Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day

To celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day we’re sharing nine remarkable memoirs, novels, and story collections that honor Indigenous people’s stories and histories. With original releases spanning from 1997 to 2013, these titles encompass diverse voices and accounts. From a woman’s experience living in a one-room cabin on a South Dakota reservation to an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time, these moving, hopeful yet somber, and powerful books showcase just some of the rich experiences from Native voices—and are stories worth reading every year.

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on a South Dakota reservation. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopelessness of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Indigenous communities in the sixties and seventies. Lakota Woman is a unique document unparalleled in American Indian literature, a story of death, of determination against all odds, and of the cruelties perpetrated against American Indians during the last several decades. It is also a deeply moving account of a woman’s triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world.

“A powerful autobiography . . . feisty and determined, warm and even funny. . .” —Chicago Tribune

 

Ohitika Woman by Mary Brave Bird

The beloved sequel to the now-classic Lakota Woman, Ohitika Woman follows Mary Brave Bird as she continues her powerful tale of ancient glory and present anguish, of courage and despair, of magic and mystery, and, above all, of the survival of both body and mind. Coming home from Wounded Knee in 1973, married to American Indian movement leader Leonard Crow Dog, Mary was a mother with the hope of a better life. But, as she says, “trouble always finds me.” With brutal frankness she bares her innermost thoughts, recounting the dark as well as the bright moments in her always eventful life. She not only talks about the stark truths of being an American Indian living in a white-dominated society but also addresses the experience of being a mother, a woman, and, rarest of all, a Sioux feminist. Filled with contrasts, courage, and endurance, Ohitika Woman is a powerful testament to Mary’s will and spirit.

“Mary Brave Bird brings to life the invisible. A grim yet gripping account.” —The Boston Globe

 

Rez Life by David Treuer

Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of American Indian literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist’s storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of reservation life, past and present. A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in mainstream America. Treuer traverses the boundaries of American and Indian identity as he explores crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of his native language and culture. Rez Life is a strikingly original work of history and reportage.

“[Rez Life] is not, for all its intimacy, just as it is not exactly a work of reportage or a work of history. Rather, it is a nuanced hybrid, a memoir, broken into six chapters, each of which begins in the personal, then expands outward to a larger theme. Sovereignty, fishing, treaty rights, the tribal justice system, education, language and assimilation—Treuer examines all of it, finding associations between the broadest stories and the most individual.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

 

Truth & Bright Water by Thomas King

Thomas King’s novels Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water have introduced readers across North America to the touching, delightful world of an extraordinarily fine storyteller. His next novel is a warm and magical story set in Truth and Bright Water, sister towns separated by a river that runs between Montana and an Alberta Indian reservation. Together they form an unusual and special community. There’s a diner with the same special every day, and characters like Lucy Rabbit, who believes Marilyn Monroe was Indian and will not give up on becoming a platinum blonde.

 

“Marvelous . . . This subtle and deceptively simple tale is an elegiac and beautiful tragicomedy about a single summer, two towns, and three Indian kids . . . Beneath the coming-of-age story of two boys and their daily struggle lies the more complicated and ancient story of a haunted suffering land and its indigenous people . . . Thomas King has quietly and gorgeously done it again.” –Newsday

 

Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, The Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears by Brian Hicks

Toward the Setting Sun chronicles one of the most significant but least explored periods in American history, recounting the unknown story of the first white man to champion the cause of the Cherokee Nation. Son of a Scottish trader and a quarter-Cherokee woman, John Ross was educated in white schools. It was not until he was twenty-two and fighting alongside “his people” against the Creek Indians, a neighboring rebel tribe, that he knew the Cherokees’ fate would be his. Cherokee chief for forty years, he would guide the tribe through its most turbulent period.

 

“Richly detailed and well-researched, this heartbreaking history unfolds like a political thriller with a deeply human side.” —Publishers Weekly

 

Remnants of the First Earth by Ray Young Bear

Ray A. Young Bear’s work has been called “magnificent” by The New York Times and “a national treasure” by Bloomsbury Review. Dazzlingly original, but with deep roots in his traditional Mesquakie culture, Young Bear is a master wordsmith poised with trickster-like aplomb between the ancient world of his forefathers and the ever-encroaching “blurred face of modernity”.  At the center of the novel is a murder investigation involving a powerful shaman holding court at the local Ramada Inn, negligent white cops from nearby Why Cheer, and corrupt tribal authorities. This lyrical narrative swirls through the present and into the mysteries of the age-old stories and myths that still haunt, inform, and enlighten this uniquely American community.

“A rare portrait of a writer struggling both to preserve his people’s heritage and to turn it into art.”—New York Times Book Review

 

Flight by Sherman Alexie

The journey for the young hero in Flight begins as he’s about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of decision, he finds himself shot back through time and resurfaced in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era. Here he will be forced to see just why “hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s.” Red River is only the first stop in a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He will continue traveling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant—making us laugh while he’s breaking our hearts.

“A funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious voice set beside his elder . . . contemporaries . . . Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

 

The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America by James Wilson

The European ‘discovery” and conquest of America was one of the most cataclysmic events in history, leading to the wholesale destruction of millions of people and hundreds of flourishing societies. As far as history books are concerned, Indigenous history has been secondary to an essentially Euro-American story. Now, James Wilson presents a rigorously authoritative, beautifully written, comprehensive history that-as Richard Gott wrote in the London Literary Review “places the “Native Americans’ at the center of the historical stage, abandoning the traditional version of the American past in which the “Indians’ had a subservient role on the periphery of someone else’s epic.”

“A major contribution to the literature Indian America.” –T. H. Watkins, The Washington Post Book World

 

Black Eagle Child by Ray A. Young Bear

Black Eagle Child uses a rich mix of verse, prose narrative, and letters to tell Edgar Bearchild’s journey to adulthood. Although the backdrop of much of Young Bear’s novel may be familiar—the conflicts over race, drugs, Vietnam and others that gripped America in the fifties, sixties, and seventies—Bearchild’s recounts his coming-of-age story from a distinct vantage point, as a member of the Mesquakie nation. From his childhood delight in Jell-O to his induction into the faith of his elders, Bearchild’s journey is a uniquely American one.

“The American Indian poet and novelist Ray A. Young Bear possesses a robust imagination and a wonderfully droll narrative voice.” –The New York Times