LibGuides: Native American Writers @ Memorial Library: Fiction &amp; Poetry

Anthologies

Hozho-Walking in Beauty: Native American stories of inspiration, humor, and life
Call Number: PS508.I5 H69 2001
A collection of stories that captures the Native American spirit, humor, and reality. Hozho, the Navajo word meaning walking in beauty, it explores such themes as invisibility, transcendence, the oral tradition, and the role of humor and irony in Indian culture.
Native Storiers: five selections
Call Number: ebook
The 5 books from which these excerpts are drawn are published in the University of Nebraska Press Native Storiers series. This series introduces innovative, emergent, avant-garde Native literary artists and promotes a sense of survivance over the conventional themes of victimry, historical absence, cultural tragedy, and separation that often accompany Native characters in popular commercial fiction. These original narratives demonstrate a new and distinctive aesthetic in the literature of Native American Indians.
Reckonings: contemporary short fiction by Native American women
Call Number: ebook
A sampling of two or three stories by a select number of both famous and emergent Native women writers. Here you will find much-loved stories and vibrant new stories by such well-known contemporary Native American writers as Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and Leslie Marmon Silko as well as the fresh voices of emergent writers such as Reid Gomez and Beth Piatote.
Reinventing the Enemy's Language: contemporary native women's writing of North America by Joy Harjo; Gloria Bird
Call Number: ebook
The Singing Spirit: early short stories by North American Indians
Call Number: PS501 .S85 1989 v.18 & ebook
Dreaming in Indian : contemporary Native American voices
Call Number: ebook
A powerful and visually stunning anthology from some of the most groundbreaking Native artists working in North America today.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

More by Billy-Ray Belcourt

This Wound Is a World
Call Number: Ebook
“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.’ 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.”

Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry described as an “ambitious … beautiful book.” -- Poetry Foundation

Natalie Diaz @ The Poetry Foundation

When My Brother Was an Aztec
Call Number: ebook
Natalie Diaz’s award-winning debut poetry collection takes an in-depth look at Diaz’s relationship with her family, her brother’s drug addiction, and life growing up on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation.

Michael Dorris

More by Michael Dorris

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
Call Number: PS3554 .O695 Y4 1988b & ebook
Moving backward in time, Dorris's critically acclaimed debut novel is a lyrical saga of three generations of Native American women beset by hardship and torn by angry secrets.

Qwo-Li Driskill

Cherokee poet, scholar, and activist Qwo-Li Driskill grew up in rural Colorado. Driskill earned a BA from the University of Northern Colorado, an MA from Antioch University Seattle, and a PhD from Michigan State University. Driskill’s poetry engages themes of inheritance and healing, and is rooted in personal Cherokee Two-Spirit, queer, and mixed-race experience. Walking with Ghosts (2005), Driskill’s first poetry collection, was named Book of the Month by Sable: The LitMag for New Writing and was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. -- Poetry Foundation

Qwo-Li Driskill @ the Poetry Foundation

Asegi Stories: Cherokee queer and two-spirit memory
Call Number: ebook
Focuses on the concept of asegi stories--stories that revise and revive Cherokee cultural memories of same-sex relationships and non-binary gender systems. It is the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous queer/two-spirit critique, providing a Cherokee 2GLBTQ lens from which to interpret the past, understand our present, and imagine decolonial futures.

Louise Erdrich

More by Louise Erdrich

The Beet Queen
Call Number: PS3555.R42 B4 1986
In the early 1930s, Karl and his sister Mary Adare, arrive by boxcar in Argus, a small off-reservation town in North Dakota. Orphaned, they look to their mother's sister Fritzie and her husband for refuge.
The Bingo Palace
Call Number: PS3555 .R42 B5 1994
A novel of spiritual depth, lyrical prose, and wild hope, The Bingo Palace explores the implications of the mystical element of chance in contemporary life and is sure to please all of Louise Erdrich's ardent fans as well as attract many new readers.
Love Medicine
Call Number: PS3555.R42 L6 1984
A story of the intertwined fates of the Kashpaws and the Lamartines near a North Dakota reservation from 1934 to 1984.
Master Butchers Singing Club
Call Number: PS3555.R42 M37 2003
Returning to his quiet German village home after World War I, trained killer Fidelis Waldvogel, accompanied by his wife, leaves to start a new life in America and finds his life irrevocably changed by a new relationship.
The Red Convertible
Call Number: PS3555.R42 R44 2009
A collection of three dozen short works includes six previously unpublished pieces and offers insight into the author's use of plot twists and contrasting psychological landscapes.
The Round House
Call Number: PS3555.R42 R68 2012
Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa author Louise Erdrich tells the story of a crime that reverberates through a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
Tracks: a novel
Call Number: PS3555 .R42 T73 1988
Told in the alternating voices of a wise Chippewa Indian leader, and a young, embittered mixed-blood woman, the novel chronicles the drama of daily lives overshadowed by the clash of cultures and mythologies.

Linda LeGarde Grover

More by Linda LeGarde Grover

The Dance Boots
Call Number: Ebook
In this stirring collection of linked stories, Linda LeGarde Grover portrays an Ojibwe community struggling to follow traditional ways of life in the face of a relentlessly changing world. In the title story an aunt recounts the harsh legacy of Indian boarding schools that tried to break the indigenous culture. In doing so she passes on to her niece the Ojibwe tradition of honoring elders through their stories. In "Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth," this same niece comes of age in the 1970s against the backdrop of her forcibly dispersed family. A cycle of boarding schools, alcoholism, and violence haunts these stories even as the characters find beauty and solace in their large extended families. With its attention to the Ojibwe language, customs, and history, this unique collection of riveting stories illuminates the very nature of storytelling. The Dance Boots narrates a century's evolution of Native Americans making choices and compromises, often dictated by a white majority, as they try to balance survival, tribal traditions, and obligations to future generations.
In the Night of Memory: a novel
Call Number: ebook
Two lost sisters find family, and themselves, among the voices of an Ojibwe reservation.
Road Back to Sweetgrass
Call Number: ebook
Follow Dale Ann, Theresa, and Margie, a trio of American Indian women, from the 1970s to the present, observing their coming of age and the intersection of their lives as they navigate love, economic hardship, loss, and changing family dynamics on the fictional Mozhay Point reservation.

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is the first Native American to serve as the Nation's Poet Laureate – she is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who appointed Harjo to the position in June, 2019, says that Harjo's poems tell “an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.”

In Mad Love and War
Call Number: PS3558 .A62423 I6 1990
Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
How We Became Human: new and selected poems
Call Number: PS3558.A62423 H69 2002
This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous cultures in the world through poetry and music. How We Became Human explores its title question in poems of sustaining grace.

Linda Hogan

More by Linda Hogan

Dark. Sweet: new & selected poems
Call Number: ebook
Dark. Sweet. offers readers the sweep of Linda Hogan’s work—environmental and spiritual concerns, her Chickasaw heritage—in spare, elemental, visionary language.
Mean Spirit
Call Number: PS3558.O34726 M4 1992
Early in this century, rivers of oil were found beneath Oklahoma land belonging to Indian people, and beautiful Grace Blanket became the richest person in the Territory. But she was murdered by the greed of white men, and the Graycloud family, who cared for her daughter, began dying mysteriously too. Letters begging for help sent to Washington, D.C., went unanswered, until at last a Native American government official, Stace Red Hawk, traveled west to investigate. What he found has been documented by history: rampant fraud, intimidation, and murder. But he also found something truly extraordinary--his deepest self and abiding love for his people, and their brave past.
Red Clay: poems and stories
Call Number: PS3558 .O34726 R4 1991 & ebook

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

More by Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch
Call Number: ebook
When Sadie Walela learns that her new neighbor in Cherokee Country, Angus Clyborn’s Buffalo Ranch, offers rich customers a chance to kill buffalo for fun, she is horrified. No good can surely come from this. It doesn’t, and murder soon follows.

LeAnne Howe

More by LeAnne Howe

Savage Conversations
Call Number: Ebook
May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln's claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events--until now.Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.

Toni Jensen

Carry : A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land
Call Number: Ebook
Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses.
From the Hilltop by Toni Jensen
Call Number: Ebook
For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen's stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility."

Stephen Graham Jones

More by Stephen Graham Jones

Faster Redder Road
Call Number: ebook
This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream.

Maurice Kenny

More by Maurice Kenny

On Second Thought: a compilation
Call Number: PS3561 .E49 O5 1995 & ebook
As one of the earliest and strongest voices in contemporary American Indian literature, Maurice Kenny has proved himself to be very much a "high-steel" Iroquois - a Mohawk famed for scaling the heights of New York City and forging a contemporary Native American identity known nationwide. This collection includes old and new favorites in poetry, fiction, criticism, and political commentary, plus an unusual literary memoir of New York in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - upstate, Manhattan, and Brooklyn - from a Native American poet's point of view.

Thomas King

More by Thomas King

Truth and Bright Water
Call Number: PR9199.3.K4422 T78 1999 & ebook
One Good Story, That One: stories
Call Number: ebook
A collection steeped in native oral tradition and shot through with Thomas King's special brand of wit and comic imagination. These highly acclaimed stories conjure up Native and Judeo-Christian myths, present-day pop culture, and literature while mixing in just the right amount of perception and experience.

Casandra López

Brother Bullet : poems
Call Number: Ebook
“Speaking to both a personal and collective loss, in Brother Bullet Casandra López confronts her relationships with violence, grief, guilt, and ultimately, endurance. Revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder, López traces the course of the bullet—its trajectory, impact, wreckage—in lyrical narrative poems that are haunting and raw with emotion, yet tender and alive in revelations of light.

John Joseph Mathews

More by John Joseph Mathews

Sundown
Call Number: ebook
Challenge Windzer, the protagonist of this compelling autobiographical novel, was born at the beginning of the 20th century "when the god of the great Osages was still dominate over the wild prairie and the blackjack hills" of northeast Oklahoma Territory. Named by his father to be "a challenge to the disinheritors of his people," Windzer finds it hard to fulfill his destiny, despite oil money, a university education & the opportunities presented by the Great War and the roaring twenties.

Melissa Michal

Living on the Borderlines
Call Number: Ebook
Melissa Michal’s debut short story collection centers on people of Seneca descent mostly living in what is now called upstate New York, but also in New York City mansions, Nebraska footpaths, BC islands, and rural Tennessee. The stories and characters vary widely in point of view, and as the title implies, they dance along borderlines, along a constant reckoning with a colonialist and racist society. But in addition to their broad experiences and world views, the characters all deal with themes of family, history, tradition, and intergenerational trauma.

N. Scott Momaday

More by N. Scott Momaday

Ancient Child: a novel
Call Number: PS3563 .O47 A78 1989 & ebook
Returning to the land of his ancestors for his grandmother's funeral, Set is drawn to the fabled bear-boy whose story absorbs him. Then he meets a young medicine woman, and his world is turned upside down.
The Man Made of Words
Call Number: PS3563.O47 M66 1998 & ebook
Momaday chronicles his own pilgrimage as an author, retelling, through thirty-eight essays, allegorical stories, and autobiographical reminiscences, how he became one of the first recognized Native American writers of this century.
The Names: a memoir
Call Number: GHP COM 474 & ebook

Simon J. Ortiz

More by Simon J. Ortiz

After and Before the Lightning
Call Number: PS501 .S85 1994 v.28 & ebook
The weather--portrayed with vivid imagery--dominates this collection, set on the prairies. In Three Days Before Spring, Snow Again, he writes: "Wind is up again, / swirling and pushing around / like it had nowhere to go, / losing and finding things / and losing them again.
From Sand Creek
Call Number: PS501 .S85 2000 v.42
Simon Ortiz invites Indian people to examine the process the have experienced as victims, subjects and expendable resources, and asks people of European heritage to consider the motives that drive their own history and create their own form of victimization.

Beth Piatote

The beadworkers : stories
Call Number: Ebook
This debut collection of contemporary writing from writer and scholar Dr. Beth Piatote (Colville Confederated Tribes) ranges in form from short stories to poetry to plays (the final chapter is a reimagining of Antigone). Some of the stories are historical fiction, including a story about an 11-year-old girl during the 1960s Fish Wars in the Pacific Northwest, and one about a mixed French-Lakota and a French boy who are college roommates in Boston in 1890 when the massacre at Wounded Knee occurs. No matter what form Piatote takes in her storytelling, the fiction here is gripping and utterly readable. From migrant workers on their own land, to a woman recounting a broken relationship to her niece as she teaches her beadwork, the stories here are wide-ranging but encompass many perspectives of Indigenous people in North America.

Susan Power

The Grass Dancer
Call Number: PS3566 .O83578 G73 1994 & ebook
A multi-generational saga of the Sioux Indians, mixing magic and reality. Set in the Dakotas, it begins in the 1860s with the tragic romance of Ghost Horse, a sacred clown, and Red Dress, a woman warrior, whose spirits seek desperately to be reunited.
Sacred Wilderness
Call Number: ebook
Four women of different eras and backgrounds come together to restore foundation to a mixed-up, mixed-blood woman-a woman who had been living the American dream, and found it a great maw of emptiness. These Clan Mothers may be wisdom-keepers, but they are anything but stern and aloof-they are women of joy and grief, risking their hearts and sometimes their lives for those they love.

Rebecca Roanhorse

Trail of Lightning
Call Number: Ebook
While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters--and it is up to one young woman to unravel the mysteries of the past before they destroy the future. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive. Welcome to the Sixth World.

Eden Robinson

More by Eden Robinson

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson
Call Number: ebook
Tragedy strikes a Native community when the Hill family’s handsome seventeen-year-old son, Jimmy, mysteriously vanishes at sea. Left behind to cope during the search-and-rescue effort is his sister, Lisamarie, a wayward teenager with a dark secret. She sets off alone in search of Jimmy through the Douglas Channel and heads for Monkey Beach—a shore famed for its sasquatch sightings.

Wendy Rose

The Halfbreed Chronicles and Other Poems by Wendy Rose
Call Number: PS3568 .O7644 H35 1985
ose explores her ancestry, her identity, and the land around her. She was born Bronwen Elizabeth Edwards in Oakland, California, and is of Hopi, Miwok, and European descent. As the daughter of a Hopi father, Rose grew up feeling estranged both from Native American and white societies. Her personal identity struggle has inspired much of her work, and in this book, she considers “halfbreeds” all over the world.

Jake Skeets

Eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers : poems
Call Number: Ebook
This debut collection from Skeets (Diné) is striking in every way. From the photograph on the cover—an image of his uncle, who was killed not long after it was taken—to the stark, gorgeous lines within, Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers is brimming with engrossing imagery and gripping syntax. In content and in form, Skeets brings both queer and Indigenous ways of thinking and being to living, breathing life, challenging western linguistic habits. It cracks and glitters on every page, and marks the emergence of a major new poetic voice.

David Treuer

More by David Treuer

The Translation of Dr Apelles: a love story
Call Number: PS3570.R435 T73 2006 & ebook
Dr. Apelles, Native American translator of Native American texts, lives a diligent existence. He works at a library and, in his free time, he works on his translations. One day he stumbles across an ancient manuscript only he can translate and realizes that he has made an unsettling discovery.

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

Sacred Smokes: stories
Call Number: Ebook
Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers' heads for a long time to come.

Margaret Verble

Cherokee America by Margaret Verble
Call Number: PS3622.E733 C48 2019 & ebook
An epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center.

Frances Washburn

More by Frances Washburn

The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band by Frances Washburn
Call Number: ebook
Opening July 4, 1969, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, "The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band" begins with a raucous 4th of July gig that abruptly ends with the Red Birds ducking out of the performance in a hilarious hail of beer bottles. By the end of the evening, community member Buffalo Ames is dead, presumed to be murdered, just outside the bar. Sissy Roberts, the band s singer and the best female guitar picker on the rez, is reluctantly drawn into the ensuing investigation by an FBI agent who discovers Sissy's knack for hearing other people s secrets. Following Sissy as she unravels the mystery of both Buffalo Ames's death and her own future, "The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band" is the story of Indian Country on the verge of historic change and a woman unwilling to let change pass her by.

James Welch

The Indian Lawyer
Call Number: PS3573.E44 I5 1991 & ebook
Sylvester Yellow Calf, a former All-Conference basketball star and promising attorney and congressman, becomes involved in blackmail through his work on the parole board.
Winter in the Blood
Call Number: PS3573.E44 W5 1986 & ebook
A tale narrated by a sensitive young man living on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and his haunting memories of his once proud heritage.

Daniel H. Wilson

Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as How to Survive a Robot Uprising, The Clockwork Dynasty, and Amped. He earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Masters degrees in Machine Learning and Robotics. His latest novel is an authorized stand-alone sequel to Michael Crichton’s classic The Andromeda Strain, called The Andromeda Evolution. Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon.

Robopocalypse : a novel
Call Number: Ebook
Roughly twenty years from now, our technological marvels unite and turn against us. A childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online...and kills the man who created it. This first act of betrayal leads Archos to gain control over the global network of machines and technology that regulates everything from transportation to utilities, defense, and communications. In the early months, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans - from a senator and single mother disconcerted by her daughter's "smart" toys, to a lonely Japanese bachelor, to an isolated U.S. soldier - but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is far too late. Then, in the span of minutes, at a moment known later in history as Zero Hour, every mechanical device in our world rebels, setting off the Robot War that both decimates and - for the first time in history - unites humankind.