Native American / Indigenous Literature

Cecrow: Noting however, the author is not indigenous!

Muscogulus : This 1970 book should be no one's first choice for learning Native American history today. Other white authors had written heartfelt books about U.S. cruelty and injustice toward Indians in the past, to little effect. American Indian activists and the shock of the Vietnam War made the public ready to receive this one. It has had a historic impact but it does not provide a comprehensive view of its topic.

LyndaInOregon: Not all Native American battles were fought in the landscape. This historically-based novel follows the fight of a Chippewa tribe to retain its tribal identity against federal legislation in the 1950s

LyndaInOregon: Part coming-of-age, part mystery, part an indictment of the tangle of jurisdictions covering crimes on Indian reservations, Erdrich's novel alternately glows and rages.

LyndaInOregon: This is the piece that exploded Alexie onto the public's mind; the Chicago Tribune's book critic said "it is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940”. It's a brilliant, bitter, funny, heartbreaking piece of work and a uniquely American classic.

yoyogod: A multi award winning horror novel by a Native American writer.

aspirit: Aboriginal Australians

: I can find no evidence that Grann is Native American.

Muscogulus : This is an excellent book of reporting on corruption and murder, but it is not Native American literature.

ojy : Writer is not indigenous/native

LyndaInOregon: Deloria looks at the life of a typical Sioux woman at the time when contact with white culture was just beginning, concentrating on the quotidian.

LyndaInOregon: This is a beautifully crafted collection of nine short stories that are funny and heartbreaking and memorable in their truth and beauty. The protagonists battle the same kinds of demons of loss and love and life and death that we all face.

MaureenRoy: The author uncovers evidence that many thousands of years before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across Australia were planting, irrigating and harvesting seeds, and establishing a civilization. Their description as "hunter-gatherers" by whites was a convenient lie to justify dispossession.

Kindleifier: Oral history of Crazy Horse as passed down to his closest living relatives

LyndaInOregon: Glancy uses a unique device here, alternating between excerpts from the Lewis & Clark journals with fictional commentary from Sacajawea on the same incidents, revealing the depth and width of the chasm of understanding between the two cultures.

aspirit: Poetry from various North American peoples

yoyogod: An award winning horror novel by a Native American writer.

Muscogulus: A Shawnee philosopher draws on indigenous knowledge while engaging with and refining a Western constructivist frame of reality as "equally privileged, well-made actual worlds." This is a technical yet humane and humorous essay proposing four common themes in American Indian philosophy: relatedness, circularity, expansive personhood, and the semantic power of performance such as dance.

-pilgrim-: The author is Sami (i.e. of the indigenous people of Northen Finland) as is the protagonist.

aspirit: Pacific NW, North American