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Native American and Alaskan Native Heritage Month November 2023
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Sisters of the lost nation
by Nick Medina
As girls start going missing amidst strange and sinister happenings in the reservation's casino, including her little sister, Anna Horn, an outcast struggling with her place on the rez, must confront demons old and new as she hunts for answers.
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Weaving sundown in a scarlet light : fifty poems for fifty years
by Joy Harjo
"In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo's inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth"
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Five little Indians
by Michelle Good
"Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention. Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn't want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission. Fuelled by rage and furious with God, Clara finds her way into the dangerous, highly charged world of the American Indian Movement. Maisie internalizes her pain and continually places herself in dangerous situations. Famous for his daring escapes from the school, Kenny can't stop running and moves restlessly from job to job - through fishing grounds, orchards andlogging camps - trying to outrun his memories and his addiction. Lucy finds peace in motherhood and nurtures a secret compulsive disorder as she waits for Kenny to return to the life they once hoped to share together. After almost beating one of his tormentors to death, Howie serves time in prison, then tries once again to re-enter society and begin life anew. With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the desperate quest of these residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward."-- Provided by publisher
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Living nations, living words : an anthology of first peoples poetry
by Joy Harjo
"A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathersthe work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.""
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The removed : a novel
by Brandon Hobson
A Cherokee family takes in a remarkable foster child on the eve of the Cherokee National Holiday and anniversary of a loved one's death. By the National Book Award-winning author of Where the Dead Sit Talking. 75,000 first printing.
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The heartbeat of Wounded Knee : life in Native America
by David Treuer
"Adapted for young adults from the adult nonfiction book of the same name, this powerful story of resilience and reinvention looks at Native American culture as it exists today?—?and the fight to preserve its languages and traditions. Simultaneous eBook. Illustrations."
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Swim Home to the Vanished
by Brendan Shay Basham
A grief-stricken young man, Damien lands in a fishing village where he falls under the spell of Ana Maria, rumored to have had something to do with her daughter's death, and forms a strange kinship with one of her surviving daughters, who is driven by a fierce need for revenge. 50,000 first printing.
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The seed keeper : a novel
by Diane Wilson
"A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakota family's struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most"
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Bad Cree = : ãAcimowin : a novel
by Jessica Johns
A young Cree woman is tormented by vivid dreams from before her sister's untimely death and wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands before returning to her rural hometown in Alberta seeking answers. 30,000 first printing.
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Earth keeper : reflections on the American land
by N. Scott Momaday
A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet celebrates the oral tradition of his Native American culture as he recalls the stories of his childhood, passed down for generations, and their profound and sacred connection to the natural world. 25,000 first printing.
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My heart is a chainsaw
by Stephen Graham Jones
Protected by horror movies—especially the ones where the masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them—Jade Daniels, an angry, half-Indian outcast, pulls us into her dark mind when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian lake. 100,000 first printing.
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Girlhood : essays
by Melissa Febos
The acclaimed author looks back on her experiences growing up as a female and how the values that she and other women learned in girlhood failed to prioritize their personal safety, happiness and freedom. 50,000 first printing.
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The sentence : a novel
by Louise Erdrich
The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author presents an unusual novel in which a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. 150,000 first printing.
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Project 562 : changing the way we see Native America
by Matika Wilbur
In this visually stunning celebration of contemporary Native American life and cultures, a critically acclaimed social documentarian and photographer presents compelling personal narratives of Native people and the issues they face that will inspire, educate and truly change the way we see Native America. Illustrations.
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Braiding sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
"As a leading researcher in the field of biology, Robin Wall Kimmerer understands the delicate state of our world. But as an active member of the Potawatomi nation, she senses and relates to the world through a way of knowing far older than any science. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she intertwines these two modes of awareness--the analytic and the emotional, the scientific and the cultural--to ultimately reveal a path toward healing the rift that grows between people and nature. The woven essays that construct this book bring people back into conversation with all that is green and growing; a universe that never stopped speaking to us, even when we forgot how to listen"
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Crooked hallelujah
by Kelli Jo Ford
A first collection by an award-winning Cherokee writer traces four generations of Native American women as they navigate cultural dynamics, religious beliefs, the 1980s oil bust, devastating storms and unreliable men to connect with their ideas about home.
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Shapes of Native nonfiction : collected essays by contemporary writers
by Elissa Washuta
"For many the phrase "Native nonfiction" inspires thoughts of the past, of timeless oral history transcriptions and dry 19th century autobiographies. In Shapes of Native Nonfiction, Washuta and Warburton explode this perspective by showcasing 22 contemporary Native writers and their provocative approaches to form. While exploring familiar legacies of personal and collective trauma and violence, these writers push, pull and break the conventional essay structure to overhaul the dominant cultural narrativethat romanticize Native lives, yet deny Native emotional response. Organized into four sections inspired by different aspects of and strategies for basket weaving (Technique, Coiling, Plaiting, Twining) the essays presented here demonstrate how Native writers manipulate the shape of creative nonfiction to offer incisive observations, critiques and commentary on our political, social and cultural world. The result is an engaging anthology that introduces a variety of audiences to the true range of Native nonfiction work"
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Funeral songs for dying girls
by Cherie Dimaline
To save her father's job at the crematorium and the only home she's ever known, Winifred and her con-artist cousin start offering ghost tours until Winifred meets an actual ghost who causes her to question everything she believes about life, love and death. Simultaneous eBook.
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Birding while Indian : a mixed-blood memoir
by Thomas C. Gannon
"Catalogs a lifetime of bird sightings to explore the part-Lakota author's search for identity and his reckoning with colonialism's violence against Indigenous humans, animals, and land."
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Winter counts : a novel
by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop. They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost
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Thinning blood : a memoir of family, myth, and identity
by Leah Myers
"Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe's strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family's totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird, and perched on top, Raven. As she pieces together their stories, Myers weaves in tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and Native mythology. Throughout, she tells the larger story of how, as she puts it, her "culture is being bleached out," offering sharp vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds"
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Night of the living rez
by Morgan Talty
"Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty-with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight-breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, whichsets into motion his family's unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction"
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Pierce County Library System 3005 112th St. E, Tacoma, Washington 98446 253-548-3300mypcls.org |
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