There's a Book for That: Native American Heritage Month
Welcome Native American Heritage Month – a time to celebrate the traditions, languages and stories of Native American and Alaska Native communities and ensure their rich histories and contributions continue to thrive with each passing generation. This year’s theme is “Weaving together our past, present and future.” (for more visit: https://www.bia.gov/NNAHM).
In commemoration of the culture and people who were the original settlers of this land, we present the following recently published, and acclaimed, fiction and poetry written by, and about, indigenous peoples:
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
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
“A stunning debut about love, race, brutality, and the balm of forgiveness.” —People
A stunning, multimorphic work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity
mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.
A man lunges in front of a car. An elderly woman silently drowns herself. A corpse sits up in its coffin and speaks. On this reservation, not all is what it seems, in this new spine-chilling mythological horror from the author of Sisters of the Lost Nation.
More than 45 years after its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
A wondrous and shattering award-winning 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.
Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.
Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a stunning and lyrical Native American coming-of-age story. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family.
The 25th-anniversary edition of “a novel that in the sweep and inevitability of its events…is a major contribution to Native American literature.” (Wallace Stegner)
In the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, the Lone Eaters, a small band of Blackfeet Indians, are living their immemorial life. The men hunt and mount the occasional horse-taking raid or war party against the enemy Crow. The women tan the hides, sew the beadwork, and raise the children. But the year is 1870, and the whites are moving into their land. Fools Crow, a young warrior and medicine man, has seen the future and knows that the newcomers will punish resistance with swift retribution. First published to broad acclaim in 1986, Fools Crow is James Welch’s stunningly evocative portrait of his people’s bygone way of life.
WINNER OF THE PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT NOVEL
Set on a North Dakota reservation, and inspired by the lore of her Sioux heritage, this critically-acclaimed novel from Mona Susan Power weaves the stories of the old and the young, of broken families, romantic rivals, men and women in love and at war…
A groundbreaking Dakota author and activist chronicles her refusal to assimilate into nineteenth-century white society and her mission to preserve her culture.
Longlisted for the National Book Award
This blood-chilling debut novel set in New Mexico’s Navajo Nation is equal parts gripping crime thriller, supernatural horror, and poignant portrayal of coming of age on the reservation.
For more on these and related titles visit National American Indian Heritage Month
Visit #StoriesoftheLand/The Read Down here
Visit https://nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov/ for events and resources.
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