceptionally astute writer with a mastery of deadpan wit. It signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.
Bragging Rights:
★ 2019 Winner Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest for Memoir
★ Smithsonian Magazine’s “10 Best Books About Travel of 2021”
★ HipLATINA’s “11 Books to Understand the Indigenous History of LATAM”
Our Take: With piercing honesty and bone-dry wit, An Indian Among los Indígenas complicates the well-worn Peace Corps narrative in all the best ways. Ursula Pike turns the gaze inward, unpacking what it means to be an Indigenous woman offering “help” in a country still grappling with its own colonial past. Thoughtful, sharp, and often unsettling, this memoir doesn’t hand out easy answers—it asks better questions. A must-read for fans of travel writing that challenges rather than flatters, especially those interested in decolonization, identity, and nuance.
From a Reader: “[Pike] also gives great insight into what it means to be Native American and captures many of my own experiences and feeling.”