I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

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

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

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

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

Russell Means, Marvin J. Wolf · 573 pages

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

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

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 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

American Indian Stories

Zitkala-Sa · 104 pages

Collection of American Indian stories by Zitkala-Sa, an Sioux Indian. Many of the stories are of an autobiographical nature.

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

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz · 320 pages

My Place

Sally Morgan · 360 pages

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

Black Elk, John G. Neihardt · 298 pages

This is the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century. It is at once a tale of Lakota life, a history of a Native nation, and an enduring spiritual testament, wherein the author conveys Black Elk's searing visions of the unity of humanity and Earth. Black Elk met the author, a distinguishe

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.

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

Walking With The Comrades

Arundhati Roy · 182 pages

In early 2010, Roy traveled into the forests of Central India, homeland to millions of indigenous people, dreamland to some of the world's biggest mining corporations. The result is this... report from the heart of an unfolding revolution.

Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life

David Treuer · 330 pages

Novelist David Treuer examines Native American reservation life--past and present--illuminating misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation while also exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture.

By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

Rebecca Nagle · 352 pages

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown · 512 pages

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

Peter Matthiessen · 646 pages

An investigative account of the fatal shootout between FBI agents and American Indians in 1975. On a hot June morning in 1975, a desperate shoot-out between FBI agents and Native Americans near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, left an Indian and two federal agents dead. Four members of the American Indian Movement were indicted on murder charges, and one, Leonard Peltier, was convicted and is now serv

Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII

Chester Nez, Judith Schiess Avila · 320 pages

Crazy Brave

Joy Harjo · 176 pages

A memoir from the Native American poet describes her youth with an abusive stepfather, becoming a single teen mom, and how she struggled to finally find inner peace and her creative voice.

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