Library Research Guides: Media Studies: Indigenous Heritage & History Month

Land Acknowledgment & Resource Guide

Indiana University and the city of Bloomington occupy lands of enduring historical and cultural significance, and that for some was, is, and will always be home, to a number of Indigenous groups, including the Myaamiaki (Miami), Lënape (Delaware), Saawanwa (Shawnee), kiikaapoa (Kickapoo), and Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi) peoples. We honor and acknowledge the ancestral and contemporary caretakers of this place, as well as our nonhuman spirits, elders, and guides, offer gratitude for being held and nourished by the land, and recognize the inherent sovereignty and resilience of all Native communities who have survived and still thrive to this day on Turtle Island in spite of the systemic subjugation, dispossession, and genocide that constitute the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism.

We encourage all, settlers and guests alike, to look beyond acknowledgement and engage with local Indigenous communities while also cultivating thoughtful relations of reciprocity with the sacred land you live on, as well as the many vibrant beings with whom you share it.

Further Resources & Reading

Land Reparations & Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
Resource Guide to Reparations and Land Rematriation on Turtle Island
Suggestions for Native Organizations to Support
10 Native Activism Organizations to Support (Teen Vogue)
Native Land Interactive Map
Indigenous Heritage & History Month Resources (IU Libraries)
Queer Projects on Indigenous Land (The Sogorea Te Land Trust)
Decolonize Your Bookshelf (Electric Literature)
Decolonize Your Bookshelf (Verso)
First Nations Educational & Cultural Center @ IU (FNECC)
FNECC Land Acknowledgment & Resources

If you'd like to learn more about the practice and history of indigenous land acknowledgments, consult the resources below. You can also navigate to our full resource guide.

Preliminary Resources

What are land acknowledgements and why do they matter? (Local Love)
Indigenous Land Acknowledgment, Explained (Teen Vogue)

Guides & Toolkits

Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgments (Native Governance Center)
Territory Acknowledgement Resource Page (Native Land)
Land Acknowledgment Toolkit (CSUSM)

Critical Takes

Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments (Apihtawikosisan)
Burial Ground Acknowledgments (The New Inquiry)
Beyond the Land Acknowledgment (Hack the Gates)
Indigenous Artists' Perspectives on Land Acknowledgments (Vice)
Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement (Canadian Theatre Review)

To learn more about the tribes, nations, and communities with ties to this land colonially known as the state of Indiana, check out their websites and consider supporting them in an ongoing way however you can:

Myaamiaki (Miami)

Miami Tribe of Oklahoma (OK)

Lënape (Delaware)

Delaware Nation (OK)
Delaware Tribe of Indians (OK)

Saawanwa (Shawnee)

Kiikaapoa (Kickapoo)

Kansas Kickapoo Tribe (KS)
Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma (OK)
Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas (TX)

Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi)

Citizen Potawatomi Nation (OK)
Forest County Potawatomi (WI)
Gun Lake Tribe (MI)
Hannahville Indian Community (MI)
Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi (MI)
Pokagon Band of Potawatomi (IN & MI)
Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation (KS)

Introduction

National Native American Heritage Month honors the histories, cultures, and lifeways of the Indigenous peoples of the United States. In recognition of this month-long celebration (rechristened Indigenous Heritage & History Month here), we have put together an array of resources meant to showcase the diversity of perspectives and experiences that constitute indigeneity across Turtle Island (what is now known as North America). Below, you'll find lists of books, databases, movies, and podcasts; you'll also find a playlist of songs by Indigenous artists across the 20th & 21st centuries under the "Playlists" tab, along with a number of resources for further reading about Indigenous music. Additionally, as part of this celebration and remembering, there is also an introduction to Two-Spirit identity and the LGBTQIA Indigenous experience on the Gender Studies Research Guide and an overview of Indigenous Philosophy on the Philosophy Research Guide.

For more information about the Indigenous communities with ongoing and traditional ties to this land, and how to support Indigenous groups and movements, take a look at our Land Acknowledgment and Local Indigenous Resources guide.

Resources
Native American Heritage Month: Indigenous People Will Not Be Erased (NDN Collective)
Celebrating Native American Heritage Month: Dos and Don'ts (Teen Vogue)
Celebrating Native American Heritage Month (MSU LibGuide)
Native American Heritage Month Website (US Gov)
November 2020 Monthly Message: Native American Heritage Month (National Parks Service)

Books

All Our Relations by Winona LaDuke
ISBN: 9781608466290
Publication Date: 2016-03-01
Haymarket Books proudly brings back into print Winona LaDuke's seminal work of Native resistance to oppression. This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. Winona LaDukewas named byTimein 1994 as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty. In 1996 and 2000, LaDuke served as Ralph Nader's vice presidential running mate in the Green Party.
Our History Is the Future by Nick Estes
ISBN: 9781786636720
Publication Date: 2019-03-05
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan "Mni Wiconi" Water is Life was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue. In Our History is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the #NoDAPL movement from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. While a historian by trade, Estes also draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires), making Our History is the Future at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.
Red Skin, White Masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition by Glen Sean Coulthard
ISBN: 9781452942421
Publication Date: 2014-08-15
WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association's C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term "recognition" shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics--one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a "place-based" modification of Karl Marx's theory of "primitive accumulation" throws light on Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon's critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.
The Transit of Empire by Jodi A. Byrd
ISBN: 9780816676408
Publication Date: 2011-09-06
In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable "Indianness" that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources. Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations--from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma's vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill--Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire. Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.
As Long As Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
ISBN: 0807073784
Publication Date: 2019-04-02
Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy. Throughout 2016, the Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists, but it also underscored how little Americans know about the longtime historical tensions between Native peoples and the mainstream environmental movement. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.
How We Go Home by Sara Sinclair (Editor)
ISBN: 9781642594089
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
In myriad ways, each narrator's life has been shaped by loss, injustice, and resilience--and by the struggle of how to share space with settler nations whose essential aim is to take all that is Indigenous. Hear from Jasilyn Charger, one of the first five people to set up camp at Standing Rock, which kickstarted a movement of Water Protectors that roused the world; Gladys Radek, a survivor of sexual violence whose niece disappeared along Canada's Highway of Tears, who became a family advocate for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Marian Naranjo, herself the subject of a secret radiation test while in high school, who went on to drive Santa Clara Pueblo toward compiling an environmental impact statement on the consequences of living next to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Theirs are stories among many of the ongoing contemporary struggles to preserve Native lands and lives--and of how we go home.
Beyond Settler Time by Mark Rifkin
ISBN: 9780822373421
Publication Date: 2017-02-02
What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present? In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of "settler time" to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples' expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.
Mohawk Interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states by Audra Simpson
ISBN: 9780822356431
Publication Date: 2014-05-09
Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.
Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice
ISBN: 9781771121767
Publication Date: 2018-03-10
Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today. Selected as an Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Community Read by the Association of University Presses. In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future. This provocative volume challenges readers to critically consider and rethink their assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics while never forgetting the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the power of story to effect personal and social change. Written with a generalist reader firmly in mind but addressing issues of interest to specialists in the field, this book welcomes new audiences to Indigenous literary studies while offering more seasoned readers a renewed appreciation for these transformative literary traditions.
Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: mapping the long view by Eve Tuck (Editor); K. Wayne Yang (Editor); Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Editor)
ISBN: 9781138585867
Publication Date: 2018-06-18
Indigenous and decolonizing perspectives on education have long persisted alongside colonial models of education, yet too often have been subsumed within the fields of multiculturalism, critical race theory, and progressive education. Timely and compelling, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education features research, theory, and dynamic foundational readings for educators and educational researchers who are looking for possibilities beyond the limits of liberal democratic schooling. Featuring original chapters by authors at the forefront of theorizing, practice, research, and activism, this volume helps define and imagine the exciting interstices between Indigenous and decolonizing studies and education. Each chapter forwards Indigenous principles - such as Land as literacy and water as life - that are grounded in place-specific efforts of creating Indigenous universities and schools, community organizing and social movements, trans and Two Spirit practices, refusals of state policies, and land-based and water-based pedagogies.
Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson
ISBN: 9781452961255
Publication Date: 2020-05-12
Winner of the Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award, and the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience, Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the "whiteness of sound studies," Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism's "tin ear" that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Hungry Listening offers examples of "doing sovereignty" in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence. Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
Afterlives of Indigenous Archives by Ivy Schweitzer (Editor); Gordon Henry (Editor)
ISBN: 9781512603644
Publication Date: 2019-10-15
Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of "digital humanities." The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and indigenous studies scholars alike.
Sacred Instructions by Sherri Mitchell; Larry Dossey (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781623171957
Publication Date: 2018-02-13
A Penobscot Indian draws on the experiences and wisdom of the First Nations to address environmental justice, water protection, generational trauma, and more. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another. Sacred Instructions explains how our traditional stories set the framework for our belief systems and urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. It reveals how the removal of women from our stories has impacted our thinking and disrupted the natural balance within our communities. For all those who seek to create change, this book lays out an ancient world view and set of cultural values that provide a way of life that is balanced and humane, that can heal Mother Earth, and that will preserve our communities for future generations.
Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria
ISBN: 9780806121291
Publication Date: 1988-05-15
In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria's Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists. This book continues to be required reading for all Americans, whatever their special interest.
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
ISBN: 9781452956015
Publication Date: 2017-10-17
Winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best Subsequent Book and Honorable Mention for the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017. Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around the refusal of the dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that its goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.
All Our Relations: finding the path forward by Tanya Talaga
ISBN: 9781487005733
Publication Date: 2018-10-02
Tanya Talaga, the bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers, calls attention to an urgent global humanitarian crisis among Indigenous Peoples: youth suicide. In this urgent and incisive work, bestselling and award-winning author Tanya Talaga explores the alarming rise of youth suicide in Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. From Northern Ontario to Nunavut, Norway, Brazil, Australia, and the United States, the Indigenous experience in colonized nations is startlingly similar and deeply disturbing. It is an experience marked by the violent separation of Peoples from the land, the separation of families, and the separation of individuals from traditional ways of life—all of which has culminated in a spiritual separation that has had an enduring impact on generations of Indigenous children. As a result of this colonial legacy, too many communities today lack access to the basic determinants of health—income, employment, education, a safe environment, health services—leading to a mental health and youth suicide crisis on a global scale. But, Talaga reminds us, First Peoples also share a history of resistance, resilience, and civil rights activism. Based on her Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series, All Our Relations is a powerful call for action, justice, and a better, more equitable world for all Indigenous Peoples.
Speaking of Indigenous Politics: conversations with activists, scholars, and tribal leaders by J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Editor); Robert Warrior (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781517904777
Publication Date: 2018-06-10
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, or the battle to protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a site sacred to Native peoples. But most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kehaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life. Land desecration, treaty rights, political status, cultural revitalization: these are among the themes taken up by a broad cross-section of interviewees from across the United States and from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and New Zealand. Some speak from the thick of political action, some from a historical perspective, others from the reaches of Indigenous culture near and far. Writers, like Comanche Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, expand on their work—about gaming and sovereignty, for example, or protecting Native graves, the reclamation of land, or the erasure of Indian identity. These conversations both inform and engage at a moment when their messages could not be more urgent.

There There by Tommy Orange
ISBN: 9780525520375
Publication Date: 2018-06-05
Tommy Orange's "groundbreaking, extraordinary" (The New York Times) There There is the "brilliant, propulsive" (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters: Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss. There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. Here is a voice we have never hear—-a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide.
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
ISBN: 9781551527253
Publication Date: 2018-05-15
'You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine' is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishises himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the 'rez,' and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages—and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote
ISBN: 9781640092686
Publication Date: 2019-10-22
Beth Piatote's luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world. Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed-genre works of Beth Piatote's first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return. A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone. Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.
American Indian Stories by Zitkála-Šá; Layli Long Soldier (Introduction by)
ISBN: 9781984854216
Publication Date: 2019-05-21
First published in 1921, American Indian Stories details the hardships encountered by Zitkala-Ša and other Native Americans in the missionary and manual labour schools. Bright and carefree, Zitkála-Šá grows up on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota with her mother until Quaker missionaries arrive, offering a free education to all Sioux children. The catch: the children must leave their parents behind and travel to Indiana. Curious about the world beyond the reservation, Zitkála-Šá begs her mother to let her go-and her mother, aware of the advantage that an education offers, reluctantly agrees. But the missionary school is not the adventure that Zitkála-Šá expected: the school is a strict one, her long hair is cut, and only English is spoken. She encounters racism and ridicule. Slowly, she adapts to her environment-excelling at her studies, winning prizes for essay-writing and oration. Vivid and poignant, this memoir is the story of an activist in the making, a woman whose extraordinary career partially inspired the events of Killers of the Flower Moon.
The Faster Redder Road by Stephen Graham Jones; Theodore C. Van Alst (Editor)
ISBN: 9780826355836
Publication Date: 2015-04-15
This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones's novels including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, The Gospel of Z, and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones's contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.'s introduction puts Jones on the literary map.
Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis
ISBN: 9781644452035
Publication Date: 2022-09-27
Potent stories that offer a forceful vision of contemporary Navajo life by an American Book Award winner. An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician's plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a white woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions. Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writers and musicians, construction workers, people passing through with the hope of something better somewhere else. His characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses; they raise families, choose families, and abandon families; they endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
ISBN: 9780062671196
Publication Date: 2021-03-23
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a "termination" that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans "for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run"? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.
Shutter by Ramona Emerson
ISBN: 9781641293334
Publication Date: 2022-08-02
Longlisted for the National Book Award This blood-chilling debut 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. Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward clues other investigators overlook. Rita's taboo ability was what drove her away from the Navajo reservation, where she was raised. It has isolated her from friends and gotten her in trouble with the law. And now it might be what gets her killed, when a furious ghost lands her in the crosshairs of Albuquerque s most dangerous cartel.
Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford
ISBN: 9780802149121
Publication Date: 2020-07-14
It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church—a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever. Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman—and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma's Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn't easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world—of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home. In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.
The Removed by Brandon Hobson
ISBN: 9780062997562
Publication Date: 2021-02-02
Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson. In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation. With the family's annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray's death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest's mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo. Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.
Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky #2) by Rebecca Roanhorse
ISBN: 9781534437753
Publication Date: 2022-04-19
Return to The Meridian with New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Roanhorse's sequel to the most critically hailed epic fantasy of 2020, Black Sun (finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Lambda, and Locus awards). The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God's eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent. The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded? As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth. And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, the struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages. How will Serapio stay human when he is steeped in prophecy and surrounded by those who desire only his power? Is there a future for Naranpa in a transformed Tova without her total destruction? Welcome back to the fantasy series of the decade in Fevered Star.
Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah
ISBN: 9781643751474
Publication Date: 2022-07-26
A moving and deeply engaging debut novel about a young Native American man finding strength in his familial identity, from a stellar new voice in fiction. Oscar Hokeah's electric debut takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle, whose family—part Mexican, part Native American—is determined to hold onto their community despite obstacles everywhere they turn. Ever's father is injured at the hands of corrupt police on the border when he goes to visit family in Mexico, while his mother struggles both to keep her job and care for her husband. And young Ever is lost and angry at all that he doesn't understand, at this world that seems to undermine his sense of safety. Ever's relatives all have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother, knowing the importance of proximity, urges the family to move across Oklahoma to be near her, while his grandfather, watching their traditions slip away, tries to reunite Ever with his heritage through traditional gourd dances. Through it all, every relative wants the same: to remind Ever of the rich and supportive communities that surround him, there to hold him tight, and for Ever to learn to take the strength given to him to save not only himself but also the next generation. How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn't made room for him to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle finds his way home.
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
ISBN: 9781616958879
Publication Date: 2018-02-20
With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a 15-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface, that is, until he meets 17-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings towards Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.
From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen
ISBN: 9780803226340
Publication Date: 2010-03-01
For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen's stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility. Drawing on American Indian oral traditions and her own Métis upbringing, Jensen tells stories that mix many lives and voices to offer fleeting perspectives on a world that reconfigures the tragedy and disconnection often found in narratives of American Indian life. A brother falls off the roof of an abandoned hotel, a young bride tries to connect with a family she's never met, and an adopted teenage girl seeks acceptance where she is viewed as an outsider. The reader also encounters a kidnapped nephew, strangers in a hotel, and even a stray dog: these are the souls that populate Jensen's stories, finding tentative connections with the past, the future, one another, and finally us.
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
ISBN: 9781534413504
Publication Date: 2018-06-26
One of the Time 100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time, Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novel One of Bustle's Top 20 "landmark sci-fi and fantasy novels" of the decade. While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters—and it is up to one young woman to unravel the mysteries of the past before they destroy the future. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive. Welcome to the Sixth World.
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
ISBN: 9781953534187
Publication Date: 2022-07-05
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family's unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.

Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead
ISBN: 9781517914479
Publication Date: 2022-11-15
A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world. The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession. In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land. Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781937512934
Publication Date: 2020-07-14
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller
ISBN: 9781984820396
Publication Date: 2021-01-12
A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother's life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family's troubled history. "A candid and achingly fractured memoir of [Geller's] mother, her family, her Navajo heritage and her own journey to self-discovery and acceptance." Shortlisted for The Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, The Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes. When Danielle Geller's mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother's life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother's life to try and understand her mother's relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family's history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother's home: the Navajo reservation. Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.
Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
ISBN: 9781571313355
Publication Date: 2013-10-15
An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as "the younger brothers of creation." As she explores these themes she circles toward a central argument: the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return.
Black Indian by Shonda Buchanan
ISBN: 0814345816
Publication Date: 2019-08-26
Black Indian, searing and raw, is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Alice Walker's The Color Purple meets Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony--only, this isn't fiction. Beautifully rendered and rippling with family dysfunction, secrets, deaths, alcoholism, and old resentments, Shonda Buchanan's memoir is an inspiring story that explores her family's legacy of being African Americans with American Indian roots and how they dealt with not just society's ostracization but the consequences of this dual inheritance. Buchanan was raised as a Black woman, who grew up hearing cherished stories of her multi-racial heritage, while simultaneously suffering from everything she (and the rest of her family) didn't know. Tracing the arduous migration of Mixed Bloods, or Free People of Color, from the Southeast to the Midwest, Buchanan tells the story of her Michigan tribe--a comedic yet manically depressed family of fierce women, who were everything from caretakers and cornbread makers to poets and witches, and men who were either ignored, protected, imprisoned, or maimed--and how their lives collided over love, failure, fights, and prayer despite a stacked deck of challenges, including addiction and abuse. Ultimately, Buchanan's nomadic people endured a collective identity crisis after years of constantly straddling two, then three, races. The physical, spiritual, and emotional displacement of American Indians who met and married Mixed or Black slaves and indentured servants at America's early crossroads is where this powerful journey begins. Black Indian doesn't have answers, nor does it aim to represent every American's multi-ethnic experience. Instead, it digs as far down into this one family's history as it can go--sometimes, with a bit of discomfort. But every family has its own truth, and Buchanan's search for hers will resonate with anyone who has wondered "maybe there's more than what I'm being told."
Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot; Sherman Alexie (Introduction by); Joan Naviyuk Kane (Afterword by)
ISBN: 9781619023345
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
A powerful, poetic memoir of an Indigenous woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest--this New York Times bestseller and Emma Watson Book Club pick is "an illuminating account of grief, abuse and the complex nature of the Native experience . . . at once raw and achingly beautiful (NPR) Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie
ISBN: 9780316270748
Publication Date: 2019-11-12
A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman. When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.
Carry by Toni Jensen
ISBN: 9781984821188
Publication Date: 2020-09-08
A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an Indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author's encounters with gun violence. Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. "We need more voices like Toni Jensen's, more books like Carry." Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There. Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of Indigenous women, on Indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. "The Worry Line" explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. "At the Workshop" focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In "Women in the Fracklands," Jensen takes the reader inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history—as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one's country is not the same as surviving one's country.
White Magic by Elissa Washuta
ISBN: 9781951142391
Publication Date: 2021-04-27
Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.
Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk by Sasha LaPointe
ISBN: 9781640094147
Publication Date: 2022-03-08
Shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. An Indigenous artist blends the aesthetics of punk rock with the traditional spiritual practices of the women in her lineage in this bold, contemporary journey to reclaim her heritage and unleash her power and voice while searching for a permanent home. Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe has always longed for a sense of home. When she was a child, her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha. With little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother—a linguist who helped preserve her Indigenous language of Lushootseed—Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, determined to build a better future for herself and her people. Set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own. Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas amplified by the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal.
Bitterroot by Susan Devan Harness
ISBN: 9781496207463
Publication Date: 2018-10-01
2019 High Plains Book Award (Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories), 2021 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado. In Bitterroot, Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her "real" parents;He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn't, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later. Harness's search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of "home" she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination. Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterroot also provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.

This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781452962238
Publication Date: 2019-09-03
The new edition of a prize-winning memoir-in-poems, a meditation on life as a queer Indigenous man--available for the first time in the United States "i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative." Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is "a prayer against breaking," writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. "By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for." Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
ISBN: 9781644450147
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Natalie Diaz's highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. 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: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible." Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier
ISBN: 9781555977672
Publication Date: 2017-03-07
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from "WHEREAS Statements" WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets
ISBN: 9781571315205
Publication Date: 2019-09-10
Named a "Best Poetry Book of 2019" by Electric Literature, Entropy Mag, and Auburn Avenue Named a "Favorite Book of 2019" by Lit Hub Named a "Best Queer Book of 2019" by BuzzFeed and Book Marks Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series,Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros. Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men "only touch when they fuck in a backseat." Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, "the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all." But if Jake Skeets's collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place--full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover's body: A spine becomes a railroad."Veins burst oil, elk black." And "becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal." Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense. Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems ofEyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.
The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday
ISBN: 9780062961150
Publication Date: 2020-03-10
Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated American master N. Scott Momaday returns with a radiant collection of more than 200 new and selected poems rooted in Native American oral tradition. One of the most important and unique voices in American letters, distinguished poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller N. Scott Momaday was born into the Kiowa tribe and grew up on Indian reservations in the Southwest. The customs and traditions that influenced his upbringing—most notably the Native American oral tradition—are the centerpiece of his work. This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday's mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday's connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape. The title poem, "The Death of Sitting Bear" is a celebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief. "I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination," Momaday writes, "and I sing him an honor song." Here, too, are meditations on mortality, love, and loss, as well as reflections on the incomparable and holy landscape of the Southwest. The Death of Sitting Bear evokes the essence of human experience and speaks to us all.
An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo
ISBN: 9781324003861
Publication Date: 2019-08-13
National Bestseller A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land. In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
Mother/Land by Cheryl Savageau
ISBN: 9781844712694
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
In Cheryl Savageau's new book of poetry, Mother/Land, she radically re-maps New England as Native American space. Savageau retells and re-imagines creation stories, revealing a landscape of trees, ponds, rivers and mountains rich in meaning for Abenaki people, and weaves traditional, personal and family stories, with stories of colonization and resistance. Savageau's "unhistory" tells the stories of her people without privileging the moment of contact with Europe as the defining moment for viewing the culture.Mother/Land is beaded with gems from her mother's jewel box--poems that tell stories of her mother's life, and the complexities of survival and love in a family of mixed heritage.Savageau's work signals the reemergence of a people who have been described as "hiding in plain sight." In contrast to stereotypical associations of Native Americans with "Mother Earth," this poetry highlights the bittersweet complexities of the relationship between a woman and her homeland, whose bodies seem to be constantly under siege.
Perfidia by Sky Hopinka; Julie Niemi (Contribution by); Lauren Cornell (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781732708686
Publication Date: 2020-09-22
Poetry. Native American Studies. Art. Film. Edited by Julie Niemi. Foreword by Lauren Cornell. Sky Hopinka's PERFIDIA moves within the textured landscape of memory, both personal and collective, to address the founding colonial violence of the United States and its lasting impact. In a series of cantos, the book-length poem surfaces a first-person narrative amidst the stream of history and its accounting through the voices of ancestors and kin. Shifting registers between the embodied and the spiritual, PERFIDIA's subjective syntax destabilizes entrenched colonial perspectives and concomitant descriptions of land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood. PERFIDIA sits at the center of Hopinka's most recent body of filmic work, which draws from the poem's sixteen cantos and its previous iterations. These filmic works include the short film Lore (2019), the 2-channel video installation Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019), the feature-length film maÉ¬ni (2020), and the photo series The Land Describes Itself (2019).
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
ISBN: 9781556593833
Publication Date: 2012-05-08
"I write hungry sentences," Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, "because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them." This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars. The lion didn't want to do it—He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep. Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
ISBN: 9781941040638
Publication Date: 2017-05-09
Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he's adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo
ISBN: 9780819511829
Publication Date: 1990-05-21
Sacred and secular poems of the Creek Tribe. Winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award (1990) and the William Carlos Williams Award (1991). 2019 United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo is a powerful voice for her Creek (Muscogee) tribe ("a stolen people in a stolen land"), for other oppressed people, and for herself. Her poems, both sacred ad secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious. They are rooted in the land; they are one with the deer and the fox, the hawk and the eagle, the sun, moon, and wind, and the seasons, "spring/ was lean and hungry with he hope of children and corn." There are enemies here, also lovers; there are ghost dancers, ancestors old and new, who rise again "to walk in shoes of fire." Indeed, fire and its aftermath is a constant image in the burning book. Skies are "incendiary"; the "smoke of dawn" turns enemies into ashes: "I am fire eaten by wind." "Your fire scorched / my lips." "I am lighting the fire that crawls from my spine / to the gods with a coal from my sister's flame." But the spirit of this book is not consumed. It is not limited by mad love or war, and "there is something larger than the memory / of a dispossessed people." That something larger is, for example, revolution, freedom, birth.
The Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
ISBN: 9781487001278
Publication Date: 2017-04-08
A knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.
Fire Power by Chrystos
ISBN: 9780889740471
Publication Date: 1995-09-01
Eloquent words are Chrystos's tool for survival and her weapon in fighting for social justice. "Chrystos is writing a poetry which indeed changes the world." —Lambda Book Report. Telling the truth is powerful medicine. It is a fire that lights the way for others. When we speak our "Fire Power", we join a long & honored line of warriors against injustice. Each of us is born with innate power & purpose, a sacred direction for which we have been created. Our task is to find the place where we belong & do our work there.

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through by Joy Harjo (Editor); LeAnne Howe
ISBN: 9780393356809
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize-winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.
We Are the Middle of Forever by Dahr Jamail (Editor); Stan Rushworth (Editor)
ISBN: 9781620976692
Publication Date: 2022-04-12
A powerful, intimate collection of conversations with Indigenous Americans on the climate crisis and the Earth's future. Although for a great many people, the human impact on the Earth—countless species becoming extinct, pandemics claiming millions of lives, and climate crisis causing worldwide social and environmental upheaval—was not apparent until recently, this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story that is many generations long. They have had to adapt, to persevere, and to be courageous and resourceful in the face of genocide and destruction—and their experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation. An innovative work of research and reportage, We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today's environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions, who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life. A welcome antidote to the despair arising from the climate crisis, We Are the Middle of Forever brings to the forefront the perspectives of those who have long been attuned to climate change and will be an indispensable aid to those looking for new and different ideas and responses to the challenges we face.
Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction by Joshua Whitehead (Editor)
ISBN: 9781551528113
Publication Date: 2020-10-20
A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Nathan Adler, Darcie Little Badger, Gabriel Castilloux Calderon, Adam Garnet Jones, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, jaye simpson, and Nazbah Tom.
Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time by Hope Nicholson (Editor); Richard Van Camp; Jeffrey Veregge (Artist); Nathan Adler; Gwen Benaway; Cherie Dimaline; Daniel Heath Justice; Cleo Keahna; Mari Kurisato; Darcie Little Badger; David Alexander Robertson
ISBN: 9780993997075
Publication Date: 2016-09-30
Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love.
Native Voices: indigenous American poetry, craft and conversations by CMarie Fuhrman (Editor); Dean Rader (Editor)
ISBN: 1946482188
Publication Date: 2019-04-01
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Native American Studies. NATIVE VOICES is a comprehensive collection of the most urgent Indigenous American poetry and prose spanning the mid 20th Century to today. Featuring forty-two poets, including Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, and Orlando White; original influence essays by Diane Glancy on Lorca, Chrystos on Audre Lorde, Louise Erdrich on Elizabeth Bishop, LeAnne Howe on W. D. Snodgrass, Allison Hedge Coke on Delmore Schwartz, Suzanne Rancourt on Ai, and M. L. Smoker on Richard Hugo, among others; and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists.
Sovereign Erotics: a collection of two-spirit literature by Qwo-Li Driskill (Editor); Daniel Heath Justice (Editor); Deborah Miranda (Editor); Lisa Tatonetti (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816502424
Publication Date: 2011-10-01
Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.
Shapes of Native Nonfiction: collected essays by contemporary writers by Elissa Washuta (Editor); Theresa Warburton (Editor)
ISBN: 9780295745763
Publication Date: 2019-06-01
Just as a basket's purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.
New Poets of Native Nations by Heid E. Erdrich
ISBN: 9781555978099
Publication Date: 2018-07-10
A landmark anthology celebrating twenty-one Native poets first published in the twenty-first century. New Poets of Native Nations gathers poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations to present the extraordinary range and power of new Native poetry. Heid E. Erdrich has selected twenty-one poets whose first books were published after the year 2000 to highlight the exciting works coming up after Joy Harjo and Sherman Alexie. Collected here are poems of great breadth—long narratives, political outcries, experimental works, and traditional lyrics—and the result is an essential anthology of some of the best poets writing now. Poets included are Tacey M. Atsitty, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Laura Da', Natalie Diaz, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Eric Gansworth, Gordon Henry, Jr., Sy Hoahwah, LeAnne Howe, Layli Long Soldier, Janet McAdams, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Margaret Noodin, dg okpik, Craig Santos Perez, Tommy Pico, Cedar Sigo, M. L. Smoker, Gwen Westerman, and Karenne Wood.
Living Nations, Living Words by Joy Harjo (Editor); Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by); The Library of Congress (As told to)
ISBN: 9780393867916
Publication Date: 2021-05-04
Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

Seventh Generation: an anthology of Native American plays by Mimi D'Aponte (Editor)
ISBN: 1559361476
Publication Date: 1998-06-01
The first major collection of dramatic works by Native Americans.
Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays by Jaye T. Darby (Editor); Hanay Geiogamah (Editor)
ISBN: 0935626492
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
Cultural Writing. Native American Studies. STORIES OF OUR WAY is the first anthology of its kind to span more than thirty years of American Indian theater, including the 1930s classic THE CHEROKEE NIGHT. This distinguished group of twelve plays draws ona rich range of tribal experiences -- Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Kiowa, Navajo, Oneida, Otoe-Missouria, Rappahonack, and urban. They treatthe diverse stories of Native people's ways with gritty integrity, uncompromising honesty, and deep respect, balanced with an awareness of the challenges and responsibilities to renew, and a commitment to an evolving American Indian theatrical aesthetic. These playwrights invite audiences to probe the often painful past, share the enduring values of family, community, and tribe, and celebrate humor and spirituality.
Two-Spirit Acts by Jean O'Hara (Editor); Waawaate Fobister; Muriel Miguel; Kent Monkman
ISBN: 9781770911840
Publication Date: 2014-04-15
With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.
The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway
ISBN: 9780920079447
Publication Date: 1992-12-15
Winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and nominated for the Governor General's Award. This award-winning play by Native playwright Tomson Highway is a powerful and moving portrayal of seven women from a reserve attempting to beat the odds by winning at bingo. And not just any bingo. It is THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD and a chance to win a way out of a tortured life. The Rez Sisters is hilarious, shocking, mystical and powerful, and clearly establishes the creative voice of Native theatre and writing in Canada today.
Women of the Fur Trade by Frances Koncan
ISBN: 9780369103529
Publication Date: 2022-05-31
In eighteen hundred and something something, somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory, three very different women with a preference for twenty-first century slang sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love, and the hot nerd Louis Riel. Marie-Angelique, a Metis Taurus, is determined to woo Louis (a Metis Libra)—who will be arriving soon—by sending him boldly flirtatious letters. Eugenia, an Ojibwe Sagittarius, brings news of rebellion back to the fort after trading, but isn't impressed by Louis's true mediocre nature. And Cecilia, a pregnant British Virgo, is anxiously waiting on her husband's return from an expedition, but can't resist pining over the heartthrob Thomas Scott (Irish Capricorn), who is actually the one secretly responding to Marie-Angelique's letters. This will all go smoothly, right? This lively historical satire of survival and cultural inheritance shifts perspectives from the male gaze onto women's power in the past and present through the lens of the rapidly changing world of the Canadian fur trade.
Darrell Dennis - Two Plays by Darrell Dennis; Lee Maracle (Introduction by)
ISBN: 0887547729
Publication Date: 2005-09-01
Tales of an Urban Indian is a one-person play that follows the trials and tribulations of Simon Douglas, a young First Nations man who moves from his rural reservation to the big city of Vancouver. This dark comedy examines the issues of race, identity, and assimilation that drive young Indigenous men to self-destruction. In The Trickster of Third Avenue East, Roger and Mary are spiralling out of control but are too scared to let each other go. Enter J.C., a mysterious visitor who turns their lives upside down and forces them to confront their darkest secrets. J.C. pushes Roger and Mary into the realm of the supernatural and past the brink of sanity.
This Is How We Got Here by Keith Barker
ISBN: 9781770918245
Publication Date: 2017-10-30
Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, This is How We Got Here follows a close-knit family as they deal with an unexpected loss. A mother, father, aunt, and uncle must learn how to move forward after the trauma and re-learn how to interact with one another with forgiveness, humour, and love. It's been a year since Paul and Lucille's son Craig died by suicide, and their once-solid family bonds are starting to break down. While the now-separated couple tries to honour their son, Lucille's sister Liset and her husband Jim refuse to discuss their nephew. The ties that keep the four together as sisters, best friends, and spouses are strained by grief and guilt...until a visit from a fox changes everything.
The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse
ISBN: 9781682661406
Publication Date: 2015
Good intentions. Bad decisions. Great fun. In Larissa FastHorse’s satirical comedy The Thanksgiving Play, a troupe of really well-meaning theater artists dream of creating something revolutionary: a culturally sensitive, totally inoffensive Thanksgiving school pageant that finally gives a voice to Native Americans. Finding said Native Americans... isn’t so simple. And that’s when things start to get absurd. Sending up a whole feast of social issues, this bitingly funny play roasts everything right, wrong, and woke in America.

Children's Literature

Read Aloud Handbook for Native American Children by Lauren Waukau-Villagomez; Samantha J. Villagomez
ISBN: 9781641135900
Publication Date: 2019-06-01
This book is essential for teachers of reading and Native American Children to improve the reading scores of Native children. The book promotes the use of read alouds with Native American children in order to develop oral language, vocabulary and background knowledge. In addition, American Indian English and Standard English are discussed as issues for Native American Children. The importance of code-switching and bilingualism are examined so teacher have a better understanding of their students' worldviews. This will lead to a respect for the children's culture and subjugated knowledge. The book includes an annotated bibliography of books to use as read alouds. Many books have been field tested at Menominee Tribal School on school children in grades K-8. The books include some classic award-winning books and Native American books. The books were chosen for their use of Standard English. The Menominee Reservation is a focus of the book.
A Kid's Guide to Native American History by Yvonne Wakim Dennis; Arlene Hirschfelder
ISBN: 9781556528026
Publication Date: 2009-11-01
Hands-on activities, games, and crafts introduce children to the diversity of Native American cultures and teach them about the people, experiences, and events that have helped shape America, past and present. Nine geographical areas cover a variety of communities like the Mohawk in the Northeast, Ojibway in the Midwest, Shoshone in the Great Basin, Apache in the Southwest, Yupik in Alaska, and Native Hawaiians, among others. Lives of historical and contemporary notable individuals like Chief Joseph and Maria Tallchief are featured, and the book is packed with a variety of topics like first encounters with Europeans, Indian removal, Mohawk sky walkers, and Navajo code talkers. Readers travel Native America through activities that highlight the arts, games, food, clothing, and unique celebrations, language, and life ways of various nations. Kids can make Haudensaunee corn husk dolls, play Washoe stone jacks, design Inupiat sun goggles, or create a Hawaiian Ma'o-hauhele bag. A time line, glossary, and recommendations for Web sites, books, movies, and museums round out this multicultural guide.
Fry Bread by Kevin Noble Maillard; Juana Martinez-Neal (Illustrator)
ISBN: 9781626727465
Publication Date: 2019-10-22
Fry bread is food.It is warm and delicious, piled high on a plate. Fry bread is time.It brings families together for meals and new memories. Fry bread is nation.It might look or taste different, but it is still shared by many, from coast to coast and beyond. Fry bread is us.It is a celebration of old and new, traditional and modern, similarity and difference.Fry Bread is a story told in lively and powerful verse by Seminole Nation member Kevin Noble Maillard, with vibrant art from Pura Belpre Award winner Juana Martinez-Neal.
Shi-Shi-Etko by Nicola Campbell; Kim LaFave (Illustrator)
ISBN: 9780888996596
Publication Date: 2005-08-09
Winner of the Anskohk Aboriginal Children's Book of the Year Award. Finalist for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award and the Ruth Schwartz Award In just four days young Shi-shi-etko will have to leave her family and all that she knows to attend residential school. She spends her last days at home treasuring the beauty of her world -- the dancing sunlight, the tall grass, each shiny rock, the tadpoles in the creek, her grandfather's paddle song. Her mother, father and grandmother, each in turn, share valuable teachings that they want her to remember. And so Shi-shi-etko carefully gathers her memories for safekeeping. Richly hued illustrations complement this gently moving and poetic account of a child who finds solace all around her, even though she is on the verge of great loss -- a loss that native people have endured for generations because of the residential schools system.
Native American Picture Books of Change by Rebecca C. Benes
ISBN: 0890134715
Publication Date: 2004-02-13
In this book illustrated with 150 enchanting paintings and historical photographs, some from as early as 1922, the author describes the history and motivation behind some of the most exceptional children's books published in the United States. These picture book readers, originally developed for use in Indian schools during the New Deal, represent the first Native-centred texts used in Bureau of Indian Affairs curriculum. They were written by lauded writers, ethnologists, and linguists and illustrated with the stunning work of emerging and prominent Native American artists.

Young Adult

#Notyourprincess by Lisa Charleyboy (Editor); Mary Beth Leatherdale (Editor)
ISBN: 9781554519583
Publication Date: 2017-09-12
Native Women demand to be heard in this stunning anthology. Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book. In the same style as the best-selling Dreaming in Indian, #Not Your Princess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
ISBN: 9781770864863
Publication Date: 2017-09-01
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden--but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
Hunting by Stars (The Marrow Thieves #2) by Cherie Dimaline
ISBN: 9781419753473
Publication Date: 2021-10-19
From the acclaimed author of The Marrow Thieves comes a thrilling new story about hope and survival that New York Times bestselling author Angeline Boulley called "a revelatory must-read." A 2022 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book. Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Without dreams, people are haunted, sick, mad, unable to rebuild. The government soon finds that the Indigenous people of North America have retained their dreams, an ability rumored to be housed in the very marrow of their bones. Soon, residential schools pop up--or are re-opened--across the land to bring in the dreamers and harvest their dreams. Seventeen-year-old French lost his family to these schools and has spent the years since heading north with his new found family: a group of other dreamers, who, like him, are trying to build and thrive as a community. But then French wakes up in a pitch-black room, locked in and alone for the first time in years, and he knows immediately where he is—and what it will take to escape. Meanwhile, out in the world, his found family searches for him and dodges new dangers—school Recruiters, a blood cult, even the land itself. When their paths finally collide, French must decide how far he is willing to go--and how many loved ones is he willing to betray--in order to survive. This engrossing, action-packed, deftly-drawn novel expands on the world of Cherie Dimaline's award-winning The Marrow Thieves, and it will haunt readers long after they've turned the final page.
Turtle Island by Eldon Yellowhorn; Kathy Lowinger
ISBN: 9781554519446
Publication Date: 2017-09-12
Unlike most books that chronicle the history of Native peoples beginning with the arrival of Europeans in 1492, this book goes back to the Ice Age to give young readers a glimpse of what life was like pre-contact. The title, Turtle Island, refers to a Native myth that explains how North and Central America were formed on the back of a turtle. Based on archeological finds and scientific research, we now have a clearer picture of how the Indigenous people lived. Using that knowledge, the authors take the reader back as far as 14,000 years ago to imagine moments in time. A wide variety of topics are featured, from the animals that came and disappeared over time, to what people ate, how they expressed themselves through art, and how they adapted to their surroundings. The importance of story-telling among the Native peoples is always present to shed light on how they explained their world. The end of the book takes us to modern times when the story of the Native peoples is both tragic and hopeful.
Speaking Our Truth by Monique Gray Smith
ISBN: 9781459815834
Publication Date: 2017-09-19
Canada's relationship with its Indigenous people has suffered as a result of both the residential school system and the lack of understanding of the historical and current impact of those schools. Healing and repairing that relationship requires education, awareness and increased understanding of the legacy and the impacts still being felt by Survivors and their families. Guided by acclaimed Indigenous author Monique Gray Smith, readers will learn about the lives of Survivors and listen to allies who are putting the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into action.
Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac
ISBN: 9780803729216
Publication Date: 2005-03-17
Throughout World War II, in the conflict fought against Japan, Navajo code talkers were a crucial part of the U.S. effort, sending messages back and forth in an unbreakable code that used their native language. They braved some of the heaviest fighting of the war, and with their code, they saved countless American lives. Yet their story remained classified for more than twenty years. But now Joseph Bruchac brings their stories to life for young adults through the riveting fictional tale of Ned Begay, a sixteen-year-old Navajo boy who becomes a code talker. His grueling journey is eye-opening and inspiring. This deeply affecting novel honors all of those young men, like Ned, who dared to serve, and it honors the culture and language of the Navajo Indians.

New Native Kitchen by Freddie Bitsoie; James O. Fraioli; Quentin Bacon (By (photographer)); Gabriella Trujillo (Illustrator)
ISBN: 9781419753558
Publication Date: 2021-11-16
Modern Indigenous cuisine from the renowned Native foods educator and former chef of Mitsitam Native Foods Café at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, Freddie Bitsoie and James Beard Award-winning author James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen is a celebration of Indigenous cuisine. Accompanied by original artwork by Gabriella Trujillo and offering delicious dishes like Cherrystone Clam Soup from the Northeastern Wampanoag and Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin from the Pueblo peoples, Bitsoie showcases the variety of flavor and culinary history on offer from coast to coast, providing modern interpretations of 100 recipes that have long fed this country. Recipes like Chocolate Bison Chili, Prickly Pear Sweet Pork Chops, and Sumac Seared Trout with Onion and Bacon Sauce combine the old with the new, holding fast to traditions while also experimenting with modern methods. In this essential cookbook, Bitsoie shares his expertise and culinary insights into Native American cooking and suggests new approaches for every home cook. With recipes as varied as the peoples that inspired them, New Native Kitchen celebrates the Indigenous heritage of American cuisine.
The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman; Beth Dooley (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9780816699797
Publication Date: 2017-10-10
2018 James Beard Award Winner for Best American Cookbook. Named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2017 by NPR, The Village Voice, Smithsonian Magazine, UPROXX, New York Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Mpls. St. Paul Magazine and others. Here is real food—our indigenous American fruits and vegetables, the wild and foraged ingredients, game and fish. Locally sourced, seasonal, "clean" ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here —and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef's healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut-maple bites. The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen is a rich education and a delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with a vision and approach to food that travels well beyond those borders.
Tawâw by Shane M. Chartrand; Jennifer Cockrall-King (As told to)
ISBN: 9781487005122
Publication Date: 2019-10-01
tawâw [pronounced ta-WOW]: Come in, you're welcome, there's room. Acclaimed chef Shane M. Chartrand's debut cookbook explores the reawakening of Indigenous cuisine and what it means to cook, eat, and share food in our homes and communities. Born to Cree parents and raised by a Métis father and Mi'kmaw-Irish mother, Shane M. Chartrand has spent the past ten years learning about his history, visiting with other First Nations peoples, gathering and sharing knowledge and stories, and creating dishes that combine his interests and express his personality. The result is tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine, a book that traces Chartrand's culinary journey from his childhood in Central Alberta, where he learned to raise livestock, hunt, and fish on his family's acreage, to his current position as executive chef at the acclaimed SC Restaurant in the River Cree Resort & Casino in Enoch, Alberta, on Treaty 6 Territory. Containing over seventy-five recipes—including Chartrand's award-winning dish "War Paint"—along with personal stories, culinary influences, and interviews with family members, tawâw is part cookbook, part exploration of ingredients and techniques, and part chef's personal journal.
Original Local by Heid E. Erdrich
ISBN: 9780873518949
Publication Date: 2013-11-01
Local foods have garnered much attention in recent years, but the concept is hardly new: indigenous peoples have always made the most of nature's gifts. Their menus were truly the "original local," celebrated here in 135 home-tested recipes paired with stories from tribal activists, food researchers, families, and chefs. A chapter devoted to wild rice makes clear the crucial role manoomin plays in Native cultures. Similar attention is lavished on the tallest of the Three Sisters: mandamin, or corn. The bounty of the region's lakes and streams—walleye, whitefish, and more—inspire flavorful combinations and fierce protection of resources. Health concerns have encouraged Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota cooks to return to, and revise, recipes for bison, venison, and wild game. Sections on vegetables and beans, herbs and tea, and maple and berries offer insight from a broad representation of regional tribes, including Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Mandan gardeners and harvesters. The innovative recipes collected here—from Maple Baked Cranberry Beans to Three Sisters Salsa, from Manoomin Lasagna to Black and Blue Bison Stew—will inspire home cooks not only to make better use of the foods all around them but also to honor the storied heritage they represent.
Iwígara by Enrique Salmón
ISBN: 9781604698800
Publication Date: 2020-09-15
The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same breath—known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwígara—has resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world, passed down for millennia by native cultures. Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón builds on this concept of connection and highlights 80 plants revered by North America's indigenous peoples. Salmón teaches us the ways plants are used as food and medicine, the details of their identification and harvest, their important health benefits, plus their role in traditional stories and myths. Discover in these pages how the timeless wisdom of iwígara can enhance your own kinship with the natural world.
Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States by Devon A. Mihesuah (Editor); Elizabeth Hoover (Editor); Winona LaDuke (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780806163215
Publication Date: 2019-08-08
Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

Indigikitchen Blog and Online Cooking Show
Indigikitchen, a portmanteau of Indigenous, digital, and kitchen, is an online cooking show dedicated to re-indigenizing our diets using digital media. Using foods native to their Americas, Indigikitchen gives viewers the important tools they need to find and prepare food in their own communities. Beyond that, it strengthens the ties to our cultures and reminds us of the inherent worth of our identities while fueling our physical bodies. Indigenous food systems support healthier ecosystems, bodies, and families.

Reading Lists & Bibliographies

Decolonize Your Bookshelf With These Books by Native American Writers (Electric Literature)
Decolonize Your Bookshelf (Verso)
Native American Heritage Book List (Penguin Random House)
Most Anticipated Books by Indigenous Authors For the Second Half of 2020 (Literary Hub)
35 books to read for National Indigenous History Month (CBC)
12 books by Indigenous women you should read (CBC)
Collected Bibliographies of Native American Youth Literature (Cynsations)
A Reading List for Native American Heritage Month 2022 (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses)

Online Compilations

Native American Poetry & Culture (Poetry Foundation)
Indigenous Futures and Imagining the Decolonial (ANMLY)
Reading List: Native American Heritage Month (The Common)
Voices of Rebirth: A Reading List on Being Indigenous in America (Longreads)

Films & Filmmakers

Introduction
There is a history, particularly within American cinema, of filmmakers without indigenous heritage telling stories about indigenous people. Oftentimes these stories reproduce and propagate harmful stereotypes. In doing so they adhere to a settler-colonialist mindset that masks a history of forced displacement, genocide, and cultural suppression. This is one major reason it is important to pay attention to the work of indigenous filmmakers who present authentic representations of their own lived experiences and the lived experiences of their people. The following is just a small sampling of indigenous filmmakers doing the important work of telling stories both universal and uniquely indigenous.

Chris Eyre (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes)

Best known for his 1998 debut film Smoke Signals, Eyre’s career spans nearly 25 years and 14 films (both as director and producer). He has directed both fiction and documentary films. He treats both the subject of contemporary Native American life and the history of indigenous people. Eyre has dealt with themes like trauma (and specifically war-related PTSD) and race relations within the United States. He directed 3 of the 5 parts of the PBS docuseries We Shall Remain, which places indigenous history at the center of American history.

Further biographical information at the following webpage: Chris Eyre (1968-) (oregonencyclopedia.org)

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (Sámi People and Kainai First Nation) See the source image

A filmmaker, actor, activist, and writer with a career spanning 12 films and 13 years. She is known for her use of films as a medium for activism. Her films treat themes like domestic violence and the environmental degradation of tribal land. She is perhaps best known for her 2019 film, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, which follows two indigenous women with contrasting domestic lives who meet by chance and begin a friendship (one a survivor of domestic abuse and the other happily married).

Review of Tailfeathers' work documenting the opioid crisis amongst First Nations people at the following webpage: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers sheds light on the opioid crisis in Kanai First Nation in new film — Stir (createastir.ca)

See the source image

Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation of Oklahoma)

Harjo is known for portraying stories set within his native Seminole Nation. He has worked in documentaries, fiction films, and series television. Many of his films explore themes of death, dying, and grief. His feature debut was Four Sheets to the Wind, a film that follows a Seminole man who goes to visit his sister after the death of his father. He broke into documentary filmmaking with his film This May Be the Last Time, about his grandfather who disappeared in 1962. Most recently, he has collaborated with the New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waiti to produce the FX series Reservation Dogs, about four teenagers who dream of escaping Oklahoma to California following the death of their friend.

Interview at the following webpage: Sterlin Harjo talks ‘Reservation Dogs’ - Indian Country Today

See the source image

Zacharias Kunuk (Inupiak Peoples)

Kunuk is a Inuk producer and director best known for his 2001 film Atajarnuat: The Fast Runner, which recounts the Inuit legend of the title character entirely in the Inuktikut language (making it the first film entirely in this language. In his films, Kunuk treats themes of humankind’s relationship to nature and the encroachment of western ‘modernity’ on the beliefs of native people. He directed a segment on the National Parks Project, a large-scale Canadian documentary effort to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Canada’s national park system.

More extensive biography at the following webpage: Long Biography & Citations (inuitartfoundation.org)

See the source image

Sydney Freeland (Navajo Nation)

The daughter of a Navajo father and a Scottish mother, Freeland’s debut feature, Drunktown’s Finest, explores themes of parenthood, gender identity, and social marginality in the lives of Native Americans. Her second- and most recent- feature explores the dynamics of a family thrown into upheaval as two daughters have their mother arrested and find themselves placed in foster care. She has directed several episodes for television, most recently two episodes of FX’s Reservation Dogs.

Interviews: The Independent Critic - An Interview with Sydney Freeland and Characters on the margins: An interview with Sydney Freeland — High Country News – Know the West (hcn.org)

See the source image

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation)

Hopinka is an artist working in several media: film, poetry, photography, and installation. He is perhaps best known for his feature-length film debut małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore which explores Chinookan notions of death, the afterlife, and humankind’s place in the universe. Much of his work explores language and its preservation: his most recent short film Kicking the Clouds, for example, centers around the recording of a Pechanga language lesson passed from his grandmother to his mother.

Further information at artist's website: Sky Hopinka

Nyla Innuksuk (Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada)

Nyla Innuksuk is the founder of Mixtape VR which produces Virtual and Augmented Reality content. A writer for Marvel Comics, Innuksuk co-created the character of Snowguard, a teenage superhero from Pangnirtung, Nunavut and a member of Marvel’s Champions League. Working in mixed media allows Nyla to channel her passions for technology and genre storytelling among mediums that include interactive graphic novels, film, television and synthetic experiences. In addition to her film and digital work, Nyla sits on the board of directors of Ontario Creates (formerly the OMDC) and the Glenn Gould Foundation. She is an ambassador for the Northern Indigenous Film Fund in Norway and was the 2018 imagineNATIVE artist in residence.

Further information: Nyla Innuksuk IMDB

Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)
A small nomadic community is cursed by an unknown shaman. When Atanarjuat falls in love with a woman already promised to the son of the clan's leader, he has to fight for her. She is won by Atanarjuat and the leader plots to attack him in his sleep. Escaping, he sets off running across the ice, embarking on a harrowing adventure of survival in the brutal wilderness. He returns stronger and wiser to reclaim his life and stop the curse that has divided his people.
Smoke Signals
Story of the journey of two Coeur d'Alene Indian boys from Idaho to Arizona. Victor is the stoic, handsome son of an alcoholic father who has abandoned his family. Thomas is a gregarious, goofy young man orphaned as an infant by a fire which Victor's father accidentally started while drunk. Thomas is a storyteller who makes every effort to connect with the people around him; Victor, in contrast, uses his quiet demeanor to gain strength and confidence. When Victor's estranged father dies in Arizona the two young men embark on a journey to recover his ashes. Directed by Chris Eyre, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
Drunktown's Finest
Three young Navajo Native Americans - an adopted Native girl, a young father-to-be, and a trans woman who dreams of being a model - strive to escape the hardships of life on an Indian reservation. Nizhoni seeks out her past, well after being adopted by a white Christian family, Felixia, a trans woman, pursues a spot in the "women of the tribe" calendar, and Sickboy is headed to basic training so he can take care of his soon-to-be-born child. Directed by Sydney Freeland, a Navajo.
Skins
In the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, lies one of the poorest counties in America, The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For police officer Rudy Yellow Lodge, the painful legacy of Indian existence is brought home every night as he locks up drunk and disorderly Indians, including his own brother. Rudy's frustration leads him to take the law into his own hands. Ultimately, Rudy is able to honor his big brother, and his people with a life-affirming act of defiance. Directed by Chris Eyre, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls
In the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, lies one of the poorest counties in Red Crow Mi'gMaq reservation, 1976: by government decree, every Indian child under the age of 16 must attend residential school. In the kingdom of the Crow, that means imprisonment at St. Dymphna’s. That means being at the mercy of “Popper, ” the sadistic Indian agent who runs the school. At 15, Aila is the weed princess of Red Crow. Hustling with her uncle Burner, she sells enough dope to pay Popper her “truancy tax, ” keeping her out of St.Ds. But when Aila's drug money is stolen and her father Joseph returns from prison, the precarious balance of Aila’s world is destroyed. Her only options are to run or fight...and Mi'gMaq don't run. The debut film from acclaimed director Jeff Barnaby, of Mi’kmaqi heritage.America, The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For police officer Rudy Yellow Lodge, the painful legacy of Indian existence is brought home every night as he locks up drunk and disorderly Indians, including his own brother. Rudy's frustration leads him to take the law into his own hands. Ultimately, Rudy is able to honor his big brother, and his people with a life-affirming act of defiance.
Powwow Highway
With nothing in common but their Native American heritage, two men begin a cross-country adventure filled with comedy and drama. While not Indigenous-directed, it was adapted from a book my Huron author David Seals and the film stars Native actor Gary Farmer (Cayuga) as Philbert and also features Cheyenne tribal members playing a variety of minor roles.
Four Sheets to the Wind
After his father's suicide, Cufe, embarks on a journey outside of his reservation to find a more fulfilling life.
Shaman
This animated short tells the story of a ferocious polar bear turned to stone by an Inuk shaman. The tale is based on emerging filmmaker Echo Henoche's favourite legend, as told to her by her grandmother in her home community of Nain, Nunatsiavut, on Labrador's North Coast.
Wildhood by Bretten Hannam
Publication Date: 2021
In a rural east-coast trailer park, Link lives with his toxic father and younger half-brother Travis. When Link discovers his Mi’kmaw mother could still be alive, it lights a flame and they make a run for a better life. On the road they meet Pasmay, a pow wow dancer drawn to Link. As the boys journey across Mi’kma’ki, Link finds community, identity, and love in the land where he belongs.
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open by Kathleen Hepburn, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers
Publication Date: 2019-11-29
When Áila encounters a young Indigenous woman, barefoot and crying in the rain on the side of a busy street, she soon discovers that this young woman, Rosie, has just escaped a violent assault at the hands of her boyfriend. Áila decides to bring Rosie home with her and over the course of the evening, the two navigate the aftermath of this traumatic event.

We Shall Remain: America Through Native Eyes
When Europeans arrived in North America, they encountered the Native people. Contrary to stereotype, American Indians were not simply ferocious warriors or peaceable lovers of the land. They were, like all people, an amalgam: charismatic and forward thinking, imaginative and courageous, compassionate and resolute, and, at times, arrogant, vengeful, and reckless. Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture using all avenues available, including military, legal, and political action, diplomacy, and supplication of the spiritual realm. From the Wampanoags of New England in the 1600s who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes, to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity. Spanning almost four hundred years, these documentaries tell the story of pivotal moments in U.S. history from the Native American perspective, presenting Native history as an integral part of the American story.
Maɬni: towards the ocean, towards the shore
A poetic, experimental debut feature circling the origin of the death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, maɬni - towards the ocean, towards the shore follows two people as they wander through their surrounding nature, the spirit world, and something much deeper inside. At its center are Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, who take separate paths contemplating their afterlife, rebirth, and death. Probing questions about humanity's place on earth and other worlds, Sky Hopinka's film will have audiences thinking (and dreaming) about it long after.
Kivalina
Set 80 miles above the Arctic Circle, Kivalina is an intimate portrait of the Inupiaq Eskimo community of Kivalina, Alaska whose island is going under water due to climate change. Caught in the middle of the Arctic's grave environmental and cultural tipping point, the documentary beautifully captures the plight of a small indigenous community to survive in a landscape and an American system that is failing them.
Angry Inuk by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril
In her award-winning documentary, director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril joins a new tech-savvy generation of Inuit as they campaign to challenge long-established perceptions of seal hunting. Armed with social media and their own sense of humour and justice, this group is bringing its own voice into the conversation and presenting themselves to the world as a modern people in dire need of a sustainable economy.
The ride
The Ride takes us along the annual 300-mile journey through the South Dakota Badlands, where young Lakota Sioux ride horseback and reflect upon the history of their ancestors, many of whom were massacred at Wounded Knee in 1890. This intimate, stunningly photographed account captures the thoughts and emotions of the young riders and the guidance and wisdom of the adults.
Rumble: the Indians who rocked the world
Documentary highlighting the careers of musicians in Modern American Rock music (20th-21st century) of First Nations heritage. Features interviews with the musicians themselves, as well as a plethora of musicians who have been influenced by them.
Kanehsatake: 270 years of resistance
On a hot July day in 1990, an historic confrontation propelled Native issues in Kanehsatake and the village of Oka, Québec, into the international spotlight and into the Canadian conscience. A powerful feature-documentary emerges that takes you right into the action of an age-old aboriginal struggle. The result is a portrait of the people behind the barricades, providing insight into the Mohawks' unyelding determination to protect their land.
Imagining Indians
Employing a keen sense of humor to reveal a Native American perspective on the misrepresentation of Native Americans in feature films, this unconventional film plows headlong into the theme of the commodification and appropriation of Native American arts and material culture.
Bago Boys
In 2015, the Winnebago Boys basketball team won their first state championship since 1940. NET chronicles the Bago Boys 2014-15 championship season. This 30 minute documentary, follows the team through their challenges both on and off the court as they journey to Lincoln seeking a Nebraska State Championship trophy!
Kind Hearted Woman
In a special two-part series, acclaimed filmmaker David Sutherland (The Farmer’s Wife, Country Boys) creates an unforgettable portrait of Robin Charboneau, a 32-year-old divorced single mother and Oglala Sioux woman living on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation. Sutherland follows Robin over three years as she struggles to raise her two children, further her education, and heal herself from the wounds of sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Kind Hearted Woman is a special co-presentation of Frontline and Independent Lens.
Our fires still burn: the Native American experience
This exciting and compelling one hour documentary invites viewers into the lives of contemporary Native American role models living in the U.S. Midwest. It dispels the myth that American Indians have disappeared from the American horizon, and reveals how they continue to persist, heal from the past, confront the challenges of today, keep their culture alive, and make great contributions to society. Their experiences will deeply touch both Natives and non-Natives and help build bridges of understanding, respect, and communication. The tragic history of Native Americans is considered by many to be our 'American Holocaust.' This can be seen in the history of the Boarding School Era, during which time Native children were forcibly removed from their homes and placed into boarding schools. Interviewees explain how this past trauma continues to negatively impact their emotional and physical health today and contribute to urgent social problems. To help heal this historical trauma, Native Americans are reclaiming their spiritual and cultural identity. In the documentary, an Ojibwa Firekeeper demonstrates the ancient healing ceremony of the Sacred Fire. Also, a Native American businessman, journalist, artist and youth advocate share how they use ancestral teachings to foster diversity and creativity as well as to educate and initiate social change. The stories shared in this documentary are powerful, startling, despairing and inspiring. They reflect an American history fraught with the systematic destruction of a people. Yet, amidst the debris of suffering and trauma, there is resilience and a profound remembering and healing taking place today, which will also benefit the next Seven Generations.
Losing knowledge: 50 years of change by Laura Nader and Roberto Gonzalez
This profound ethnographic documentary explores the myriad of ways in which centuries-old indigenous knowledge is rapidly vanishing throughout the world. The film focuses on the southern Mexican village of Talea, Oaxaca. For half a century, the Zapotec people of this region have experienced rapid modernization: The creation of a road linking the village to cities, the arrival of electricity, and the introduction of computers and Internet have all transformed the texture of daily life. However, the people of Talea have often experienced progress as a double-edged sword. Farmers are now able to export coffee and other cash crops, but many of their children have migrated to the United States and today, fertile fields lay abandoned. Governance was once a village affair, but state and national government has disrupted and sometimes displaced local political autonomy. Most new buildings in Talea are constructed with imported concrete, not with regional materials. And traditional healing practices are rapidly being displaced by Western biomedicine. By exploring the transformation of agriculture, governance, architecture, and medical practices in the village, filmmaker/anthropologists Laura Nader and Roberto Gonzalez pose a series of provocative questions: Is it possible that 50 years of development has done more to unravel local culture than 500 years of conquest? What are the long-term implications of the knowledge that has been lost? Is there any possibility these processes might be reversed? The film also examines how disappearing indigenous knowledge isn't just a Zapotec problem. It is a global problem, for throughout the world, local knowledge developed over centuries -- a priceless intellectual treasure trove -- is withering away at an alarming rate.
This May Be the Last Time
This May Be the Last Time traces the heartfelt journey of award-winning filmmaker Sterlin Harjo as he interweaves the tale of a mysterious death in 1962 with the rich history of the powerful hymns that have united Native American communities in times of worship, joy, tragedy, and hope. Investigating the stories of these songs, this illuminating film takes us on an epic tour as we travel with the power of the music through Southwest America, slavery in the deep South, and as far away as the Scottish Highlands.
Native Art Now!
Native Art Now! is a documentary that examines the evolution of Native contemporary art over the last 25 years, presenting personal perspectives from internationally acclaimed Native contemporary artists. Produced in collaboration with the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.
Native America: From Caves to Cosmos
Native America challenges everything we thought we knew about the Americas before and since contact with Europe. It travels through 15,000-years to showcase massive cities, unique systems of science, art, and writing, and 100 million people connected by social networks and spiritual beliefs spanning two continents. The series reveals some of the most advanced cultures in human history and the Native American people who created it and whose legacy continues, unbroken, to this day. This series explores this extraordinary world through an unprecedented combination of cutting edge science and traditional indigenous knowledge. It is Native America as never seen before - featuring sacred rituals filmed for the first time, history changing scientific discoveries, and rarely heard voices from the living legacy of Native American culture. Native America rediscovers a past whose splendor and sophistication is only now being realized, and whose story has for too long remained untold. It reveals a unifying belief that inspires these diverse cultures - people are deeply connected to earth, sky, water, and all living things. This belief is rooted in millennia of living on this land and continues to resonate in the lives of Native Americans to this day. From Caves to Cosmos focuses on the deep roots of Native America: Who are America's First Peoples and how did they create their unique world? Answers emerge from Hopi Elders on pilgrimage at sacred Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert, scientists examining ancient cave painting in the Amazon jungle, Chumash boat builders exploring their tribe's ancient migration legacy off California's coast, and an archaeologist digging deep below a towering pyramid near Mexico City.

Streaming Media

Native American Heritage Month (Docuseek)
Native American & First Nations Heritage Collection (Docuseek)
Indigenous Cinema Database (National Film Board of Canada)
Native American Heritage Month: Films & Documentaries (PBS)
The 2021 Indigenous Short Film Tour (The Sundance Institute)
First Nations / Native American Heritage Month Streaming and DVD Resources (IU Libraries Media Services)

On Indigenous Cinema

Breaking your reservation: the rise of indigenous cinema (BFI - Sight & Sound)
Haunting the National Consciousness: The Rise of Indigenous Horror (Nightmarish Conjurings)
New Native Cinema, Part I: Smoke Signals (Letterboxd)
New Native Cinema, Part II: Before Tomorrow (Letterboxd)

Lists & Recommendations

Exploring NFB's Indigenous Catalog: 6 Films (CBC)
8 of indigenous cinema’s most important films (i-D)
11 Essential Native American Films You Can Watch Online Right Now (Indian Country News)
Screenwriter Migizi Pensoneau Suggests Films to Watch for Native American Heritage Month (Variety)

Organizations & Initiatives

Native Film Festivals

Other

Must-Know Indigenous Creator Collectives & Platforms (Free the Work)

We Never Hunted Buffalo: the emergence of Native American cinema by Johanna Feier
ISBN: 9783643109545
Publication Date: 2011-02-17
This study deals with the filmic self-representation of Native Americans. It focuses on five contemporary features directed by indigenes, and it deconstructs the ways in which they respond to the legacy of the Hollywood Indian. By telling their own cinematic stories, Native Americans have taken up the battle against the century-old one-dimensional characterizations of America's original peoples in the mainstream culture. These indigenous filmmakers highlight the variety and complexity of modern Native America. (Series: MasteRResearch - Vol. 1)
Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and film by Neva Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
ISBN: 0803277903
Publication Date: 1999-09-01
Native American characters have been the most malleable of metaphors for filmmakers. The likeable Doc of Stagecoach (1939) had audiences on the edge of their seats with dire warnings about “that old butcher, Geronimo.” Old Lodgeskins of Little Big Man (1970) had viewers crying out against the demise of the noble, wise chief and his kind and simple people. In 1995 Disney created a beautiful, peace-loving ecologist and called her Pocahontas. Only occasionally have Native Americans been portrayed as complex, modern characters in films like Smoke Signals. nbsp; Celluloid Indians is an accessible, insightful overview of Native American representation in film over the past century. Beginning with the birth of the movie industry, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick carefully traces changes in the cinematic depictions of Native peoples and identifies cultural and historical reasons for those changes. In the late twentieth century, Native Americans have been increasingly involved with writing and directing movies about themselves, and Kilpatrick places appropriate emphasis on the impact that Native American screenwriters and filmmakers have had on the industry. Celluloid Indians concludes with a valuable, in-depth look at influential and innovative Native Americans in today’s film industry.
Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous films in North America by Kerstin Knopf
ISBN: 9042025433
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
This is the first book that comprehensively examines Indigenous filmmaking in North America, as it analyzes in detail a variety of representative films by Canadian and US-American Indigenous filmmakers: two films that contextualize the oral tradition, three short films, and four dramatic films. The book explores how members of colonized groups use the medium of film as a means for cultural and political expression and thus enter the dominant colonial film discourse and create an answering discourse. The theoretical framework is developed as an interdisciplinary approach, combining postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, and film studies. As Indigenous people are gradually taking control over the imagemaking process in the area of film and video, they cease being studied and described objects and become subjects who create self-controlled images of Indigenous cultures.
Native Apparitions: critical perspectives on Hollywood's Indians by Steve Pavlik (Editor); Tom Holm (Editor); M. Elise Marubbio (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816535477
Publication Date: 2017-11-07
In Cherokee, the term for motion picture is a-da-yv-la-ti or a-da-yu-la-ti, meaning "something that appears." In essence, motion pictures are machine-produced apparitions. While the Cherokee language recognizes that movies are not reality, Western audiences may on some level assume that film portrayals offer sincere depictions of imagined possibilities, creating a logic where what is projected must in part be true, stereotype or not. Native Apparitions offers a critical intervention and response to Hollywood's representations of Native peoples in film, from historical works by director John Ford to more contemporary works, such as Apocalypto and Avatar. But more than a critique of stereotypes, this book is a timely call for scholarly activism engaged in Indigenous media sovereignty. The collection clusters around three approaches: retrospective analysis, individual film analysis, and Native- and industry-centered testimonials and interviews, which highlight indigenous knowledge and cultural context, thus offering a complex and multilayered dialogic and polyphonic response to Hollywood's representations. Using an American Indian studies framework, Native Apparitions deftly illustrates the connection between Hollywood's representations of Native peoples and broader sociopolitical and historical contexts connected to colonialism, racism, and the Western worldview. Most importantly, it shows the impact of racializing stereotypes on Native peoples, and the resilience of Native peoples in resisting, transcending, and reframing Hollywood's Indian tropes. CONTRIBUTORS Chadwick Allen Richard Allen Joanna Hearne Tom Holm Jan-Christopher Horak Jacqueline Land Andrew Okpeaha MacLean M. Elise Marubbio Steve Pavlik Rose Roberts Myrton Running Wolf Richard M. Wheelock
Native Americans on Film by M. Elise Marubbio (Editor); Eric L. Buffalohead (Editor); Jennifer Gauthier (Other); Michelle Raheja (Other); Houston Woods (Other)
ISBN: 9780813136653
Publication Date: 2013-02-22
The film industry and mainstream popular culture are notorious for promoting stereotypical images of Native Americans: the noble and ignoble savage, the pronoun-challenged sidekick, the ruthless warrior, the female drudge, the princess, the sexualized maiden, the drunk, and others. Over the years, Indigenous filmmakers have both challenged these representations and moved past them, offering their own distinct forms of cinematic expression. Native Americans on Film draws inspiration from the Indigenous film movement, bringing filmmakers into an intertextual conversation with academics from a variety of disciplines. The resulting dialogue opens a myriad of possibilities for engaging students with ongoing debates: What is Indigenous film? Who is an Indigenous filmmaker? What are Native filmmakers saying about Indigenous film and their own work? This thought-provoking text offers theoretical approaches to understanding Native cinema, includes pedagogical strategies for teaching particular films, and validates the different voices, approaches, and worldviews that emerge across the movement.
Smoke Signals: native cinema rising by Joanna Hearne
ISBN: 9780803219274
Publication Date: 2012-12-01
Smoke Signals is a historical milestone in Native American filmmaking. Released in 1998 and based on a short-story collection by Sherman Alexie, it was the first wide-release feature film written, directed, coproduced, and acted by Native Americans. The most popular Native American film of all time, Smoke Signals is also an innovative work of cinematic storytelling that demands sustained critical attention in its own right. Embedded in Smoke Signals's universal story of familial loss and renewal are uniquely Indigenous perspectives about political sovereignty, Hollywood's long history of misrepresentation, and the rise of Indigenous cinema across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Joanna Hearne's work foregrounds the voices of the filmmakers and performers--in interviews with Alexie and director Chris Eyre, among others--to explore the film's audiovisual and narrative strategies for speaking to multiple audiences. In particular, Hearne examines the filmmakers' appropriation of mainstream American popular culture forms to tell a Native story. Focusing in turn on the production and reception of the film and issues of performance, authenticity, social justice, and environmental history within the film's text and context, this in-depth introduction and analysis expands our understanding and deepens our enjoyment of a Native cinema landmark.
Reverse Shots: indigenous film and media in an international context by Wendy Gay Pearson (Editor); Susan Knabe (Editor)
ISBN: 9781554583355
Publication Date: 2014-12-30
From the dawn of cinema, images of Indigenous peoples have been dominated by Hollywood stereotypes and often negative depictions from elsewhere around the world. With the advent of digital technologies, however, many Indigenous peoples are working to redress the imbalance in numbers and counter the negativity. The contributors to Reverse Shots offer a unique scholarly perspective on current work in the world of Indigenous film and media. Chapters focus primarily on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and cover areas as diverse as the use of digital technology in the creation of Aboriginal art, the healing effects of Native humour in First Nations documentaries, and the representation of the pre-colonial in films from Australia, Canada, and Norway.
Imagic Moments: indigenous North American film by Lee Schweninger
ISBN: 9780820345147
Publication Date: 2013-04-30
In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.
Indigenous Aesthetics: native art, media, and identity by Steven Leuthold
ISBN: 0292747039
Publication Date: 1998-08-01
What happens when a Native or indigenous person turns a video camera on his or her own culture? Are the resulting images different from what a Westernized filmmaker would create, and, if so, in what ways? How does the use of a non-Native art-making medium, specifically video or film, affect the aesthetics of the Native culture? These are some of the questions that underlie this rich study of Native American aesthetics, art, media, and identity. Steven Leuthold opens with a theoretically informed discussion of the core concepts of aesthetics and indigenous culture and then turns to detailed examination of the work of American Indian documentary filmmakers, including George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva, Jr. He shows how Native filmmaking incorporates traditional concepts such as the connection to place, to the sacred, and to the cycles of nature. While these concepts now find expression through Westernized media, they also maintain continuity with earlier aesthetic productions. In this way, Native filmmaking serves to create and preserve a sense of identity for indigenous people.

Podcasts

This Land by Rebecca Nagel (Cherokee Nation)
An 1839 assassination of a Cherokee leader. A 1999 small-town murder. Two crimes collide in a Supreme Court case that will decide the fate of one man and nearly half of the land in Oklahoma. Hosted by Rebecca Nagle, Oklahoma journalist and citizen of Cherokee Nation, This Land traces how a cut and dry homicide opened up an investigation into the treaty rights of five Native American tribes. Tune in to Crooked Media's 8-episode series to find out how this unique case could result in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history.
All My Relations by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation)
All My Relations is a podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) to explore our relationships— relationships to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another. Each episode invites guests to delve into a different topic facing Native American peoples today. We keep it real, play some games, laugh a lot, and even cry sometimes. We invite you to join us!
The Red Nation Podcast by Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe)
The Red Nation Podcast features discussions on Indigenous history, politics, and culture from a left perspective. Hosted by Nick Estes with help from our friend and comrade Sina.
Métis in Space (Otipêyimisiw-iskwêwak kihci-kîsikohk) by Molly Swain (Métis) & Chelsea Vowel (Métis, Plains Cree)
Métis In Space hilariously deconstructs the science fiction genre through a decolonial lense. Join hosts Molly Swain & Chelsea Vowel as they drink a bottle of (red) wine, and from a tipsy, decolonial perspective, review a sci-fi movie or television episode featuring Indigenous Peoples, tropes & themes.
The Indigenous Futures Podcast by Teo Montoya (Lipan Apache/Ndé)
Amplifying indigenous voices as they vision a collective future built on indigenous ways of knowing.
Unreserved by Rosanna Deerchild
Unreserved is the radio space for Indigenous voices—our cousins, our aunties, our elders, our heroes. Rosanna Deerchild guides us on the path to better understand our shared story. Together, we learn and unlearn, laugh and become gentler in all our relations. Rosanna Deerchild (she/her) is Cree, from the community of O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation. She has been a storyteller for more than 20 years—as a journalist, broadcaster and a poet. As the host of Unreserved, she shares Indigenous community, culture and conversation and is heard on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and Native Voice One. Rosanna helped to create the CBC podcast called This Place, which reclaims Indigenous history in Canada.

Podcast Episodes Featuring Indigenous Voices:

ologies with Alie Ward:

Between the Covers with David Naimon

Databases

America: History & Life
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Bibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
In addition to the principle English language sources in the field, it includes some (about 10%) in other languages, as well as some state and local history journals. All aspects of historical inquiry are represented: diplomatic, ecclesiastical, agricultural, cultural, economic, political, military and others. The index also provides citations to book and media reviews from about 100 journals and references to abstracts of dissertations in the field. All abstracts are in English.
American Indian Histories and Cultures
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Covers interactions between American Indians and Europeans from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the on-going repercussions of government legislation, to the civil rights movement of the mid- to late-twentieth century. This resource contains material from the Newberry Library’s Edward E. Ayer Collection.
American Indian Newspapers
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Collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada. Includes 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016.
The bulk of the titles were founded in the 1970s, documenting the proliferation of Indigenous journalism that grew out of the occupation of Wounded Knee, meeting the demand for objective reporting from within Indian Country. Subjects covered include: self-determination era and American Indian Movement (AIM), education, environmentalism, land rights and cultural representation from an Indigenous perspective.
American Race Relations: Global Perspectives, 1941-1996
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Contains primary source documents derived from the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency, covering foreign reactions to America’s racial struggles in the mid-20th century
Includes firsthand reporting on the rise of indigenous rights in countries around the world; covers African-American history, the Civil Rights movement, Hispanic-American history, Asian-American history and the evolution of racial justice in America.
Anthropology Plus
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Index of journal articles in anthropology and related fields. The primary index for research in anthropology, it includes articles, reports, edited works, and obituaries in social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, as well as in ethnology, archaeology, folklore, and material culture.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
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Bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. Includes more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia.
This resource covers a wide range of topics including acculturation, archaeology, education, Ethnohistory, and economic development, folklore, the gaming industry, missions, mythology, religion, and tribal governments.
Early Encounters in North America
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Searchable text of letters, diaries, memoirs and other accounts of early contacts between Europeans and Native Americans in North America.
Ethnic NewsWatch
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Articles from newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority, and native press in America; full text and searchable in English and Spanish
Independent Voices
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Independent Voices is a series of digital collections of the alternative press that are complete runs of newspapers, magazines, and journals drawn from special collections of leading academic libraries.
These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Indigenous Peoples of North America
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Covers the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. The archive includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and photographs.
North American Indian Drama
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256 full-text plays by 49 American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the 20th century.

Media Studies

Land Acknowledgment & Resource Guide

Introduction

Books

Films & Filmmakers

Podcasts

Podcast Episodes Featuring Indigenous Voices:

Databases

View all Library Hours