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

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 the Land Acknowledgment section on the left-hand side of this page.

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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.

More Nonfiction (Political/Academic):
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe)
As we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg)
All Our Relations: Finding a Path Forward by Tanya Talaga (Ojibwe)
Speak of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with activist, scholars, and tribal leaders by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli)

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781937512934
Publication Date: 2020-07-14
"In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. Out of the 'ruins of the museum of political depression' springs a 'tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.' Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance." --Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine 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.
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.

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
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY 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.
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.
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.

More poetry:
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz - Mojave
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico - Kumeyaay
In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo (Current US Poet Laureate) - Muscogee Nation
The Accident of Being Lost: Songs & Stories by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - Mississauga Nishnaabeg
Fire Power by Chrystos - Menominee
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier - Oglala Lakota

There There by Tommy Orange
ISBN: 9780525520375
Publication Date: 2018-06-05
ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW WINNER OF THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, GQ, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER 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. It's "the year's most galvanizing debut novel" (Entertainment Weekly). 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. It's "masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating" (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard--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. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it's destined to be a classic.
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 ina moving revision of the Greek tragedyAntigone. 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 Zitkala-Sa; Layli Long Soldier (Introduction by)
ISBN: 9781984854216
Publication Date: 2019-05-21
Bright and carefree, Zitkala-Sa 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, Zitkala-Sa 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 Zitkala-Sa 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, and 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.

More fiction:
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (Cherokee Nation)
From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen (Métis)
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo Tribe)

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.
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 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. Contributors: Indira Allegra, Louise Esme Cruz, Paula Gunn Allen, Qwo-Li Driskill, Laura Furlan, Janice Gould, Carrie House, Daniel Heath Justice, Maurice Kenny, Michael Koby, M. Carmen Lane, Jaynie Lara, Chip Livingston, Luna Maia, Janet McAdams, Deborah Miranda, Daniel David Moses, D. M. O'Brien, Malea Powell, Cheryl Savageau, Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, James Thomas Stevens, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, William Raymond Taylor, Joel Waters, and Craig Womack

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 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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

Reading Lists & Bibliographies
Decolonize Your Bookshelf With These Books by Native American Writers (Electric Literature)
Decolonize Your Bookshelf (Verso)
Native American Poetry & Culture (Poetry Foundation)
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)

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

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.

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.
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.

American Indian Film Institute (AIFI)
Indigenous Cinema Database (National Film Board of Canada)
Exploring NFB's Indigenous Catalog: 6 Films (CBC)
Native American Heritage Month: Films & Documentaries (PBS)
Breaking your reservation: the rise of indigenous cinema (BFI - Sight & Sound)
8 of indigenous cinema’s most important films (i-D)
11 Essential Native American Films You Can Watch Online Right Now (Indian Country News)
Haunting the National Consciousness: The Rise of Indigenous Horror (Nightmarish Conjurings)
Screenwriter Migizi Pensoneau Suggests Films to Watch for Native American Heritage Month (Variety)
First Nations / Native American Heritage Month Streaming and DVD Resources (IU Libraries Media Services)

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.

Podcasts

This Land hosted 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 hosted 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 hosted 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) hosted 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 hosted by Teo Montoya (Lipan Apache/Ndé)
Amplifying indigenous voices as they vision a collective future built on indigenous ways of knowing.

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, 1940-1996
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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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Includes citations for books, essays, journal articles, and government documents pertaining to native North American culture, history, and life.
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

Databases

View all Library Hours