Native American Heritage Month

Image of six book covers

Native American Heritage Month is celebrated each November. It started at the turn of the century as an effort to gain a day of recognition for the significant contributions made by Native Americans and has resulted in a whole month being designated for that purpose. Illinois legislators enacted an American Indian Day in 1919, and in 1990, President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 as “National American Indian Heritage Month.” Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994. For additional information and resources, visit the official Native American Heritage Month website. 

 

The following list of resources can help you celebrate Native American Heritage Month by learning about the history of Native American communities in the United States, reading about the lives of Native people, and experiencing the works of Native American authors and creators. Many of the titles and authors included on this list have received awards or other honors, but this list is by no means comprehensive. 

 

Adult Fiction 

  • To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose: A young Indigenous woman enters a colonizer-run dragon academy after bonding with a hatchling. 

  • VenCo by Cherie Dimaline: After finding a magical object, Métis millennial Lucky St. James and her cantankerous grandmother Stella are welcomed into a network of witches. 

  • The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich: This novel follows the folks of the Red River Valley of North Dakota in a captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. 

  • Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford: An intergenerational story about mothers and daughters struggling to keep their families together in the midst of poverty, illness, and natural disasters in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. 

  • Five Little Indians by Michelle Good: Taken from their families at a young age and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie must find their way forward when they are released after years of detention. 

  • Savage Conversations by LeAnne Howe: The 1862 mass execution of 38 Dakota haunts Mary Todd Lincoln, institutionalized and alone with her ghosts. 

  • I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones: A good kid in a small Texas town in 1989 finds himself cursed to kill for revenge in true slasher film-style. 

  • Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina: When the facts surrounding her boyfriend Roddy’s apparent suicide don’t add up, Noemi suspects something sinister is stalking their tribal lands in this mythological horror novel. 

  • The Truth According to Ember by Danica Nava: A Chickasaw woman who can’t catch a break fudges the truth on a job application and soon finds herself unable to keep up with her lies in this contemporary romantic comedy. 

  • Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange: In the aftermath of Orvil Red Feather’s shooting, Opal tries to hold her family together while Orvil becomes reliant on prescription medications and his younger brother secretly enacts blood rituals to connect to his Cheyenne heritage. 

  • Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon: From the award-winning author of the Cash Blackbear series comes a novel of a Native American woman who learns of the disappearance of one of her own and decides enough is enough. 

  • Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse: When a small town needs her help to find a missing girl, Maggie Hoskie, a Dinétah monster hunter, reluctantly enlists the help of an unconventional medicine man to uncover the terrifying truth. 

  • Fire Exit by Morgan Talty: Consumed by a long-held secret about his daughter across the river on the Penobscot Reservation, Charles Lamosway grapples with his past, a lost love, and the burdens of family as he searches for redemption. 

  • When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky by Margaret Verble: In 1926 Nashville, Cherokee horse-diver Two Feathers is working at the Glendale Park Zoo when catastrophe strikes one of her shows and more unsettling events follow. 

  • The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson: This haunting novel spanning several generations follows a Dakhóta family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. 

  

Adult Nonfiction & Memoir 

  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz: This groundbreaking poetry collection won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. 

  • Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal: A sweeping yet detailed account of Indigenous history that considers 1,000 years of sovereignty, power dynamics, global influence, governing systems, and adaptation. 

  • A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott: In this memoir, Elliott presents a portrait of her family and the effects of the personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas they have experienced. 

  • Poet Warrior: A Memoir by Joy Harjo: Three-term Poet Laureate Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. 

  • Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David Maraniss: A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist presents a biography of America’s greatest all-around athlete and gold medal winner who survived racism and alcohol addiction to become a myth and a legend. 

  • Come Home, Indio: A Memoir by Jim Terry: A Ho-Chunk cartoonist shares his journey from childhood through his struggles with alcoholism to a spiritual awakening at Standing Rock in this graphic novel memoir. 

 

Young Adult Fiction & Nonfiction 

  • Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley: A summer internship leads to a life-changing experience for Perry Firekeeper-Birch when she learns about the harsh realities of how the outside world views her ancestors and their remains. 

  • Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell: When a classmate is murdered during a traditional Blackfeet giveaway, Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli, the last people to see her alive, must take matters into their own hands and clear their names. 

  • The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline: The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. 

  • Apple: Skin to the Core by Eric Gansworth: This memoir in verse explores intersectional identities through generational and personal experience. 

  • Rez Ball by Byron Graves: When the varsity basketball team members take him under their wing, Tre Brun, representing his Ojibwe reservation, steps into his late brother’s shoes as star player. 

  • Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger: A Lipan Apache teen comes face-to-face with her cousin’s ghost and vows to unmask the murderer. 

  • Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith: Louise breaks up with her boyfriend after he makes a racist remark about her Native American heritage and begins covering the racial hostilities exposed by the casting of the new school play. 

 

Streaming Movies on Kanopy 

  • Barking Water: This film portrays a road trip across Oklahoma by a dying man and his former lover to visit friends and family in the Seminole Nation. 

  • The Exiles: Included in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, this movie chronicles a night in the life of a group of young Native Americans who fled reservation life to roam the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. 

  • The Return of Navajo Boy: An official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, this documentary reunited a Navajo family and triggered a federal investigation into uranium contamination. 

  • Who Owns the Past?: This documentary explores the discovery of a 9,000-year-old skeleton near Kennewick, Washington, an event which reignited the conflict between anthropologists and Native Americans over the control of human remains found on ancestral Indian lands.