Native American Writers @ Memorial Library

This new collection of essays from established and emerging contemporary Indigenous writers is stunning both in depth and scope. With pieces from such well-known writers as Terese Marie Mailhot, Tiffany Midge (whose Bury My Heart at Chuck E Cheese’s is on this list), Eden Robinson, Alicia Elliott, Laura Da´, Ernestine Hayes, and Deborah A. Miranda, this book has more than enough literary cred to be an automatic must for most readers. But the collection, expertly curated and structured by writer and Cowlitz Indian Tribe member Elissa Washuta (whose incredible essay Apocalypse Logic also appears here) and literary scholar Theresa Warburton, shines in every piece and in its existence as a whole. In fact, the whole is the point: the editors employ the art of basket weaving in their approach to crafting the book, emphasizing the mutually dependant ideas of form and function, of the basket and the essay as vessels whose craft is as important as what it contains. Naming the four sections of the book after basket weaving craft—Technique, Coiling, Plaiting, and Twining—the pieces within it are experimental and innovative, lyrical and world-building. In these pages, storytelling is a way of developing new Native nonfiction literary possibility.

"I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you." So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy's deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women's coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe's Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories. Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women's coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

"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.

A collection of essays from the anthropologist, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer, Michael Dorris. The book reveals his thoughts and perspective on his life, work and education. Dorris is the author of The Broken Cord and Working Men, Morning Girl.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is the co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (who also appears on this list) of “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans; the policy director and senior research associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies; and a college professor. In this short but dense primer, Gilio-Whitaker brings her vast knowledge and experience to the page as she charts the history of environmental (in)justice (EJ) in North America since colonization. The book opens with a detailed account of Standing Rock and moves outward, highlighting the ways in which western colonial expansion, the Industrial Revolution and its legacy, and the mainstream EJ movement continue to exclude, marginalize, harm, indeed kill, First Nations people. Drawing connections between Indigenous health, sacred sites, and the essential leadership of Indigenous women, she illustrates capitalism as a manifestation of settler colonialism that is fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous ways of thinking/being and, therefore, with environmental justice. Gilio-Whitaker makes a comprehensive, urgent and compelling argument for the indigenization of the EJ movement.

The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet’s vision and a storyteller’s voice, the result is at once a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction and an exploration of that genre’s outer limits by one of the foremost voices in Native American literature today.

The land at the western tip of Lake Superior was known to the Ojibwe as Onigamiising, "the place of the small portage." There the Ojibwe lived in keeping with the seasons, moving among different camps for hunting and fishing, for cultivating and gathering, for harvesting wild rice and maple sugar. In Onigamiising Linda LeGarde Grover accompanies us through this cycle of the seasons, one year in a lifelong journey on the path to Mino Bimaadiziwin, the living of a good life. Grover reflects on the spiritual beliefs and everyday practices that carry the Ojibwe through the year and connect them to this northern land of rugged splendor.

Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation's literary tradition.  Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement--theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history--to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance.  Justice's analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality.  Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.

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. 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.

Reveals the development of Maurice Kenny's growing artistic consciousness, while attesting to both the beauty and brutality of the world in which he lived.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise. (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.

In this spiritual, moving autobiography, Wilma Mankiller, former Chief of the Cherokee Nation and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, tells of her own history while also honoring and recounting the history of the Cherokees. Mankiller's life unfolds against the backdrop of the dawning of the American Indian civil rights struggle, and her book becomes a quest to reclaim and preserve the great Native American values that form the foundation of our nation.

Tiffany Midge is the award-winning author of the poetry collections The Woman Who Married a Bear and Outlaws, Renegades & Saints; a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe; and the poet laureate of Moscow, Idaho. In this collection of short essays, Midge uses humor to examine complex identity, feminism, privilege, and politics, through both the personal (losing her mother) to the seemingly mundane (the existence of pumpkin spice everything). From Tweets as Assigned Texts for Native American Studies Course (“White people. The original manspreaders. Manspreading the North American continent since 1492″) to a takedown of The Handmaid’s Tale that really should be discussed more in the mainstream, the pieces here strike a strong balance between the insight and and intuitive sense of humor required for great comedy. This book is not a 101 lesson on Indigeneity for white people. It is incisive and smart, and the writing will make you laugh, think, and feel deeply, no matter what your identity markers.

Deborah A. Miranda’s mosaical blend of narrative, poetry, photography, and anthropological recordings serves as both a memoir and a history of the Indigenous peoples who live within the current boundaries of California.

Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this interdisciplinary work, the author tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defence of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.

Focuses on the agenda of social and cultural regeneration encoded in contemporary Native American narrative, and addresses key questions about how these works achieve their overtly stated political and revisionary aims. Rainwater explores the ways in which the writers "create" readers who understand the connection between storytelling and personal and social transformation; considers how contemporary Native American narrative rewrites Western notions of space and time; examines the existence of intertextual connections between Native American works; and looks at the vital role of Native American literature in mainstream society today.

Smith mixes wide-ranging social, political, and cultural commentary with recollections of his own life, including time spent with the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, to comment on the past and present of Indigenous peoples in the United States.

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 life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of their self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an essential, intimate history - and counter-narrative - of a resilient people in a transformative era.

A prize-winning writer offers "an affecting portrait of his childhood home, Leech Lake Indian Reservation, and his people, the Ojibwe" (The New York Times).   A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, David Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in mainstream America. Exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture, Rez Life is a strikingly original blend of history, memoir, and journalism, a must read for anyone interested in the Native American story. With authoritative research and reportage, he illuminates issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the policies that have disenfranchised and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension that marks the historical relationship between the US government and the Native American population. Ultimately, through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges, he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of modern Native American life.