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Reading Challenge A book by an Indigenous author |
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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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We survived the night
by Julian Brave Noisecat
Born to a Secwepemc father and Jewish-Irish mother, Julian Brave NoiseCat's childhood was full of contradictions. Despite living in the urban Native community of Oakland, California, he was raised primarily by his white mother. He was a competitive powwow dancer, but asked his father to cut his hair short, fearing that his white classmates would call him a girl if he kept it long. When his father, tormented by an abusive and impoverished rez upbringing, eventually left the family, NoiseCat was left to make sense of his Indigenous heritage and identity on his own. Now, decades later, Noisecat has set across the country to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding this nation's First Peoples, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right.
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Indian burial ground
by Nick Medina
All Noemi Broussard wanted was a fresh start. With a new boyfriend who actually treats her right and a plan to move from the reservation she grew up on--just like her beloved Uncle Louie before her--things are finally looking up for Noemi--until the news of her boyfriend's apparent suicide brings her world crumbling down. But the facts about Roddy's death just don't add up, and Noemi isn't the only one who suspects that something menacing might be lurking within their tribal lands. After over a decade away, Uncle Louie has returned to the reservation, bringing with him a past full of secrets, horror, and what might be the key to determining Roddy's true cause of death. Together, Noemi and Louie set out to find answers, but as they get closer to the truth, Noemi begins to question whether it might be best for some secrets to remain buried.
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There there
by Tommy Orange
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame in Oakland. Dene Oxedrene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle's memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the Big Oakland Powwow to dance in public for the very first time. This is a multi-generational story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.
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The night watchman
by Louise Erdrich
A novel based on the life of Erdrich's grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.
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Poet warrior : a memoir
by Joy Harjo
Three-term poet laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life.
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Mask of the deer woman
by Laurie L. Dove
To find a missing young woman, the new tribal marshal must also find herself. At rock bottom following her daughter's murder, ex-Chicago detective Carrie Starr has nowhere to go but back to her roots. Starr's father never talked much about the reservation that raised him, but they need a new tribal marshal as much as Starr needs a place to call home. In the last decade, too many young women have disappeared from the rez. Some dead, others just... gone. Now, local college student Chenoa Cloud is missing, and Starr falls into an investigation that leaves her drowning in memories of her daughter-the girl she failed to save. Starr feels lost in this place she thought would welcome her. And when she catches a glimpse of a figure from her father's stories, with the body of a woman and the antlers of a deer, Starr can't shake the feeling that the fearsome spirit is watching her, following her. What she doesn't know is whether Deer Woman is here to guide her or to seek vengeance for the lost daughters that Starr can never bring home.
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Calling for a blanket dance
by Oscar Hokeah
A young Native American boy in a splintering family grasps for stability and love, making all the wrong choices until he finds a space of his own.
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Night of the living rez
by Morgan Talty
Set in a Native community in Maine, this 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 stories, the author, with humor, compassion, and insight-breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance.
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The seed keeper by Diane Wilson
| Spanning several generations, this follows a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. |
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The buffalo hunter hunter
by Stephen Graham Jones
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits.
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To the moon and back
by Eliana Ramage
Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband with Steph and her younger sister in tow to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.
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Wandering stars
by Tommy Orange
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle. Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather's shooting in There There.
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White horse
by Erika T. Wurth
When an old family bracelet inadvertently calls up both her mother's ghost and a monstrous entity, an urban indigenous woman searches for what happened to her mother all those years ago, forcing her to confront a long-denied truth and the one thing she's always wanted but could never have.
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Winter counts
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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You don't have to say you love me : a memoir
by Sherman Alexie
Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman. When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive.
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The Indian card : who gets to be Native in America
by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
Who is Indian enough? To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the U.S. who claim Native identity has exploded--increasing 85 percent in just ten years--the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes--
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By the fire we carry : the generations-long fight for justice on Native land
by Rebecca Nagle
A work of reportage and American history in the vein of Caste and How the Word Is Passed that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the '90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later.
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Thinning blood : an Indigenous 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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Nothing more of this land : community, power, and the search for Indigenous identity
by Joseph Lee
Before Martha's Vineyard was a vacation destination, it was home to the Wampanoag people. The island is increasingly unaffordable for tribal members, with nearly three-quarters now living off-island. Lee grapples with what this situation meant for his tribe, how the community can grow, and what it means to be Indigenous. From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, a sweeping, personal exploration of Indigenous identity and the challenges facing Indigenous people around the world.
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The painted drum
by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich's breathtaking, lyrical novel of a priceless Ojibwe artifact and the effect it has had on those who have come into contact with it over the years.While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.
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An American sunrise : poems
by Joy Harjo
A nationally best-selling volume of wise, powerful poetry from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
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When my brother was an Aztec
by Natalie Diaz
In When My Brother Was An Aztec, Natalie Diaz examines memory's role in human identity. Each section filters memory through specific individuals and settings. The first concentrates on a diabetic grandmother without legs and the landscape, tangible and intangible, of a Native American reservation. The second engages a brother's strife with drug-use and his unraveling of the family, the home. The third grapples with war as a character and its tattering of individuals, families, and communities. Bigotry against Native Americans is confronted throughout the collection, and the speaker's wrestling with identity is carefully woven into each poem. Faithfulness to and departure from tradition and culture are ever-present. Each poem is stitched into the reservation's landscape, while many consider Christian identity. Natalie Diaz experiments with form, from couplets to parts, lists to prose poems, and explores the terrain of poetic predecessors, yet strikes out into new territory, demonstrating her adventurous spirit.
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