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Books to Honor Indigenous Peoples' Day |
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Girl gone missing : a Cash Blackbear mystery
by Marcie R. Rendon
When Renee Blackbear, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman, attends college at Minnesota’s Moorhead State, she realizes that she is unprepared for college or for the hurt that happens in the Twin Cities, especially when a man claiming he’s her brother shows up.
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Black sun
by Rebecca Roanhorse
Xiala, a disgraced Teek who can calm waters or cause madness with her song, arrives and disrupts the holy city of Tova during the winter solstice in the first novel of a new trilogy.
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The only good Indians : a novel
by Stephen Graham Jones
"Peter Straub's Ghost Story meets Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies in this American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends"
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Where the dead sit talking
by Brandon Hobson
After his mother is jailed, a young Cherokee boy, Sequoyah, bonds with another Native American, Rosemary, in the foster home where they both have been placed and experienced deepening feelings for each other while dealing with the scars of their pasts.
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Split tooth
by Tagaq
When a young Nunavut girl, who knows the ravages of alcohol and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust, becomes pregnant, she struggles with the world around her.
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Future home of the living god : a novel
by Louise Erdrich
A tale set in a world of reversing evolution and a growing police state follows the efforts of a pregnant woman who investigates her biological family while awaiting the birth of a child who may emerge as a member of a primitive human species. (dystopian).
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Moccasin Square Gardens : Short Stories
by Richard Van Camp
The characters of Moccasin Square Gardens inhabit Denendeh, the land of the people north of the sixtieth parallel. These stories are filled with in-laws, outlaws and common-laws. Get ready for illegal wrestling moves (“The Camel Clutch”), pinky promises, a doctored casino, extraterrestrials or “Sky People,” love, lust and prayers for peace.
While this is Van Camp’s most hilarious short story collection, it’s also haunted by the lurking presence of the Wheetago, human-devouring monsters of legend that have returned due to global warming and the greed of humanity. The stories in Moccasin Square Gardens show that medicine power always comes with a price.
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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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Oak Flat : a fight for sacred land in the American west
by Lauren Redniss
Three generations of an Apache family of activists race against time in a legal and cultural battle to protect sacred land from corrupt government officials and a multinational mining corporation. By the National Book Award finalist author of Radioactive. Illustrations.
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Spirit run : a 6,000-mile marathon through North America's stolen land
by Noé Álvarez
"Growing up in Raymond Carver country-Yakima, Washington-Noé lvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who "slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives." Escape came in the form of a university scholarship, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, lvarez struggled to fit in. At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys,epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across a North America older than its present political borders. He dropped out of school and joined a group of Dené, Secwépemc, Gitxsan, Dakelh, Apache, Tohono O'odham, Seri, Purépecha, and Maya runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories alongside his own, lvarez writes about a four-month-long journey that pushed him to his limits. He writes not only of overcoming hunger, thirst, and fear-dangers included stone-throwing motorists and a mountain lion-but also of asserting Indigenous and working-class humanity in a capitalist society where oil extraction, deforestation, and substance abuse wreck communities. Running through mountains, deserts, and cities, and through the Mexican territory his parents left behind, lvarez forges a new relationship with the land, and with the act of running, carrying with him the knowledge of his parents' migration, and-against all odds in a society that exploits his body and rejects his spirit-the dream of a liberated future"
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Poet warrior : a memoir
by Joy Harjo
"Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Weaving together the voices that shaped her, Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, the teachings of a changing earth, and the poets who paved her way. She explores her grief at theloss of her mother and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. Moving fluidly among prose, song, and poetry, Poet Warrior is a luminous journey of becoming that sings with all the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo"
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Bury my heart at Chuck E. Cheese's
by Tiffany Midge
"Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's is a powerful and inviting collection of Tiffany Midge's musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in modern America"
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Mamaskatch : a Cree coming of age
by Darrel J. McLeod
"As a small boy in remote Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod is immersed in his Cree family's history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turns wild and unstable, and their home life becomes chaotic. Meanwhile, he begins to question and grapple with his sexual identity--a reckoning complicated by the repercussions of his abuse and his sibling's own gender transition. Thrillingly written in a series of fractured vignettes, and unflinchingly honest, Mamaskatch--"It's a wonder!" in Cree--is a heartbreaking account of how traumas are passed down from one generation to the next, and an uplifting story of one individual who broke the cycle in pursuit of a fulfilling and adventurous life"
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Dog Flowers
by Danielle Geller
An award-winning essayist draws on archival documents in a narrative account that explores how her family’s troubled past and the death of her mother, a homeless alcoholic, reflected the traditions and tragic history of her Navajo heritage. Illustrations.
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The journey of Crazy Horse : a Lakota history
by Joseph Marshall
A leading Lakota historian and storyteller offers a lively portrait of Crazy Horse, the era in which he lived, and his legacy, drawing on his own culture's oral tradition and firsthand research to capture diverse aspects of Crazy Horse's life, from the visions that led him to battle to preserve the Lakota homeland to his profound leadership skills. Reprint.
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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.
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I've Been Here All the While : Black Freedom on Native Land
by Alaina E. Roberts
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.
In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.
Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.
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Stories from the Magic Canoe of Wa’xaid
by Cecil Paul
My name is Wa’xaid, given to me by my people. ‘Wa’ is ‘the river’, ‘Xaid’ is ‘good’ – good river. Sometimes the river is not good. I am a Xenaksiala, I am from the Killer Whale Clan. I would like to walk with you in Xenaksiala lands. Where I will take you is the place of my birth. They call it the Kitlope. It is called Xesdu’wäxw (Huschduwaschdu) for ‘blue, milky, glacial water’. Our destination is what I would like to talk about, and a boat – I call it my magic canoe. It is a magical canoe because there is room for everyone who wants to come into it to paddle together. The currents against it are very strong but I believe we can reach that destination and this is the reason for our survival. —Cecil Paul
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Braiding sweetgrass : indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.""
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As You Were
by David Tromblay
In this hypnotic, brutal and unstoppable coming-of-age story, the author confronts the compounded traumas of his childhood, searching for the domino that fell and forced his family into the cycle of brutality and denial of their own identity.
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The heartbeat of Wounded Knee : native America from 1890 to the present
by David Treuer
The received idea of Native American history has been that it essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a Minnesota reservation and training as an anthropologist David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear -- and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence -- the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing thetribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the U.S. military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era
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Code talker
by Chester Nez
A retired Marine and Navajo Indian describes his experiences as one of 29 top-secret code talkers during World War II and how his life growing up on the Checkerboard Area of the Navajo Reservation prepared him for his service.
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There there
by Tommy Orange
A novel that grapples with the complex history and identity of Native Americans follows twelve characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow.
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The Beadworkers : Stories
by Beth Piatote
This brilliant debut collection of stories, set in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, draws on indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life in the Americas.
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Junk
by Tommy Pico
"The third book in Tommy Pico's Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto fororientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing politicallandscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons's Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space "Junk," in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of "being" for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?"
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This town sleeps : a novel
by Dennis E. Staples
Engaging in a secret affair with a closeted white man, an Ojibwe from a northern Minnesota reservation navigates small-town discrimination before a ghost leads him to the grave of a basketball star whose murder becomes linked to a local legend.
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A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
by Alicia Elliott
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced.
Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes thrilling connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political.
A national bestseller in Canada, this updated and expanded American edition helps us better understand legacy, oppression, and racism throughout North America, and offers us a profound new way to decolonize our minds.
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An indigenous peoples' history of the United States
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was genocidal and imperialist, designed to crush the original inhabitants. Spanning more than 300 years, a classic bottom-up history significantly reframes how we view our past. Told from the viewpoint of the indigenous, it reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the U.S. empire.
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Trail of lightning
by Rebecca Roanhorse
When a small town needs her help in finding a missing girl, Maggie Hoskie, a Dinetah monster hunter and supernaturally gifted killer, reluctantly enlists the help of an unconventional medicine man to uncover the terrifying truth behind the disappearance—and her own past.
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Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
"Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback For the seventieth anniversary of Penguin Classics, the Penguin Orange Collection celebrates the heritage of Penguin's iconic book design with twelve influential American literary classics representing the breadth and diversity of the Penguin Classics library. These collectible editions are dressed in the iconic orange and white tri-band cover design, first created in 1935, while french flaps, high-quality paper, and striking cover illustrations provide the cutting-edge design treatment that is the signature of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions today. Ceremony Almost forty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature--a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power"
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Everything you know about Indians is wrong
by Paul Chaat Smith
Smith mixes wide-ranging social, political, and cultural commentary with recollections of his own life, including time spent with the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, to comment on the past and present of Indigenous peoples in the United States.
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