Native American Authors

November is Native American Heritage Month, so we’re kicking it off with a list of 8 novels by Native American authors! Check out our display in the library and the booklist in the catalog for these and other titles.

 

Book cover of "Trail of Lightning" by Rebecca Roanhorse. It features a woman in a leather jacket standing atop a red pickup truck with lightning bolts striking around her. A man sits in the driver's seat below, against a backdrop of stormy, yellow-tinged clouds.

Trail of Lightning

By Rebecca Roanhorse

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.

Welcome to the Sixth World.

 

The cover of the novel "Winter Counts" by David Heska Wanbli Weiden. The background is a bold red with an illustration of a rodent, possibly a prairie dog, in black. The title "Winter Counts" appears in large white letters, and the author's name is in yellow below the title.

Winter Counts

By David Heksa Wanbli Weiden

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

 

The cover of "Where the Dead Sit Talking" by Brandon Hobson features a stylized black bird with wide wings against a red-orange gradient background. A National Book Award Finalist badge is present on the right. The author's name is at the bottom, and a feather lies below the book title.

Where the Dead Sit Talking

By Brandon Hobson

Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story.

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts.

Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

 

Orange book cover with yellow title text "There There" and two brown feathers intersecting horizontally. Badge on the left says "One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year." Subtitle reads "A novel by Tommy Orange." Quote by Margaret Atwood at the top.

There There

By Tommy Orange

A wondrous and shattering novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

 

The cover of a novel titled "The Round House" by Louise Erdrich features a gray background with irregular reddish-brown fragments scattered across it. The title and author's name are centered in a serif font.

The Round House

By Louise Erdrich

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe’s life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

 

The cover of "The Clockwork Dynasty" by Daniel H. Wilson features a steampunk aesthetic with cogs and gears forming a heart at the center. The background is a rich red with intricate mechanical designs. The author's name and the book title are displayed prominently.

The Clockwork Dynasty

By Daniel H. Wilson

Present day: When a young anthropologist specializing in ancient technology uncovers a terrible secret concealed in the workings of a three-hundred-year-old mechanical doll, she is thrown into a hidden world that lurks just under the surface of our own.

Russia, 1725: In the depths of the Kremlin, the tsar’s loyal mechanician brings to life two astonishingly humanlike mechanical beings. Struggling to blend into pre-Victorian society, they are pulled into a legendary war that has raged for centuries.

The Clockwork Dynasty seamlessly interweaves past and present, exploring a race of beings designed to live by ironclad principles, yet constantly searching for meaning. As June plunges deeper into their world, her choices will ultimately determine their survival or extermination.

 

A blue book cover with the title "Ten Little Indians" in large yellow letters at the top. Below the title, there is a black silhouette of a fence or decorative pattern. At the bottom, the author's name "Sherman Alexie" is written in the same yellow font.

Ten Little Indians

By Sherman Alexie

With Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love.

In Alexie’s first story, “The Search Engine,” Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. In “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,” an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawn shop window the fancy-dance regalia that was stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother.

 

Cover of the book "Crooked Hallelujah" by Kelli Jo Ford. The image features a silhouette of two people holding hands, filled with a vibrant sunset scene, against a black background. The text includes "Winner of the Plimpton Prize".

Crooked Hallelujah

By Kelli Jo Ford

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine―a mixed-blood Cherokee woman― and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world―of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados―intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.


Posted: October 28, 2021