By Cynthia Leitich Smith

New York Times best-selling author Cynthia Leitich Smith turns to realistic fiction with the thoughtful story of a Native teen navigating the complicated, confusing waters of high school — and first love.

When Louise Wolfe’s first real boyfriend mocks and disrespects Native people in front of her, she breaks things off and dumps him over e-mail. It’s her senior year, anyway, and she’d rather spend her time with her family and friends and working on the school newspaper. The editors pair her up with Joey Kairouz, the ambitious new photojournalist, and in no time the paper’s staff find themselves with a major story to cover: the school musical director’s inclusive approach to casting The Wizard of Oz has been provoking backlash in their mostly white, middle-class Kansas town. From the newly formed Parents Against Revisionist Theater to anonymous threats, long-held prejudices are being laid bare and hostilities are spreading against teachers, parents, and students — especially the cast members at the center of the controversy, including Lou’s little brother, who’s playing the Tin Man. As tensions mount at school, so does a romance between Lou and Joey — but as she’s learned, “dating while Native” can be difficult. In trying to protect her own heart, will Lou break Joey’s?

By Terese Marie Mailhot

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.

By Anton Treuer

More than one hundred stereotype-debunking questions—thoughtful, awkward, and searching—answered with solid information, humor, and compassion.

“I had a profoundly well-educated Princetonian ask me, ‘Where is your tomahawk?’ I had a beautiful woman approach me in the college gymnasium and exclaim, ‘You have the most beautiful red skin.’ I took a friend to see Dances with Wolves and was told, ‘Your people have a beautiful culture.’ . . . I made many lifelong friends at college, and they supported but also challenged me with questions like, ‘Why should Indians have reservations?’ ”

What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers—or suspect that your questions may be offensive? In matterof-fact responses to over 120 questions, both thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal tour of what’s up with Indians, anyway.

• What is the real story of Thanksgiving?
• Why are tribal languages important?
• What do you think of that incident where people died in a sweat lodge?

White/Indian relations are often characterized by guilt and anger. Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask cuts through the emotion and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.

Anton Treuer, author of The Assassination of Hole in the Day and many other books on Ojibwe history and language, received an Ambassador Award in 2011 from Facing Race: We’re All in This Together, an initiative of the St. Paul Foundation. All around Minnesota, Treuer has given scores of public lectures and been asked hundreds of questions—many like the ones in this book.

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub

By Winona LaDuke

Chronicles is a major work, a collection of current, pressing and inspirational stories of Indigenous communities from the Canadian subarctic to the heart of Dine Bii Kaya, Navajo Nation. Chronicles is a book literally risen from the ashes—beginning in 2008 after her home burned to the ground—and collectively is an accounting of Winona’s personal path of recovery, finding strength and resilience in the writing itself as well as in her work. Long awaited, Chroniclesis a labour of love, a tribute to those who have passed on and those yet to arrive.

“Winona LaDuke’s latest book reads like a prayer. These are holy words— inspirational stories taken straight from the heart of indigenous communities throughout the world…(Chronicles) is lyrical, instructional, and infused with wry humor when the weight of the message becomes unbearable…LaDuke provides a road map through tribal nations’ belief systems; offering a spiritual compass and invaluable insight into the relationship of prophesy to the realities of climate change, economic collapse, food scarcity and basic human rights.”

— Huffington Post

By Vine Deloria Jr.

Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, is a 1969, non-fiction book by the lawyer, professor and writer Vine Deloria, Jr. The book was noteworthy for its relevance to the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement and other activist organizations, such as the American Indian Movement, which was beginning to expand. Deloria's book encouraged better use of federal funds aimed at helping Native Americans. Vine Deloria, Jr. presents Native Americans in a humorous light, devoting an entire chapter to Native American humor. Custer Died for Your Sinswas significant in its presentation of Native Americans as a people who were able to retain their tribal society and morality, while existing in the modern world.

This excerpt from and article by David E. Wilkins in Indian Country Today can give you a feeling for this must-read:

He managed to articulate the concept in a way that made sense for Native peoples politically, legally, and perhaps most importantly, culturally. For Deloria knew that cultural integrity — Native lands, languages, values, and spiritual traditions — was the beating heart of Native sovereignty. And it was that integrity, fully acknowledged, if not always enforced, which was woven throughout the several hundred treaties and other diplomatic accords negotiated and ratified between tribal nations and the United States. His grasp of Native personal and political realities led prominent Pueblo scholar Alfonso Ortiz in a review in 1969 to deem Custer, “the most ambitious and most successful overview of contemporary American Indian affairs and aspirations I have ever read.”

The book’s publication in 1969 coincided with events, personalities, and social movements that were exploding across Indian Country and the United States. Americans in the midst of the Vietnam War knew about the Civil Rights Movement, the fight for women’s rights, the Stonewall riots, Johnson’s War on Poverty, Woodstock, and the Poor People’s Movement, but there was very little popular awareness of Native peoples. And a lot was happening within Indian Country, including the Fish Wars of Washington state led by Billy Frank and Hank Adams, the Alcatraz takeover, and the birth of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis. Thus, the timing of Custer’s release, coupled with the force of Deloria’s trenchant observations rendered in his trademark sardonic prose, elevated the work and gave it real staying power.

Within the slim volume, Deloria skillfully and often humorously lambasted many of the entrenched myths and stereotypes about Indigenous peoples. He castigated powerful institutions. Anthropologists, with their discipline’s penchant for preying on and profiting from Indigenous communities were singled out. Christian churches were called out for their corrupt actions. The main target was the federal government with its multiple branches, departments, and agencies still devising far too many unprincipled laws and policies deployed with arrogance and disrespect towards Native communities.