Happy Native American Heritage and Indigenous History Month! We’re celebrating, as we do, with books by Indigenous authors, starring Indigenous characters. (Note: Despite the title of the post, these books include indigenous characters from all over.) While the usual affiliate links are included, you’re strongly encouraged to order from the Native-owned Birchbark Books where available! For many more recommendations, check out last year’s post.
Children’s
Sharice’s Big Voice: A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman by Sharice Davids, Nancy K. Mays, and Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley
This picture book autobiography tells the triumphant story of Sharice Davids, one of the first Native American women elected to Congress, and the first LGBTQ congressperson to represent Kansas.
When Sharice Davids was young, she never thought she’d be in Congress. And she never thought she’d be one of the first Native American women in Congress. During her campaign, she heard from a lot of doubters. They said she couldn’t win because of how she looked, who she loved, and where she came from. But here’s the thing: Everyone’s path looks different and everyone’s path has obstacles. And this is the remarkable story of Sharice Davids’ path to Congress.
Beautifully illustrated by Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, an Ojibwe Woodland artist, this powerful autobiographical picture book teaches readers to use their big voice and that everyone deserves to be seen—and heard!
The back matter includes information about the Ho-Chunk written by former Ho-Chunk President Jon Greendeer, an artist note, and an inspiring letter to children from Sharice Davids.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Birchbark Books
Young Adult
Like Glass by Jen Ferguson (Métis)
When Tatum Nova Lambert boards a plane to Chamonix, a town in the French Alps, she has one half-formed plan: to drag her Michelin-star-winning dad home. Since her older sister Bronwyn’s death a year ago, Tate and her dad don’t talk. They barely even text. So when he doesn’t pick her up at the transit station like he said he would, it’s no surprise.
What is a complete and very unwelcome surprise? Her dad is unexpectedly living in Bronwyn’s apartment, and Tate discovers she’ll be sleeping in her sister’s bed—the one Bronwyn died in. In the apartment and at her dad’s restaurant, it’s hard to bear both her dad’s broken promises and her sister’s ghost.
While trying to untangle the secret life Tate’s sister left behind, Tate meets Agatha, a schedule-obsessed Olympic ski-jump hopeful, and Beetle, a pickpocket and general teenaged dirtbag. As the unlikely trio explore in the mountains’ shadow, Tate brings her distinct kind of chaos to everyone’s lives—all while she tries to figure out if she can forgive her dad and her sister for leaving her behind.
I’m Not Really Here by Gary Lonesborough (Aboriginal)
Footsteps approach behind me. I turn and see an Aboriginal boy arriving at the doorway. He’s tall, taller than me. He’s got curly hair. His body is fit. His chest is chiselled and bare and he’s wearing only football shorts.
When 17-year-old Jonah arrives in a new town – Patience – with his dad and younger brothers, it feels like a foreign place. A new town means he needs to make new friends – which isn’t always easy. Especially when he’s wrestling with his body image, and his memories of his mother.
When he joins the local footy team so he can spend more time with his new crush, Harley, he feels like he’s moving closer to something good. But even though he knows what he wants, it doesn’t mean he’s ready.
Adult Fiction
To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage (Cherokee)
My mother took my sister and me, and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to, a place on earth she thought we might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair. I watched the moon.
Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister in tow—to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.
Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her: her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.
In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity, and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Birchbark Books
Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris (Mi’kmaw)
After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him – about his childhood, their family, and the Mi’kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita’s girlfriend Molly forges an artist?s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.
On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin’s history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest’s lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she’s never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp’s decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.
Poetry
The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake
The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations. Oscillating between musical influences, including the repercussions of ethnomusicology, and the present/past/future, the collection rewrites and rerights what it means to be Indigenous, queer, and even formerly-emo in the twenty-first century.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Birchbark Books
Pitiful by Brandi Bird
“This poem begins where Bulimia ends
or maybe, just maybe, when it started. Where
the differential diagnosis is confused
by decades of self-made violence. Poverty,
colonialism, god, all prisms that will shatter
one day, if not now…”
Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as “sovereignty” itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.
