Adult Nonfiction: Indigenous Stories

Updated October 15, 2025
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1491 : new revelations of the Americas before Columbus
Mann, Charles C.
Paper Book
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus's landing had crossed the...
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
Mays, Kyle T.
Paper Book
The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary...
Born of lakes and plains : mixed-descent peoples and the making of the American West
Hyde, Anne Farrar
Paper Book
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native...
Braiding sweetgrass : [indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teaching of plants]
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...
A brave and cunning prince : the great chief Opechancanough and the war for America
Horn, James P. P.
Paper Book
The extraordinary story of the Powhatan chief who waged a lifelong struggle to drive European settlers from his homeland In the mid-sixteenth century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake Bay kidnapped an Indian child and took him back to Spain and subsequently to...
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee : an Indian history of the American West
Brown, Dee Alexander.
Paper Book
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling historyThe New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down" Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent,...
Covered with night : a story of murder and indigenous justice in early America
Eustace, Nicole
Paper Book
In the winter of 1722, on the eve of a major conference between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois) and Anglo-American colonists, a pair of colonial fur traders brutally assaulted a Seneca hunter near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, the...
Do all Indians live in tipis? : questions and answers from the National Museum of the American Indian
Paper Book
How much do you really know about totem poles, tipis, and Tonto? There are hundreds of Native tribes in the Americas, and there may be thousands of misconceptions about Native customs, culture, and history. In this illustrated guide, experts from Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian...
The heart of everything that is : the untold story of Red Cloud, an American legend
Drury, Bob.
Paper Book
This acclaimed New York Times bestselling biography of the legendary Sioux warrior Red Cloud, is "a page-turner with remarkable immediacy...and the narrative sweep of a great Western" (The Boston Globe). Red Cloud was the only American Indian in...
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...
An indigenous peoples' history of the United States
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne
Paper Book
New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples ...
Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI
Grann, David
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, "one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."--New York...
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...
On savage shores : how indigenous Americans discovered Europe
Dodds Pennock, Caroline
Paper Book
AN ECONOMIST AND SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A landmark work of narrative history that shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by telling the story of the Indigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after...
The other slavery : the uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America
Res
Paper Book
A landmark history -- the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet,...
Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe
Maraniss, David
Paper Book
A riveting new biography of America's greatest all-around athlete by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon...
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...
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 ...
Seed to Plate, Soil to Sky : Modern Plant-based Recipes Using Native American Ingredients
Frank, Lois Ellen
Paper Book
Winner of Two IACP Awards Food Issues & Matters * Health & Nutrition This enriching cookbook celebrates eight important plants Native Americans introduced to the rest of the world: corn, beans, squash, chile, tomato, potato, vanilla, and...
Spirit run : a 6,000-mile marathon through North America's stolen land
Paper Book
In this New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, the son of working-class Mexican immigrants flees a life of labor in fruit-packing plants to run in a Native American marathon from Canada to Guatemala in this "stunning memoir that moves to the rhythm of feet, labor, and the many...
Thinning blood : memoir of family, myth, and identity
Myers, Leah
Paper Book
Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe's strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great...
Thunder in the mountains : Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War
Sharfstein, Daniel J
Paper Book
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new struggle raged in the Northern Rockies. In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was...
We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth
Jamail, Dahr
Ebook
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...
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...

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