SHIPROCK, N.M. — The SBi Giving Foundation handed out about 2,000 books Friday for the first Native book drop tour.

For three hours, students and parents stood in a line out the door, eager to get their hands on books and other items.

“I think today’s event in Shiprock could be the biggest yet. we had a line out the door with hundreds of people long before we even started,” said Kell Wood with SBI.

At the Diné College library in Shiprock, SBi teamed up with NDN Girls Book Club to hand out books.

It was part of Cellular One’s 30th anniversary on tribal lands.

“We’ve been to Window Rock, we’ve been to Tuba City, we’ve been to Leupp, we’ve been to Hopi”, Wood said.

Since COVID, literacy rates in Native American communities have suffered.

“We realize that this a book desert and we wanted to help families build in-home libraries but not just with any books. We wanted to bring books by Indigenous authors. We felt it that was very important to be culturally relevant and respectful,” Wood said.

They also gave out socks, shoes, diapers, and toys – although the books were the fan favorite.

“There is a need for more books by native authors depicting native people getting them into the hands of young native people,” Kinsale Drake said.

Drake is an author and founder of NDN Book Club, which aims to encourage young Native storytellers.

“There’s an incredible future for our youth to become authors themselves,” Drake said. “We really want to show them that we are not just a statistic, we’re not just less than one percent of the entire literary world.”