Native American Heritage: Recommended Reading
November is Native American Heritage Month, and the Popular Reading Display in the Hill Library's Learning Commons will feature books that explore the experiences, celebrate the contributions, and promote understanding of the Indigenous peoples of America. Learn more about National Native American Heritage Month, and NC State’s celebration of Native American Heritage Month.
Don’t miss the other great recommendations in DEI/DIY: Supporting Indigenous/Native American students, faculty, and staff on college campuses (2022), our collaboration with the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity.
November 2023
Poet Warrior: a memoir
Author: Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, recounts a luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all find home. Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.
Hearts of Our People: Native women artists
Author: Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves
Women have long been the creative force behind Native art. This landmark book includes works by artists from more than seventy-five Indigenous tribes made in a variety of media from textiles and beadwork to video and digital arts. It showcases the astonishing innovation and technical mastery in these traditional artworks.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an Indigenous botanist, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. Awakening our ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.
Black Indians: a hidden heritage
Author: William Loren Katz
The first paths to freedom taken by enslaved Africans led to Native American villages. There, Black men and women found acceptance and friendship among our country’s original inhabitants. The children of Native and African American marriages added a new dimension to frontier diplomacy and made daring contributions to the fight for American liberty.
Postcolonial Love Poem
Author: Natalie Diaz
Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves. In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and Brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic.
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Speaking of Indigenous Politics: conversations with activists, scholars, and tribal leaders
Author: J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
Many people learn about Indigenous politics only through the most controversial and confrontational news—the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program. Most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream and so, of course, does its significance.
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There There
Author: Tommy Orange
Native American voices gather one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow, sharing stories of the plight of the urban Native American, grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.
The Night Watchman: a novel
Author: Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world based on the extraordinary life of her grandfather who worked as a factory night watchman and fought against Native dispossession. This powerful novel is populated with memorable characters forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature and explores themes of love and death with sly humor and gravity.
IRL
Author: Tommy Pico
This sweaty, summertime epic poem composed as a long text message asks what happens to a modern, queer, Indigenous person generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history. The protagonist, Teebs, is plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his.
Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears
Author: Diane Glancy
Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears tells the story of the Cherokees' resettlement, a story never before explored in fiction. In this sequel to her popular 1996 novel Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, author Diane Glancy continues the tale of Cherokee brothers O-ga-na-ya and Knobowtee and their families.
Almanac of the Dead: a novel
Author: Leslie Marmon Silko
This tragic novel of ruin and resistance is about two women caught between the modern-day Southwest and the places of the old ones—the Native peoples of the Americas. Seese has been drawn home in search of her missing child. In Tucson she encounters Lecha, a well-known psychic tasked with transcribing painfully preserved notebooks containing the history of her people.
Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI
Author: David Grann
In one of their first major homicide investigations, the FBI put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau, to expose and stop one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history—a series of murders targeting the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma.
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