Native American culture has always been steeped in rich storytelling. Everything around them is full of stories, from the fantastical and hopeful to cautionary tales meant to warn against the dangers of the world. While this can be a very deep part of their identity, their stories are often not heard and their voices are often silenced. While things in the publishing world have gotten better, Native American representation trails behind other minority groups. Zippia statistics show that only .4% of published authors are Native Americans. Since 2018, published Native American authors have steadily decreased, even though minorities in publishing are getting more attention. Representation is so very important, and will pave the way for new generations of Native Americans writing gripping and important stories. This Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Month, I want to celebrate by highlighting some of the most astonishing stories written by Native Americans about Native Americans this year, and keep these stories alive and thriving.
By Jessica Johns (Cree)
In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.
“A mystery and a horror story about grief, but one with defiant hope in its beating heart.” —Paul Tremblay
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Never Whistle at Night
By Shane Hawk (Cheyenne-Arapaho/Hidatsa/Potawatomi) and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Mackinac Bands of Chippewa/Ottawa)
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
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The Storyteller
By Brandon Hobson (Cherokee)
A middle-grade adventure. Ziggy's mother disappeared when he was very young, making her one of many Native women who've gone mysteriously missing. Ziggy and his sister, Moon, want answers, but nobody around can give them.
Once Ziggy gets it in his head that clues to his mother's disappearance may be found in a nearby cave, there's no stopping him from going there. Along with Moon, Alice, and his best friend, Corso, he sets out on a mind-bending adventure where he'll discover his story is tied to all the stories of the Cherokees that have come before him.
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Don’t Fear the Reaper
By Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet)
December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho., in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.
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Godly Heathens: A Novel (The Ouroboros #1)
H.E. Edgmon (Seminole)
Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who’s a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn.
When Gem is attacked by a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death, Willa Mae saves their life and finally offers some answers. She and Gem are reincarnated gods who’ve known and loved each other across lifetimes. But Gem hasn’t always been the most benevolent deity. They’ve made a lot of enemies, like the Goddess of Death, who will keep coming.
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White Horse
By Erika T. Wurth (Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee)
"This ghost story is a perfect example of new wave horror that will also satisfy fans of classic Stephen King." ―Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic
Erika T. Wurth's White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut novel about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath
By Moniquill Blackgoose (Seaconke Wampanoag)
A young, Indigenous woman enters a colonizer-run dragon academy after bonding with a hatchling-and quickly finds herself at odds with the "approved" way of doing things-in the first book of a brilliant new fantasy series. The remote island of Masquapaug has not seen a dragon in many generations-until fifteen-year-old Anequs finds a dragon's egg and bonds with its hatchling. Her people are delighted, for all remember the tales of the days when dragons lived among them and danced away the storms of autumn, enabling the people to thrive. To them, Anequs is revered: a Person Who Belongs to a Dragon but not to the Anglish conquerors of her land. They have a very specific idea on how a dragon should be raised-and reluctantly allowed her to enroll in a proper Anglish dragon school on the mainland. If she cannot succeed there, then her dragon will be destroyed. For the world needs changing-and Anequs and her dragon are less coming of age in this bold new world than coming to power
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The Council of Dolls
Mona Susan Power (Sioux)
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
The long-awaited, profoundly moving, and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award-winning Native American author Mona Susan Power, spanning three generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day.
From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried....When the river swallowed Kai, Damien's little brother didn't die so much as vanish. Wanting to leave his grief behind he drives as far away to start over and finds himself in a village. Everyone mistrust the new stranger in this little village except a kind woman who takes him in after she also lost her daughter. Ana Maria gives him a place to stay and a job But how long can he resist the rumors swirling through town suggesting Ana Marie might have had something to do with her daughter's death? Marta, who is Ana Marie's other daughter is driven by a fierce need for revenge? Swiftly, Damien finds himself caught in a power struggle between the brujas, a whirlwind battle that threatens to sweep the whole village out to sea
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish)
"In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe's rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby's cry."
Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.
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A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids
Linda LeGarde Grover (Ojibwe)
When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century.
Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family's long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial of not one crime but two. Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked. Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family's land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor.
Buy Here
Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir
Thomas C. Gannon (Cheyenne)
A hilarious and humane memoir that spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author's life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon's traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother's devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
Venco
Cherie Dimaline (Metis)
Lucky St. James a millennial Metis and her grandmother, Stella are about to be evicted. After hearing an otherworldly energy in the wall, she finds an old spoon with SALEM etched into it. Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon connects her to a teeming network of witches across North America who have anxiously awaited her discovery. Hiding in plain sight, a large company with vast resources VenCo, an anagram of "coven" has awaited for the seven spoons to come together returning the network of witches to their rightful power while a very powerful witch hunter as old as witchcraft itself hunts them. Lucky and Stella must go to the showdown in the magical city of New Orleans that will determine if the witches will remain underground or usher a new beginning
Buy Here
By Shane Hawk (Cheyenne-Arapaho/Hidatsa/Potawatomi) and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Mackinac Bands of Chippewa/Ottawa)
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Buy Here
By Brandon Hobson (Cherokee)
A middle-grade adventure. Ziggy's mother disappeared when he was very young, making her one of many Native women who've gone mysteriously missing. Ziggy and his sister, Moon, want answers, but nobody around can give them.
Once Ziggy gets it in his head that clues to his mother's disappearance may be found in a nearby cave, there's no stopping him from going there. Along with Moon, Alice, and his best friend, Corso, he sets out on a mind-bending adventure where he'll discover his story is tied to all the stories of the Cherokees that have come before him.
Buy Here
By Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet)
December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho., in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.
Buy Here
H.E. Edgmon (Seminole)
Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who’s a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn.
When Gem is attacked by a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death, Willa Mae saves their life and finally offers some answers. She and Gem are reincarnated gods who’ve known and loved each other across lifetimes. But Gem hasn’t always been the most benevolent deity. They’ve made a lot of enemies, like the Goddess of Death, who will keep coming.
Buy Here
By Erika T. Wurth (Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee)
"This ghost story is a perfect example of new wave horror that will also satisfy fans of classic Stephen King." ―Silvia Moreno-Garcia, author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau and Mexican Gothic
Erika T. Wurth's White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut novel about an Indigenous woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother’s spirit
By Moniquill Blackgoose (Seaconke Wampanoag)
A young, Indigenous woman enters a colonizer-run dragon academy after bonding with a hatchling-and quickly finds herself at odds with the "approved" way of doing things-in the first book of a brilliant new fantasy series. The remote island of Masquapaug has not seen a dragon in many generations-until fifteen-year-old Anequs finds a dragon's egg and bonds with its hatchling. Her people are delighted, for all remember the tales of the days when dragons lived among them and danced away the storms of autumn, enabling the people to thrive. To them, Anequs is revered: a Person Who Belongs to a Dragon but not to the Anglish conquerors of her land. They have a very specific idea on how a dragon should be raised-and reluctantly allowed her to enroll in a proper Anglish dragon school on the mainland. If she cannot succeed there, then her dragon will be destroyed. For the world needs changing-and Anequs and her dragon are less coming of age in this bold new world than coming to power
Buy Here
Mona Susan Power (Sioux)
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
The long-awaited, profoundly moving, and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award-winning Native American author Mona Susan Power, spanning three generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day.
From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried....
Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish)
"In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe's rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby's cry."
Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.
Buy Here
Linda LeGarde Grover (Ojibwe)
When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century.
Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family's long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial of not one crime but two. Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked. Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family's land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor.
Buy Here
Thomas C. Gannon (Cheyenne)
A hilarious and humane memoir that spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author's life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon's traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother's devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
Cherie Dimaline (Metis)
Lucky St. James a millennial Metis and her grandmother, Stella are about to be evicted. After hearing an otherworldly energy in the wall, she finds an old spoon with SALEM etched into it. Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon connects her to a teeming network of witches across North America who have anxiously awaited her discovery. Hiding in plain sight, a large company with vast resources VenCo, an anagram of "coven" has awaited for the seven spoons to come together returning the network of witches to their rightful power while a very powerful witch hunter as old as witchcraft itself hunts them. Lucky and Stella must go to the showdown in the magical city of New Orleans that will determine if the witches will remain underground or usher a new beginning
Buy Here
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