This month is National Native American Heritage Month. It’s a time to celebrate and recognize the rich heritage, customs, folklore, languages, stories, issues faced by and contributions of Indigenous people in Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and affiliated Island communities.
Alongside the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ contributions and legacy, it is important to also acknowledge the lasting harm of colonization and residential schools, as well as the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and girls. Many pieces of media that spotlight Indigenous stories and raise awareness of these issues have risen to popularity in recent years, including shows like Reservation Dogs, and movies like Killers of the Flower Moon and Rez Ball — both based on books — and Fancy Dance.
Authors like Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange and Stephen Graham Jones have become well-known in the literary world for their contributions to the modern canon of Indigenous stories. But they’re not the only ones making their mark as authors.
The following list is by no means a comprehensive picture of Native American people, but serves as a great entry point for readers looking to dive into writing from a variety of Indigenous authors across nations, regions and tribes. Take these books to start, to learn something, and to diversify and decolonize your reading list across multiple genres.
If any of these books catch your attention, consider ordering a copy from one of many Indigenous-owned bookstores in the US.
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s latest release is a gripping literary thriller. In Argus, North Dakota, Gary Geist is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, a young woman who might just be the answer to his fears about the future. But Gary isn’t the only man in love with Kismet — Hugo is ready to dive in between them and get Kismet all to himself.
Between the visions Crystal, Kismet’s mother, sees of guardian angels, her fears for the future, the economic collapse of 2008, and climate change depleting the world of natural resources, there’s a lot to fear. It is the story of ordinary people in a prairie community, grappling with the devastating consequences of a world that threatens to upend their lives. The Mighty Red connects community, family, the natural world, economic challenges and emotional hardship.
Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove
Part mystery, part call-to-action on the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Mask of the Deer Woman dives into an investigation in the Saliquaw Nation. Carrie Starr, a former Chicago detective, is still grieving the death of her daughter when she finds herself a job as the new tribal marshal on the reservation where her father was raised.
When a college student goes missing, this could be Starr’s chance to rescue the young girl — reminding her of the daughter she never had the chance to save. But visions of Deer Woman, a figure from her father’s stories who has been described in folklore for generations. Is this spirit following her in hopes of acting as a guide? Or is she ready to seek vengeance for the missing women and daughters that can never return home, even with Starr’s help?
Laure L. Dove currently lives and writes in Kansas and has Indigenous heritage by birth.
The Truth According To Ember by Danica Nava
Ember Lee Cardinal cannot find a job. After 37 rejections, she decides that a little white lie won’t hurt. She’ll start to list her ethnicity as white on applications, instead of being honest about being a Chickasaw woman. When she finally lands a job in accounting, she catches the eye of the only other Native person in the office — a handsome IT guy named Danuwoa Colson.
Soon after, they forgo the no-dating policy and start seeing one another in secret. But how long is Ember willing to hide her truth? After a blackmailer at work threatens to expose her new forbidden romance, Ember’s lies begin to grow to protect her secrets. Can she keep herself hidden, or should she be honest and risk ruining everything?
Danica Nava is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.
Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
This collection of 11 short stories is a love letter to Hawaiian identity, the mythology that shapes a people, and the effects of colonization throughout a community. The stories follow mixed Native Hawaiian and Japanese women as they navigate sexuality, identity, family and relationships.
“A childhood encounter with a wild pua’a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman’s fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.” Reality blends with superstition and myth in these stories of generational memory from the ancient to the modern, from the picturesque to the grotesque.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli author.
And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
A young, new mother is living the picture-perfect life — or so she thinks. Her white husband Steve is an academic studying Mohawk culture, and he is endlessly supportive of her and their new daughter Dawn. But Alice’s posh new home in Toronto means that all the neighbors have an eye on her, as the sole Indigenous resident. Not to mention, she’s struggling to connect with her daughter, still grieving the loss of her own mother, and trying to work on a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story.
As her self-doubt and distress intensify, the world begins to take on a strange quality. As time slips out of her grasp and neighbors become more threatening, Alice’s determination to finish her story grows. The key to Alice and Dawn’s survival might lie within her writing, if only she can finish telling the creation story — before it’s too late.
Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario.
Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa
This expansive memoir tells the story of Deborah Jackson Taffa, and her childhood on and off the reservation, detailing the tribulations of assimilation and honoring tradition, the gap between Native inheritance and American mainstream culture. Taffa’s family led her to believe that sacrifice was a part of life — with grandparents who were raised in residential schools and parents who were encouraged to find jobs off the reservation.
Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico, Taffa grew up as a mixed tribe native girl. With that came a complicated relationship to identity, with a pressure to move beyond her “Indian” status and seek education, despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Whiskey Tender explores tribal identity, the criminalization of Native men, laws of assimilation, the Red Power movement of the 60s and 70s, generational trauma and systemic oppression. The book is a stark reminder of the cultural narratives of Native people have been blurred out by America’s goal of creating a “melting pot” of assimilation — and brings these stories back to the forefront.
Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo.
Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham
Damien’s brother vanished when the river swallowed him up. Still consumed by grief, Damien leaves his life behind, heading south until he reaches a fishing village full of brujas, where he hopes to forget the past. But when he arrives, the town is grieving one of their own, and the dead girl’s mother, Anna-Maria, is the only person who welcomes Damien with open arms. Rumors swirl around Anna-Maria, blaming her for the death of her daughter. As Damien begins to grow closer with Marta, who knows what its like to grieve a dead sibling, he recognizes her hunger for revenge.
Caught up in the needs and sadness of a small town, Damien is swept into a world marked by magic, on the verge of experiencing a metamorphosis himself. “Resonant with the Diné creation story and the unshakeable weight of the Long Walk—the forced removal of the Navajo from their land—Swim Home to the Vanished explores the human capacity for grief and redemption, and the lasting effects it has on the soul.”
Brendan Shay Basham (Diné) is Tó Ts’ohnii (Big Water) and Bit’ah’nii (Folded-Arms People), born for bilagáana (Irish, Scottish, English, German).
Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers
Horror meets history in this collection of short stories that ties classic monsters into the real-life monsters of colonialism, displacement and domestic violence. Across generations, Man Made Monsters follows one Cherokee family from 1830s Georgia, in their ancestral lands, to WWI, Vietnam, and the present day.
How do the monsters of history, violence, and hatred tie into the supernatural beings we fear? Truth blurs with fiction as we realize how frightening human actions and America’s colonial legacy can be — sometimes much more frightening than the monsters we invent. Detailed with illustrations by Cherokee artist Jeff Edwards, the haunting images help to tell an immersive Young Adult story of vampire-like beings, zombies, and more.
Andrea L. Rogers is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Never Name the Dead by D.M. Rowell
A Kiowa woman’s family, tribe and ancestral land are threatened when she returns home to Oklahoma. She had spent her time in Silicon Valley as Mae, leaving her roots in the past. But her grandfather, James Sawpole, sends a cryptic message urging her to come back home. Mud — a name she hasn’t been called in a decade — finds the tribe facing disaster, as fracking destroys their land, forcing people to sell off their artifacts and threatening those who fight for water rights.
Mud and her cousin soon realize that their grandfather, one of the targets of threats made by frackers, has gone missing. Not only that, but he has been accused of stealing a valuable medal from the tribe museum. And, there’s a body in his work room…
Can Mud clear her grandfather’s name and find the killer, or will the murderer come after her, next?
D. M. Rowell comes from a long line of Kiowa Storytellers within a culture that treasures oral traditions. She’s an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and has spent decades preserving sacred stories shared by tribe elders.
By The Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle
This is a journalistic account of the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty on Native land in eastern Oklahoma, from the early days of colonization to the 1990s small-town murder that led to a fight for Native rights. “Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.”
When the Muscogee people were rounded up at gunpoint by the US military in the 1830s and forced into exile halfway across the continent, they were promised new land. Of course, the promise was broken. States were created on Muscogee land and the existing reservations were denied the ability to continue. In the 1990s, a Muscogee man murdered another Muscogee citizen, he was sentenced to death, opening up questions of federal jurisdiction over reservations. But Oklahoma denied the reservation’s existence, and the dispute continued for decades until just a few years ago when the Supreme Court made a ruling that would change history.
Rebecca Nagle is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and a two spirit/ queer woman.
Rez Ball by Byron Graves
Tre Brun plays basketball on the Red Lake Reservation high school team. It’s the only thing that calms his distressing memories of his late brother Jaxon’s deadly accident. So when Jaxon’s former teammates take Tre under their wing, inviting him onto varsity to represent the rez and push them to their first state championship, he knows he could be the hero his Ojibwe community desperately needs.
But does Tre have the skills to fill his big brother’s shoes on the court, and can he live up to the dreams his brother had of stardom? And can he do it without messing up his budding romance, his own dreams of making it to the NBA, and the expectations of his community?
Byron Graves is Ojibwe and was born and raised on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota, where he played high school basketball.
Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon
“Rendon masterfully navigates the histories of trauma and brutality that continue to exist within our Native communities, laying bare the truths of colonial violence and the continuing need for closure and justice in our homelands,” says Ramona Emerson, author of Shutter.
Quill has been running her entire life. Ever since she saw Jimmy Sky leap to his death and she ran for help, she’s been running from it, knowing what happens to women like her. She has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. While training in the woods for the Boston Marathon — a kind of running she can dedicate herself to — Quill hears a woman’s scream, followed by silence. All that’s left in the wake is a single beaded earring and tire tracks in the dirt. More women begin to disappear, and suspicion turns on the men building the pipeline to the north. Can Quill find justice for all of the women missing from the reservation? And how do the trauma of being invisible and the trauma of a community in mourning affect this search for justice?
Marcie R. Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation.
The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
The number of people who claim Native identity has increased by 85 percent in the past decade. But that number is not reflective of the number of people enrolled in Tribes. The federal government has created a labyrinth of laws and restrictions to Tribal sovereignty and enrollment in a Tribe, with the goal of wiping out Native people as a whole. Some Native people who have been displaced or disconnected may never be enrolled in a Tribe because of these laws.
Blood quantum laws are a major intrusion of the federal government, and a way of identity policing, that author Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz investigates in this book. She dives into people’s attempts at finding belonging and Tribal sovereignty outside of the strict laws of bureaucracy, exploring the question, “Who is Indian enough?”
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
Political competition comes to a violent head in this debut from Jon Hickey. Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate, wants to fix things in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. Alongside his childhood friend and current Tribal President, Mack Beck, Mitch runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation. This means he also runs the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel, and he’s ready to continue his leadership role when the eve of his reelection rolls around.
Standing in his way is determined activist and politician Gloria Hawkins and her aide Layla Beck, the younger sister of Mack. Tension grows between the two campaigns, and both are determined to push their limits in order to secure victory. Soon peaceful protests threaten to grow violent, a death turns Mitch against the only family he knows, and everything hits a breaking point. This political story follows a search for belonging amidst questions of home, family and historical impact.
Jon Hickey is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
