"In 1977, indigenous leaders from around the world organized a United Nations conference in Geneva to promote indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Their first recommendation was “to observe October 12, the day of so-called ‘discovery’ of America, as an International Day of Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.” It took another 30 years for their work to be formally recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in September 2007."
In honor of Indigenous People's Day, here are some books by Native American Authors.
Joy Harjo
"Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019." https://www.joyharjo.com/
National BestsellerA stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.
N. Scott Momaday
" In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Momaday has been awarded numerous honors, including a National Medal of Arts, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and 12 honorary degrees. He is the Regents Professor of the Humanities at the University of Arizona, where he has taught since 1982." -https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/n-scott-momaday
The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a stranger in his native land
A young Native American, Abel has come home from a foreign war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his father's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world - modern, industrial America - pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, claiming his soul, goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust. And the young man, torn in two, descends into hell.
Louise Erdrich
"Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. "
New York Times Bestseller
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an 'emancipation' bill, but it isn't about freedom - it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal? Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Pixie - 'Patrice' - Paranteau has no desire to wear herself down on a husband and kids. She works at the factory, earning barely enough to support her mother and brother, let alone her alcoholic father who sometimes returns home to bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to get if she's ever going to get to Minnesota to find her missing sister Vera. In The Night Watchman multi-award-winning, author Louise Erdrich weaves together a story of past and future generations, of preservation and progress. She grapples with the worst and best impulses of human nature, illuminating the loves and lives, desires, and ambitions of her characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence.
James Welch
"Welch's final novel was The Heartsong of Charging Elk, after which Welch was awarded the title of a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters from France. For his work as a poet and author, Welch also received the Native Writer's Circle's Lifetime Achievement award. As his close friend and fellow Montana author Ivan Doig said, Welch wrote about what it means to be an Indian in modern American society and he wrote about the people of the West without glorification, without cliché in an honest, clear voice from an intimate perspective. The world lost a great storyteller when Welch passed away in 2003, but the stories and poems he's written will live on in his stead."
James Welch never shied away from depicting the lives of Native Americans damned by destiny and temperament to the margins of society. The Death of Jim Loney is no exception. Jim Loney is a mixed-blood, of white and Indian parentage. Estranged from both communities, he lives a solitary, brooding existence in a small Montana town. His nights are filled with disturbing dreams that haunt his waking hours. Rhea, his lover, cannot console him; Kate, his sister, cannot penetrate his world. In sparse, moving prose, Welch has crafted a riveting tale of disenfranchisement and self-destruction.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Daniel H. Wilson
"Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as How to Survive a Robot Uprising, The Clockwork Dynasty, and Amped. He earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Masters degrees in Machine Learning and Robotics."
This is not Wilson’s first time at the robot rodeo — but it’s a crowd favorite because Robopocalypse is just that damn good. Set in the not-too-distant future, this novel (similar to many of his others) asks what kind of role we want technology to play in our lives. In the novel, technology is destroying humankind — through a master computer called Archos that’s gained not only sentience but quick control over most other computers across the world. The one relatively safe place as the planet starts to burn down? The Osage Nation in Oklahoma. Yet another Cherokee citizen who can’t help but be that good, Wilson writes Native characters — like all his characters — who feel so realistic, it’s as if they’ve popped right out of Oklahoma and onto the page. To call this a page-turner is to minimize how brilliant this action-packed, tightly written, and incredibly smart (especially in terms of social commentary) this book is. And who blurbed this book? Stephen King. That’s who. - via 14 Contemporary Books By Native American Writers To Get Excited About by Erika T. Wurth
Rebecca Roanhorse
"Rebecca Roanhorse is a NYTimes bestselling and Nebula, Hugo and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (Campbell) Award for Best New Writer."
"While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive"--Amazon.com.
Margaret Verble
"Margaret's first novel, Maud's Line, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. Her second novel, Cherokee America, has recently been listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year for 2019. "
"From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud's Line, an epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center"-- Provided by publisher.
Tommy Orange
"Born and raised in Oakland, Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he now teaches writing, and a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He currently lives in Angels Camp, California."
Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxedrene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle's memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions--intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path. Tommy Orange delivers a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. A multi-generational relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair are woven into the history of a nation and its people.
Stephan Graham Jones
"Jones has been an NEA Fellow, a Texas Writers League Fellow, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, the Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, has been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and a Colorado Book Award finalist, and he's had his work named one of Bloody Disgusting's Top Ten Horror Novels of the Year."
"Peter Straub's Ghost Story meets Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies in this American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends."--Provided by publisher.
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