Lists
by Powell's Staff, November 1, 2023 9:08 AM
Every year, we like to celebrate Native American Heritage Month by spotlighting a list of recently published books by Native authors. This year, we’re featuring new titles that are filled with hauntings and curses, creatures and body horror, witches and missing children, Vikings and dragons, tradition and historical dispossession, apocalypses and landscapes corroded by grief. These stories are filled with questions about belonging, community, identity, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous identity, heritage, and the idea of self. Most importantly, though, these books center the Indigenous experience. Wonderful books to read this Native American Heritage Month; wonderful books to read all year-round.
FICTION
Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst
I have been looking forward to this anthology ever since it was announced! Every author in this anthology of unsettling and eerie Indigenous fiction is a heavy hitter: Tommy Orange, Morgan Talty, Kelli Jo Ford, Mona Susan Power… The list goes on!! And there’s an introduction from the legend himself, Stephen Graham Jones. These are stories filled with hauntings and curses, intergenerational trauma and racism, creatures and body horror. They’re melancholy, horrifying, unnerving, dreamy — everything you’d hope for from an anthology like this. I’m so glad it exists, and can’t recommend it enough. — Kelsey F.
by Adriana Chartrand
An Ordinary Violence is an atmospheric horror about a young Indigenous woman, Dawn, whose present is haunted by strange messages from the dead and chilling, unexplainable occurrences that drive her back to her home in order to face the traumas and violence that have plagued her and her family for generations. Sometimes bleak, sometimes humorous, but always razor-sharp — this debut marks Adriana Chartrand as an author to watch. — Lucinda G.
by Alicia Elliott
This book is an intoxicating rabbit hole that blends genres and stories as it explores questions of motherhood and mental illness, indigenous identity and the idea of self, heritage and intergenerational trauma, racism and cultural genocide. Alice is a new mom and a young Mohawk woman whose life seems ideal from the outside (good husband, good house, beautiful baby), but as the story unfolds and her narration becomes increasingly unreliable and feverish, we realize that the world she’s surrounded by is much more insidious than it might seem at first glance. An incredibly important, incredibly written debut. — Kelsey F.
by Amanda Peters
In 1962, the youngest daughter of a Mi’maq family goes missing in Maine, a disappearance that the family swirls around in the decades to come. The story alternates between Joe, the brother who last saw his sister, and Norma, a young girl being raised in Maine. The Berry Pickers is a beautifully written debut that looks at family trauma, loss, grief, and the lasting ripple effects of tragedy. — Kelsey F.
by Debra Magpie Earling
A necessary and vital book from a Native American author, giving Sacajawea her voice and story back, a story that has so often been co-opted by white people — the very people who kidnapped, abused, and used her. A stunning, justifiably complicated book. — Olive C.
by Angeline Boulley
When Perry is forced to spend her summer working at the local historical center of her Anishinaabe tribe with the town oddball Cooper Turtle, she discovers her fiery passion for reclaiming the stolen remains of Ojibwe ancestors. I cried at the scene on the local ferry during golden hour when Cooper Turtle asks Perry for "her resignation or her word" to help return the remains of Warrior Girl to Sugar Island. At the start of the summer, a local Indigenous woman goes missing and the threat of the MMIW epidemic looms closer and closer to home. Boulley is a master at exploring Native American human rights issues through poignant storytelling and characterization. — Sarah B.
by Cherie Dimaline
From Cherie Dimaline, author of Empire Wild, comes VenCo, a book about a Métis woman named Lucky St. James who discovers a magical connection to her Indigenous ancestors via a coven of modern-day witches that, turns out, she’s the sixth member of. In order to survive, the coven has to find the seventh and final member before the witch-hunting brotherhood does. Compelling and fun, VenCo will keep you glued to the page until the very end. — Olive C.
by Moniquill Blackgoose
I can't stop talking/YELLING about this book! Set in the 1800s in an alternate North America colonized by Vikings, a world where dragons can be beasts of war or lifelong companions sacred to communities, it follows a young Indigenous woman as she and her dragon try to navigate a colonizer-run school for dragoneering. Alternate history, a magic system deeply informed by science and spirituality, a coming-of-age story that is also a coming to power, queer love, incredibly rich worldbuilding, and so much else. I'm so very glad this is the first book in a series. — Claire A.
by Brendan Shay Basham
This debut novel from Brendan Shay Basham explores questions of grief, building a life in the wake of loss, community, family, and trauma, all told through rendered magical realism. Damien, a Diné man trying to escape from the recent loss of his brother and the still-unexplained disappearances of his parents from decades earlier, finds himself pulled into the world of three sisters living in a seaside village. The landscape of the book is steeped in characters’ particular griefs and the way that that grief corrodes the world around it. Basham layers the book with Native American mythology and a deep awareness of the wilderness that surrounds us, and his writing is evocative and lush. A stunning debut. — Kelsey F.
NONFICTION
by Michelle R. Jacobs
Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality relies on the ethnographic research that author Michelle Jacobs did, in order to look at Native American’s shifting relationships to urban environments, the way this impacts how they define indigeneity, and what this means for the community moving forward. It’s a nuanced look at the complicated topic of race, belonging, and identity. — Olive C.
by Ned Blackhawk
Historian Ned Blackhawk has written an important, necessary book that centers Indigenous peoples in our nation’s history, asking the vital and contradictory question about how a nation can be a democracy when it was created after dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land. Blackhawk’s central argument is that, despite this dispossession, Native Americans have been an important part of America’s history. Blackhawk revisits the important moments in our history (the colonial era, the Revolutionary War, the introduction of the transcontinental railroad, etc) and looks at them through the lens of how these moments affected Native Americans, but also how Native American affected each of these moments. This is a vital text. — Kelsey F.
by Michael John Witgen
Seeing Red is an incisive, well-researched history of the “plunder economy” in 19th century America that saw most of the Northwest Territory transferred from Indigenous hands to white settlers, a transfer that had huge economic ramifications. Throughout the book, Witgen weaves through stories of individuals in order to shine a light on the broader, devastating history. — Moses M.
by Steven Charleston
Author Steven Charleston uses Native American history to look at the various “apocalypses” we face right now (climate change and COVID-19, to name just two), and the ways that history can inform how we confront the crises that we face. Native Americans, of course, have faced many apocalypses and have still forged ahead. Charleston looks at their strategies for help, as well as to four Indigenous prophets, for guidance and — most impressively — for a sense of hope. — Lucinda G.
by Leah Myers
In this beautifully written, elegiac memoir, Leah Myers weaves together folklore, her family history, and her own story. Structured like a totem pole, with each totem representing an important person in her life and history (her great-grandmother, her grandmother, her mother, and herself), Thinning Blood explores Myers’ struggles with identity and belonging, as well as what it means to her that, because her great-grandmother chose to marry outside the tribe and her tribe has strict blood quantum laws, it’s likely that Myers will be the last member of the tribe in her family, because any children she has wouldn’t qualify. Probing, heartbreaking, and intimate, I can’t recommend this memoir enough. — Kelsey F.
by Richard Wagamese
Following the Ojibwe tradition of a father leading his son through the world, in the way that author Richard Wagamese (1955–2017) is able, this memoir is a series of letters that Wagamese wrote to his estranged son. In the letters, Wagamese tells his son about growing up in an Ojibwe family before being moved into the foster system; about becoming homeless after graduation and turning to alcohol; about his repeated attempts to become sober; and so much more. The letters are unflinching and honest and completely heartbreaking. I’m so glad that Milkweed Editions is bringing this memoir, originally published in Canada in 2002, to the U.S. — Lucinda G.
by Mona Gable
A harrowing true crime story, Searching for Savanna looks at the case of Savanna Lafontaine Greywind, who was eight months pregnant when she disappeared in 2017, only to have her corpse found the next day in a nearby river, while the baby was somehow alive and in a neighbor’s apartment. The horrific blanks in that story might be easy to fill in, but author Mona Gable manages to skillfully link this case to the ongoing and prevalent ways that Native American women in our country face (and have faced) dehumanization, and our society’s general disinterest in fixing, or even acknowledging, these injustices. An important, necessary book. — Kelsey F.
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For more recommendations, original essays, and bookseller displays, check out our Native American Heritage Month resource page.
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