Books for Native American Heritage Month
November is officially Native American Heritage Month, which means new opportunities to explore the literature created by a range of authors writing from a variety of traditions. There is a huge range of books for all ages, so choosing just a few to highlight is challenging.
In rough order by age group, here are my picks:
Joseph Bruchac’s Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II is a classic for middle grade, loved by boys especially, as its engaging story tells the real history of how the Code Talkers performed their vital work and helped preserve their language in the process.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a YA classic for good reason. Heartbreaking and funny, it tells the story of a boy caught between life on the rez and new opportunities at a more affluent white school.
YA books that, in my opinion, deserve a read for how they speak in original ways about the experience of Native youth today: Apple: Skin to the Core, by Eric Garnsworth and Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Hearts Unbroken or the recently re-released Rain is Not My Indian Name.
Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko. A true classic, about a returned WWII vet who, traumatized by his experience, seeks a way to heal himself by immersing himself in his own native history. If you’ve never read it, it’s a powerful, moving read. Silko has also written a beautiful memoir, The Turquoise Ledge.
Louise Erdrich is also a firmly-established author, and her latest, The Sentence, about a bookstore haunted by the ghost of its most annoying customer from November 1, 2019 to November 1, 2020, is not just a funny and quirky mystery but also a meditation on pandemic isolation and identity.
For those who like real-life mysteries, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch is a great new read about a woman’s search for a murder victim and the killer, moving between the reservation where she lives and the white oilmen who have come to exploit the reservation’s resources and who, for better or worse, have changed the inhabitants’ lives forever. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, with good reason.
I also can’t get by without mentioning Joy Harjo’s two volumes of memoir, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior. Mixing poetry and prose, individual and collective history, memories and dreams, they are a deep journey into spirituality, literature, and the natural world from the first Native American Poet Laureate.
Finally, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a history of the complex relationship between various Native American tribes, detailing how they resisted their oppression and extermination by every means possible, including negotiation, treaty, and warfare, in the face of official and unofficial policies designed to erase them.
Obviously, these books are just scratching the surface of what is out there. A plethora of books by Native authors have made their way to publication in recent years, from picture books, through Middle Grade, YA, and adult fiction and nonfiction. I encourage you to check them out - and if you have others to add, please do so in the comments!
