November is National American Indian Heritage Month, which makes it the perfect time to pick up books by and about Native American and Indigenous people. It’s not only a chance to celebrate diverse cultures, traditions, and contributions, but also to bring awareness to the challenges they faced throughout history. We’ve gathered a list below featuring fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and poetry that we hope you check out.
The Berry Pickers
By: Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years.
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
By: Debra Magpie Earline
Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper.
Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.
There There
By: Tommy Orange
A wondrous and shattering novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
Give Me Some Truth
By: Eric Gansworth
In 1980 life is hard on the Tuscarora Reservation in upstate New York, and most of the teenagers feel like they are going nowhere: Carson Mastick dreams of forming a rock band, and Maggi Bokoni longs to create her own conceptual artwork instead of the traditional beadwork that her family sells to tourists–but tensions are rising between the reservation and the surrounding communities, and somehow in the confusion of politics and growing up Carson and Maggi have to make a place for themselves.
Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code
By: Joseph Bruchac
As a boy, Chester Nez was taught his native language and culture were useless, but he was later called on to use his Navajo language to help create an unbreakable military code during WWII.
Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky : Modern Plant-based Recipes using Native American Ingredients
By: Lois Ellen Frank
This enriching cookbook celebrates eight important plants Native Americans introduced to the rest of the world: corn, beans, squash, chile, tomato, potato, vanilla, and cacao—with more than 100 recipes. When these eight Native American plants crossed the ocean after 1492, the world’s cuisines were changed forever. Author and chef Lois Ellen Frank introduces the splendor and importance of this Native culinary history and pairs it with delicious, modern, plant-based recipes using Native American ingredients.
Braiding Sweetgrass
By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.
The Rediscovery of America : Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
By: Ned Blackhawk
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story
By: Kevin Noble Maillard
Using illustrations that show the diversity in Native America and spare poetic text that emphasizes fry bread in terms of provenance, this volume tells the story of a post-colonial food that is a shared tradition for Native American families all across the North American continent. Includes a recipe and an extensive author note that delves into the social ways, foodways, and politics of America’s 573 recognized tribes.
A Council of Dolls
By: Mona Susan Power
From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried. It’s gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage wrought by Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people.
Warrior Girl Unearthed
By: Angeline Boulley
The second book in the Firekeeper’s Daughter series, Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is – the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won’t ever take her far from home, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.
Searching For Savanna
By: Mona Gable
A gripping and illuminating investigation into the disappearance of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind when she was eight months pregnant, highlighting the shocking epidemic of violence against Native American women in America and the societal ramifications of government inaction.
Never Whistle At Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
Edited By: Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
Many Indigenous people believe that whistling at night can summon evil spirits and cause them to appear and follow you home. This belief is shared by Native Hawaiians, who believe it attracts the spirits of ancient warriors known as Hukai’po, and Native Mexicans, who associate it with a witch named Lechuza that can transform into an owl.
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Postcolonial Love Poem
By: Natalie Diaz
Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages–bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers–be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness.
We Are Water Protectors
By: Carole Lindstrom
Inspired by the many Indigenous-led movements across North America, We Are Water Protectors issues an urgent rallying cry to safeguard the Earth’s water from harm and corruption―a bold and lyrical picture book written by Carole Lindstrom and vibrantly illustrated by Michaela Goade.
Sisters of the Lost Nation
By: Nick Medina
A young Native girl’s hunt for answers about the women mysteriously disappearing from her tribe’s reservation leads her to delve into the myths and stories of her people, all while being haunted herself, in this atmospheric and stunningly poignant debut.
Birding While Indian: A Mixed Blood Memoir
By: Thomas C. Gannon
Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of Gannon’s childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
A Snake Falls to Earth
By: Darcie Little Badger
Fifteen-year-olds Nina and Oli come from different words–she is a Lipan Apache living in Texas and he is a cottonmouth from the Reflecting World–but their lives intersect when Oli journeys to Earth to find a cure for his ailing friend and they end up helping each other save their families.
The Seed Keeper
By: Diane Wilson
Fifteen-year-olds Nina and Oli come from different words–she is a Lipan Apache living in Texas and he is a cottonmouth from the Reflecting World–but their lives intersect when Oli journeys to Earth to find a cure for his ailing friend and they end up helping each other save their families.
Night of the Living Rez
By: Morgan Talty
These searing, devastating and often darkly funny stories introduce us to a community of Native people living on a Maine Penobscot reservation. There’s family tragedy, battling drug dependency and poverty, but we also meet plucky children, adults who survive against all odds and an abiding, affecting love.
For Future Reference 