River Forest Public Library: Native American Heritage Month 2025: Adult Titles

Fiction

Old school Indian : a novel by Aaron John Curtis

Old School Indian
by Aaron John Curtis

A coming-of-middle-age novel about an Ahkwesáhsne man's reluctant return home and what it takes to heal.

Waiting for the long night moon : stories by Amanda Peters

Waiting for the Long Night Moon
by Amanda Peters

Stories of Indigenous experiences across time, from early European contact to modern water-rights activism, depicting resilience through characters like a residential school survivor, a water protector, and a young dancer, all revealing strength and dignity amid systemic hardships.

Big Chief
by Jon Hickey

Tribal government and personal entanglements collide in this political drama set on an Anishinaabe reservation.

Small ceremonies : a novel by Kyle Edwards

Small Ceremonies
by Kyle Edwards

A poignant coming-of-age story following the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg's North End illuminating what it's like to grow up forgotten, urban, poor, and Indigenous.

Where they last saw her : a novel by Marcie R. Rendon

Where They Last Saw Her
by Marcie R. Rendon

From the award-winning author of the Cash Blackbear series comes a novel of a Native American woman who learns of the disappearance of one of her own and decides enough is enough.

Nonfiction

Medicine River : a story of survival and the legacy of Indian boarding schools
by Mary Annette Pember

Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting on Native American boarding schools from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, the author traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.

The last stand of the Raven Clan : a story of imperial ambition, native resistance and how the Tlingit-Russian War shaped a continent
by Gerald Easter

The true story of how the indigenous Tlingit people of southeast Alaska thwarted Imperial Russia's grand plan of conquest in North America. Leading the charge was the young war chief K'alyáan, a hero as fierce and courageous as Crazy Horse or Geronimo. The Tlingit stance against Russian colonization--during the Battle of Sitka and beyond--was arguably the most successful indigenous resistance against European imperialism in North America.

By the fire we carry : the generations-long fight for justice on Native land
by Rebecca Nagle

A powerful work of reportage and American history braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days with a small-town murder in the '90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later.

Muddy ground : Native peoples, Chicago's portage, and the transformation of a continent
by John William Nelson

Charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers.

The rediscovery of America : native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history
by Ned Blackhawk

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.