“Like all good works of fiction, it lies like the truth.”
-Robert Crossley in his critical essay on Kindred by Octavia Butler

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"Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
—American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, May 18, 1848

2023-2024 Reading Schedule:
"Prologue" through "The Fire" (43 pgs.) by Thursday, 2/4
"The Fall" (55 pgs.) by Thursday, 2/15
"The Fight" (80 pgs.) by Thursday, 2/29
"The Storm," The Rope," "The Epilogue" (75 pgs.) by Thursday, 3/14

Supplemental Texts

Read the novel here!

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Click on the book cover above to go to a pdf copy of the novel. Please note that the PDF pages and book pages do NOT match BUT the pages printed inside the document DO match the physical book.
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Click on the image above to read the article, "Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Aroiund Us."
Course Hero Infographic

Please read the NPR article and listen to the short NPR interview linked above. Then compose and create a brief evaluative essay (250-300 words) discussing whether Butler has succeeded in her purpose based on the text you’ve read so far.

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Click on the image above to read an article from Persephone Magazine about Octavia Butler and Kindred.
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Click the image above to read, "The Second Coming of Octavia Butler" in Vanity Fair, Dec. 9, 2021.

Artifacts

#1

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Certificate of Freedom of Harriet Bolling, Petersburg Virginia, 1851

#2

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Patrol Regulations for the Town of Tarborough

#3

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Slave Pass for Benjamin McDaniel to Travel from Montpellier to New Market

#4

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Mount Harmon Plantation at World's End

#5

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"Bible Pages." Barnett Family Genealogy

#6

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"The State of Maryland, from the Best Authorities" by Samuel Lewis. W. Barker Sculp.
Video Production of The Prologue, The River, and The Fire.
Full Audiobook of the novel, Kindred, by Octavia Butler.
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Link to Graphic Novel, Parts 1-3 (Password Protected)

Octavia Butler (1947-2006)

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Click on the image above to go Butler's Author Website.
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Click on the image above to go to New York Public Library's page, "Where to Start With Octavia Butler" (2018).
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The image above is one of the many notes Octavia Butler wrote to remind herself to keep her characters credible to her audience.

Learning for Justice Resources:
​Teaching Hard History

The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors"The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors offers an introduction to the history of Indigenous enslavement on land that is now the United States. As the featured historians point out, the enslavement of Indigenous peoples stretched from Alaska into South America. It predated and helped shape the system of African enslavement in New England, and it lasted until throughout the 19th century in the West. “This,” explains historian Andrés Reséndez, “is our shared history.”
Directed and edited by Howdice Brown III, The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors was produced by Marie Acemah and Alice Qannik Glenn. The runtime for this film is just over 12 minutes." 
(Video 1) Slavery, which Europeans practiced before they invaded the Americas, was important to all colonial powers and existed in all North American colonies.
Historian Ibram X. Kendi uses the case of Elizabeth Key to trace how Virginians changed British law to protect the growing institution of slavery in the 17th century. 
(Video 2) “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.
Please watch: Historian Daina Ramey Berry describes the sale of an infant named Rachel to explore how enslaved people were commodified. 
(Video 3) Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
Please watch: Historian Tera Hunter discusses Henry “Box” Brown’s escape from slavery and his work as an abolitionist. 
​(Video 4) Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
 Please watch: Historian Martha Jones traces the development of racist ideas about people of African descent from the colonial period through the early 19th century. 
(Video 5) Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world. 
Please watch: Historian Ibram X. Kendi discusses how the foodways and music of enslaved Africans helped shape American culture as we know it today. 
(Video 6) By knowing how to read and interpret the sources that tell the story of American slavery, we gain insight into some of what enslaving and enslaved Americans aspired to, created, thought and desired. 
Please watch: Scholar Annette Gordon-Reed discusses the challenges of using texts created by enslavers to understand the lives of enslaved people. 
(Video 7) The experience of slavery varied depending on time, location, crop, labor performed, size of slaveholding and gender.
Please watch: Historian Edward L. Ayers describes how the age and gender of enslaved people, along with the labor needs in different parts of the country, affected the domestic slave trade. 

Documents

williamsck-aow_data_sheet-sat-style_2.0.pdf
File Size: 173 kb
File Type: pdf
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reynoldsj.howpoetrycanhelpkidsturnfearofliteratureintolove.pdf
File Size: 164 kb
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day2-faster-than-light-time-travel-article.pdf
File Size: 91 kb
File Type: pdf
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day2-professor-predicts-human-time-travel-this-century-article.pdf
File Size: 144 kb
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day3-kindred-questions.doc
File Size: 32 kb
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eng_iv_l1_kindred_artifact_inquiry_project.pdf
File Size: 84 kb
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mid-unit_summative_assessment.pdf
File Size: 76 kb
File Type: pdf
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lens_and_artifact_essay_presentation.pptx
File Size: 28749 kb
File Type: pptx
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lens_and_artifact_practice_worksheet.docx
File Size: 12 kb
File Type: docx
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kindred-12yearsaslavelensandartifact.docx
File Size: 15 kb
File Type: docx
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writing-a-lens-essay.pdf
File Size: 100 kb
File Type: pdf
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Film Adaptations and Connections

It's important to remember that Antebellum (2020) is not a retelling of Kindred, but it is an example of how much Butler's work has influenced the work of others.
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The image above is a still from an upcoming (2022-2023) televised adaptation of Kindred on FX. This image is linked to an article with ideas of who COULD play the characters in Octavia Butler's SciFi novel.
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The image above is linked to the IMDB page for 12 Years a Slave (2013), the Academy Award winning film based upon the REAL man, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, who was abducted and sold into slavery. While Northup's true story is dissimilar to Dana Franklin's fictional story in Kindred, it touches on some of the same themes.