American Indian Stories

The Reason You Walk

Wab Kinew · 273 pages

When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who'd raised him. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief, and an urban activist. Kinew writes af

Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder

Kent Nerburn · 313 pages

A Native American elder travels through Indian towns, introducing readers to a vivid cast of characters.

The Right to Be Cold

Sheila Watt-Cloutier · 352 pages

A "courageous and revelatory memoir" (Naomi Klein) chronicling the life of the leading Indigenous climate change, cultural, and human rights advocate. For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of I

I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

Rigoberta Menchu · 251 pages

The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing

Lori Arviso Alvord, Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt · 204 pages

Lakota Woman

Mary Crow Dog, Richard Erdoes · 263 pages

A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world. This is the powerful autobiography of Mary Brave Bird, who grew up in the misery of a South Dakota reservation. Rebelling against the violence and hopelessness of reservation life, she joined the tribal pride movement in an effort to bring a

The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir

Joseph Auguste Merasty, David Carpenter · 120 pages

From publisher: Now a retired fisherman and trapper, Merasty was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of 'aggressive assimiliation.' As Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children in the ways of white society. They we

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation espouses having an understanding and appreciation of plants and animals.

They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School

Bev Sellars · 256 pages

Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph's Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph's mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hu

Up Ghost River: A Chief's Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History

Edmund Metatawabin, Alexandra Shimo · 316 pages

In the 1950s, 7-year-old Edmund Metatawabin was separated from his family and placed in one of Canada's worst residential schools. St. Anne's, in northernn Ontario, is an institution now notorious for the range of punishments that staff and teachers inflicted on students. Years later, in seeking healing, Metatawabin participated in native cultural training workshops that emphasize the holistic app

The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Thomas King · 172 pages

"In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture's deep ties to storytelling." "Thomas King weaves events fro

One Native Life

Richard Wagamese · 264 pages

"One Native Life is a look back down the road Wagamese has travelled. It's about the things he's learned as a human being, a man and an Ojibway in his fifty-two years on the planet. Whether he's writing about making bannock, playing baseball, listening to the wind, meeting Johnny Cash or running away with the circus, these are stories told in a healing spirit. This is a book about roots: uncoverin

Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

Russell Means, Marvin J. Wolf · 573 pages

Talking To My Country

Stan Grant · 230 pages

An extraordinarily powerful and personal meditation on race, culture and national identity. In July 2015, as the debate over Adam Goodes being booed at AFL games raged and got ever more heated and ugly, Stan Grant wrote a short but powerful piece for The Guardian that went viral, not only in Australia but right around the world, shared over 100,000 times on social media. His was a personal, passio

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

David Treuer · 512 pages

My Place

Sally Morgan · 360 pages

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Doris Pilkington, Nugi Garimara · 136 pages

Author's 'real' name: Nugi Garimara From Google books: "In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Pilkington recalls with a searing irony one of the more farcical projects of land management in the newly federated states of Australia. In 1907 a fence 1,834 kms in length was built from the Great Southern Ocean to the coast of the top end for the purpose of preventing rabbits invading Western Australia f

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Wade Davis · 262 pages

"Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages s

The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

Take This Man. A Memoir

Brando Skyhorse · 258 pages

"From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brando Skyhorse comes this stunning, heartfelt memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle or The Tender Bar, the true story of a boy's turbulent childhood growing up with five stepfathers and the mother who was determined to give her son everything but the truth. When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dre

Ride the Wind

Lucia St. Clair Robson · 595 pages

A Comanche family adopts Cynthia Parker after kidnapping her in 1836, and she gradually becomes one of them, marrying her captor.

Secret of the Andes

Ann Nolan Clark · 130 pages

An Indian boy who tends llamas in a hidden valley in Peru learns the traditions and secrets of his Inca ancestors.

The Wind Is My Mother: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman

Bear Heart, Molly Larkin · 265 pages

In 1938, a young Muskogee Creek Indian walked unharmed through a den of rattlesnakes as part of his initiation into the "medicine ways" of his tribe. More than fifty years later Bear Heart, now a medicine man and a respected elder of his tribe, tells his story and shares his teachings. With eloquent simplicity, Bear Heart shares a lifetime of training that has enabled him to survive personal trag

Dances with Wolves

Michael Blake · 304 pages