November is Native American Heritage Month in the United States, which makes it an especially great time to check out some of these great books by Native American authors. These lists represent works of fiction for young adult and adult fiction--you might also be interested in these books about indigenous North American history.)
Fiction for Tweens & Teens by Native American Authors
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The firekeeper's daughter
by Angeline Boulley Daunis, who is part Ojibwe, defers attending the University of Michigan to care for her mother and reluctantly becomes involved in the investigation of a series of drug-related deaths. |
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Two roads
by Joseph Bruchac It's 1932, and twelve-year-old Cal Black and his pop have been riding the rails for a year after losing their farm in the Great Depression. Cal likes being a "knight of the road" with Pop, even if they're broke. But then Pop has to go to Washington, D.C.--and Cal can't go with him. So Pop tells Cal something he never knew before: He's a Creek Indian, which means Cal is, too. And Pop has decided to send Cal to Challagi Indian School, a government boarding school for Native Americans in Oklahoma. At Challagi, the other Creek boys quickly take Cal under their wing. Even in the harsh, miserable conditions of the school, Cal begins to learn his people's history and heritage, language, and customs. And most of all, he learns how to find strength in a group of friends who have only one another. |
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The sea in winter
by Christine Day After an injury sidelines her dreams of becoming a ballet star, Maisie is not excited for her blended family's midwinter road trip along the coast, near the Makah community where her mother grew up. |
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The marrow thieves
by Cherie Dimaline In a world where most people have lost the ability to dream, a fifteen-year-old Indigenous boy who is still able to dream struggles for survival against an army of "recruiters" who seek to steal his marrow and return dreams to the rest of the world. |
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Give me some truth : a novel with paintings
by Eric L Gansworth In 1980 life is hard on the Tuscarora Reservation in upstate New York, and some of the teenagers feel they have fewer options than they'd like: Carson Mastick dreams of forming a rock band, and Maggi Bokoni longs to create her own conceptual artwork instead of the traditional beadwork that her family sells to tourists--but tensions are rising between the reservation and the surrounding communities, and somehow in the confusion of politics and growing up Carson and Maggi have to make a place for themselves. |
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Fire song
by Adam Garnet Jones A family tragedy forces Shane, a gay Native American teenager in Northern Ontario, to choose between staying home to help support his family or leaving for college and the freedom to be himself. |
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Walking in two worlds
by Wab Kinew When Bugz, who is caught between the worlds of life on the Rez and the virtual world, meets Feng, they form an instant bond as outsiders and gamers and must both grapple with the impact of family challenges and community trauma. |
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Elatsoe
by Darcie Little Badger Imagine an America very similar to our own. This America been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples. Elatsoe lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered, in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. |
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In the footsteps of Crazy Horse
by Joseph Marshall A mixed-race Lakota youth learns about his Native American heritage through the story of Crazy Horse, in an account that draws on oral traditions to recount his heroic advocacy of his people and how he lead a war party to victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. |
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Race to the sun
by Rebecca Roanhorse Guided by her Navajo ancestors, seventh-grader Nizhoni Begay discovers she is descended from a holy woman and destined to become a monsterslayer, starting with the evil businessman who kidnapped her father. |
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The barren grounds
by David Robertson .When two indigenous foster children find a secret portal to another reality, they encounter Ochek, the only hunter supporting his starving community of Misewa, and the three try to save Misewa before the icy winter freezes everything. |
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This place : 150 years retold
by Katherena Vermette A graphic novel anthology depicts the last one hundred fifty years of Canadian history as seen through the eyes of the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land before the Europeans arrived. |
Fiction for Older Teens & Adults by Native American Authors
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The sentence : a novel
by Louise Erdrich The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author presents an unusual novel in which a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. |
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Sabrina & Corina : stories
by Kali Fajardo-Anstine A short story collection about female relationships and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands features Latina protagonists of indigenous descent who cautiously navigate the violence and changes in a Denver, Colorado community. |
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Crooked hallelujah
by Kelli Jo Ford A first collection by an award-winning Cherokee writer traces four generations of Native American women as they navigate cultural dynamics, religious beliefs, the 1980s oil bust, devastating storms and unreliable men to connect with their ideas about home. |
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The only good Indians : a novel
by Stephen Graham Jones Four American Indian men, who shared a disturbing event during their youth, are hunted down years later by an entity bent on revenge that forces them to revisit the culture and traditions they left behind. |
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The removed : a novel
by Brandon Hobson A Cherokee family takes in a remarkable foster child on the eve of the Cherokee National Holiday and anniversary of a loved one’s death. By the National Book Award-winning author of Where the Dead Sit Talking. |
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There there
by Tommy Orange A novel—which grapples with the complex history of Native Americans; with an inheritance of profound spirituality; and with a plague of addiction, abuse and suicide—follows 12 characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. |
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IRL
by Tommy Pico Teebs navigates the challenges of being a queer, reservation-born hipster transplant to New York City. |
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Black sun
by Rebecca Roanhorse A trilogy debut by the Nebula Award-winning author of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn is inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and follows the unbalancing of the holy city of Tova amid a fateful solstice eclipse. |
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This town sleeps : a novel
by Dennis E. Staples Engaging in a secret affair with a closeted white man, an Ojibwe from a northern Minnesota reservation navigates small-town discrimination before a ghost leads him to the grave of a basketball star whose murder becomes linked to a local legend. |
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Sacred smokes : stories
by Theodore C. Van Alst 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. |
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When two feathers fell from the sky
by Margaret Verble After disaster strikes during one of her shows, Two Feathers, a young Cherokee horse-diver on loan to Glendale Park Zoo from a Wild West show, must get to the bottom of a mystery that spans centuries with the help of an eclectic cast of characters. |
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Winter counts : a novel
by David Heska Wanbli Weiden A vigilante enforcer on South Dakota's Rosebud Indian Reservation enlists the help of an ex to investigate the activities of an expanding drug cartel, while a new tribal council initiative raises controversial questions. |
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Love after the end : an anthology of Two-spirit & Indigiqueer speculative fiction
by Joshua Whitehead A bold and breathtaking anthology of queer Indigenous speculative fiction, edited by the author of Jonny Appleseed. This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. |
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Jonny Appleseed : a novel
by Joshua Whitehead Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, andlinkages - and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home for his step-father's funeral, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams. |