Books by Indigenous Authors (nonfiction)

Updated December 30, 2023
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God is red : a native view of religion
Deloria, Vine.
Ebook
A 50th anniversary revised edition of the beloved classic, God is Red. First published in 1973, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s God Is Red remains the seminal work on Native American religious views, asking the reader to think about our species and our ultimate fate in novel ways....
Braiding sweetgrass
Kimmerer, Robin Wall
Paper Book
A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member...
We had a little real estate problem : the unheralded story of Native Americans in comedy
Nesteroff, Kliph
Paper Book
A Best Book of 2021 by NPR and Esquire From Kliph Nesteroff, "the human encyclopedia of comedy" (VICE), comes the important and underappreciated story of Native Americans and comedy. It was one of the most reliable jokes in Charlie Hill's...
No country for eight-spot butterflies : a lyric essay
Aguon, Julian
Audiobook
Heart berries : a memoir
Mailhot, Terese Marie
Paper Book
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...
Poet warrior : a memoir
Harjo, Joy
Paper Book
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of...
Living nations, living words : an anthology of first peoples poetry
Harjo, Joy
Paper Book
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...
Rebel poet : (continuing the oral tradition) : more stories from a 21st century Indian
Clark, Louis V., III
Paper Book
This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories...
Postcolonial love poem
Diaz, Natalie
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY 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...
When the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through : a Norton anthology of Native nations poetry
Harjo, Joy
Paper Book
United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back...
Carry : a memoir of survival on stolen land
Jensen, Toni
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE * 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 * Goop Book Club Pick *...
Earth keeper : reflections on the American land
Momaday, N. Scott
Paper Book
"Dazzling. . . . In glittering prose, Momaday recalls stories passed down through generations, illuminating the earth as a sacrosanct place of wonder and abundance. At once a celebration and a warning, Earth Keeper is an impassioned defense of all that our endangered planet stands to...
Custer died for your sins : an Indian manifesto
Deloria, Vine.
Paper Book
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...
Weaving sundown in a scarlet light : fifty poems for fifty years
Harjo, Joy
Paper Book
A magnificent selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's fifty years as a poet. Over a long, influential career in poetry, Joy Harjo has been praised for her "warm, oracular voice" (John Freeman, Boston Globe) that speaks "from a deep and...
Dog flowers : a memoir
Geller, Danielle
Paper Book
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...
Books and islands in Ojibwe country : traveling through the land of my ancestors
Erdrich, Louise.
Ebook
For more than three decades, bestselling author Louise Erdrich has enthralled readers with dazzling novels that paint an evocative portrait of Native American life. From her dazzling first novel, Love Medicine, to the National Book Award-winning The Round House, Erdrich's lyrical skill and...
A mind spread out on the ground
Elliott, Alicia
Paper Book
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She...
Standoff : Standing Rock, the Bundy movement, and the American story of sacred lands
Keeler, Jacqueline
Paper Book
"A powerful, illuminating book." --LOUISE ERDRICH, author of The Night Watchman Native young people and elders pray in sweat lodges at the Océti Sakówin camp, the North Dakota landscape outside blanketed in snow. In Oregon, white men and women in army surplus and...
The heartbeat of Wounded Knee : native America from 1890 to the present
Treuer, David
Paper Book
Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, he shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity. He traces how conscription in the US military and the pull of urban...
The rediscovery of America : native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history
Blackhawk, Ned
Paper Book
National Bestseller Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History * Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction * Winner of the 2024 Mark Lynton History Prize ...

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