The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux

God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Vine Deloria Jr., Leslie Marmon Silko · 325 pages

Deloria, a prominent Native American educator, lawyer, and philosopher, has updated his classic work on native religion. In God is Red Deloria argues convincingly that Christianity has failed today's society, and describes basic tenets that underlie Native religions. His other works include Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties and Custer Died for Your Sins.

The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

Kent Nerburn · 347 pages

A casual note left on the windshield of a car. The death of an old dog. And author Kent Nerburn unexpectedly finds himself back on the Dakota reservation where more than a decade before he traveled with the elder, Dan, whose thoughts he chronicled in the classic of Native American studies, Neither Wolf nor Dog. Now almost ninety, Dan wants Nerburn to assist in the unlikely task of burying Fatback,

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

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

Mother Earth Spirituality: Native American Paths to Healing Ourselves and Our World

Ed McGaa · 230 pages

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

American Indian Myths and Legends

Richard Erdoes, Alfonso Ortiz · 544 pages

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

Linda Tuhiwai Smith · 224 pages

To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such 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

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

Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding

Billy Mills, Nicholas Sparks · 176 pages

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

David Grann · 352 pages

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was

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.

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

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

My Place

Sally Morgan · 360 pages

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

Rebecca Nagle · 352 pages

I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

Rigoberta Menchu · 251 pages

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

Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography

Chester Brown · 286 pages

"This award-winning Canadian bestseller tells the story of the charismatic, and perhaps mad, nineteenth century Métis leader, whose struggle to win rights for his people led to violent rebellion on the nation's western frontier"--P. [4] of cover.

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 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

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