Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2024 - Memoirs by Indigenous Authors
- Sara M.
- Thursday, February 01
Collection
Check out a book from this list to fulfill the 2024 Broader Bookshelf prompt "Read a book by or about someone from an Indigenous culture".
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2024 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
A History of My Brief Body
Published in 2020
"In this stunning essay-collection-cum-prose-poem-cycle, Belcourt meditates on the difficulty and necessity of finding joy as a queer NDN in a country that denies that joy all too often. Out of the 'ruins of the museum of political depression' springs a 'tomorrow free of the rhetorical trickery of colonizers everywhere.' Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance." ?Michelle Hart,?O, The Oprah Magazine "An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength." ?Kirkus Reviews, starred The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
Abandon Me
Memoirs
Published in 2017
"In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another. At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer's life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal."-- Provided by publisher.
Apple
Skin to the Core
Published in 2020
"The term 'Apple' is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly 'red on the outside, white on the inside.' Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking." -- Inside front jacket flap.
Crazy Brave
A Memoir
Published in 2012
A memoir from the Native American poet describes her youth with an abusive stepfather, becoming a single teen mom, and how she struggled to finally find inner peace and her creative voice.
Poet Warrior
A Memoir
Published in 2021
"Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Weaving together the voices that shaped her, Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, the teachings of a changing earth, and the poets who paved her way. She explores her grief at theloss of her mother and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. Moving fluidly among prose, song, and poetry, Poet Warrior is a luminous journey of becoming that sings with all the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo"-- Provided by publisher.
A Child of the Indian Race
Published in 2022
An adoptee reconnects with the Lakota family and culture she was born into, and nurtures a new tradition that helps others to do the same. In the 1950s, when Sandy White Hawk was a toddler, she was taken from her Lakota family on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Her adoption papers identify her as "a child of the Indian race," and her adoptive mother never let her forget it. This memoir of her removal from and return to her extended Lakota family is also the story of her life work: helping other adoptees and tribal communities to reconcile the enormous harms that widespread removals have caused. Many people believe that adoption is needed to protect "unwanted children" from "unfit mothers," to offer a child a "better chance at life." White Hawk shows that this is a myth, that adoption, particularly transracial adoption, is layered in complexities that adoptees are left to navigate in emotional isolation, without a language to speak about what is happening to them. White Hawk founded First Nation Repatriation Institute, which addresses the post-adoption issues of Native American individuals, families, and communities. Incorporating the testimony of adoptees, formerly fostered individuals, and birth relatives, she argues that those who experienced child protection need to inform the policies for child removal and placement-and that everyone involved in the issue must focus on family preservation.
Carry
A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land
Published in 2020
"A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author's encounters with gun violence--for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Terese Marie Mailhot. Toni Jensen grew up in the Midwest around guns: As a girl, she learned how to shoot birds with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she's had guns waved in her face in the fracklands around Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen recalls the discrimination she faced in college as a Native American student from her roommate to her faculty adviser. "The Worry Line" explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. "At the Workshop" focuses on her graduate school years, during which a classmate repeatedly wrote stories in which he killed thinly veiled versions of her. In "Women in the Fracklands," Jensen takes the reader inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access pipeline protests, as well as the peril faced by women, in regions overcome by the fracking boom. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history--as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates as a Native American woman. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one's country is not the same as surviving one's country."-- Provided by publisher.
Clifford
A Memoir, a Fiction, a Fantasy, a Thought Experiment
Published in 2019
<p>From the bestselling author of the Governor General's Literary Award finalist <em>Firewater</em> comes a moving tribute to an older brother that traverses the thresholds of memoir, fiction, and fantasy and reimagines what could have been.</p>
Red Paint
The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk
Published in 2022
"Sasha taqwšeblu LaPointe, a Coast Salish indigenous woman, has always longed for a sense of home. As a child her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha. As an adolescent determined to escape the poverty and abuse of her childhood in order to build a better future for herself and her people, Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, with little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother, a linguist who helped preserve her indigineous language of Lushootseed and one in a long line of powerful ancestors. Exploring what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art while offering an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas as well as the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples, Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience and above all the ability to heal that chronicles Sasha's struggles navigating a collapsing marriage while answering the call to greater purpose. Set against a backdrop of tour vans and the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk-an ethos that challenges us to reclaim what's rightfully ours: our histories, our power, our traditions, and our truths-Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to heal while fighting for our right to a place to call home"-- Provided by publisher.
As Long As the Rivers Flow
Published in 2003
Describes the summer of Larry Loyie with his family before he is forcibly taken to a government-sponsored residential school.
Heart Berries
A Memoir
Published in 2018
"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."-- Provided by publisher.
Rabbit-proof Fence
Published in 2002
Three mixed-race Australian girls, having been taken from their Aboriginal families, escape and return home on foot, without supplies or gear, while trying to evade recapture, in an account based on a true story. Following an Australian government edict in 1931, black aboriginal children and children of mixed marriages were gathered up by whites and takes to settlements to be assimilated. In Rabbit-Proof Fence, award-winning author Doris Pilkington traces the captivating story of her mother, Molly, one of three young girls uprooted from her community in Southwestern Australia and take to the Moore River Native Settlement. At the settlement, Molly and her relatives Gracie and Daisy were forbidden to speak their native language,forced to abandon their aboriginal heritage, and taught to be culturally white. After regular stays in solitary confinement, the three girls-- scared and homesick-- planned and executed a daring escape from the grim camp, with its harsh life of padlocks,barred windows and hard cold beds. The girls headed for the nearby rabbit-proof fence that stretched over 1000 miles through the desert toward their home. Their journey lasted over a month, and they survived on everything from emus to feral cats,while narrowly avoiding the police, professional trackers, and hostile while settlers. Their story is a truly moving tale of defiance and resilience.
Black Water
Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory
Published in 2020
The son of a Cree father and a non-Indigenous mother, Robertson was raised with virtually no knowledge or understanding of his family's Indigenous roots. His father, Don, spent his early childhood on a trapline in the bush northeast of Norway House, Manitoba, where his first teacher was the land. When his family was moved permanently to a nearby reserve, Don was not permitted to speak Cree at school unless in secret with his friends and lost the knowledge he had been gifted. His mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town with not a single Indigenous family in it. Then Don arrived, and they fell in love. Structured around a father-son journey to the northern trapline where Robertson and his father will reclaim their connection to the land, this is the story of another journey: a young man seeking to understand his father's story, to come to terms with his lifelong experience with anxiety, and to finally piece together his own blood memory.
Becoming Story
Published in 2022
A gently powerful memoir about deepening your relationship with your homeland For the first time in more than twenty-five years, Greg Sarris-whose novels are esteemed alongside those of Louise Erdrich and Stephen Graham Jones-presents a book about his own life. In Becoming Story he asks: What does it mean to be truly connected to the place you call home-to walk where innumerable generations of your ancestors have walked? And what does it mean when you dedicate your life to making that connection even deeper? Moving between his childhood and the present day, Sarris creates a kaleidoscopic narrative about the forces that shaped his early years and his eventual work as a tribal leader. He considers the deep past, historical traumas, and possible futures of his homeland. His acclaimed storytelling skills are in top form here, and he charts his journey in prose that is humorous, searching, and profound. A gently powerful memoir, Becoming Story is also a master class in the art of belonging to the place where you live.
Come Home, Indio
A Memoir
Published in 2020
"A brutally honest but charming look at the pain of childhood and the alienation and anxiety of early adulthood. In his memoir, we are invited to walk through the life of the author, Jim Terry, as he struggles to find security and comfort in an often hostile environment. Between the Ho-Chunk community of his Native American family in Wisconsin and his schoolmates in the Chicago suburbs, he tries in vain to fit in and eventually turns to alcohol to provide an escape from increasing loneliness and alienation. Terry also shares with the reader in exquisite detail the process by which he finds hope and gets sober, as well as the powerful experience of finding something to believe in and to belong to at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance at Standing Rock."--Amazon.
From the Ashes
My Story of Being Indigenous, Homeless, and Finding My Way
Published in 2021
In his memoir, Jesse Thistle writes about his experiences as a child abandoned by his parents and placed in foster care, his self-destructive cycle of drug addiction, petty crime and homelessness, and how he managed to turn his life around through education and perseverance.
One Story, One Song
Published in 2015
"Readers have embraced Richard Wagamese's writing for its honesty, its piercing beauty and its wisdom. "In quiet tones and luminous language," said the Winnipeg Free Press of his celebrated bestseller, One Native Life, "Wagamese shares his hurts and joys, inviting readers to find the ways in which they are joined to him and to consider how they might be joined to others."
My Body Is a Book of Rules
Published in 2014
As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren't threatening her life, they're shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Sifting through the scraps of her past in seventeen formally inventive chapters, Washuta aligns the strictures of her Catholic school education with Cosmopolitan's mandates for womanhood, views memories through the distorting lens of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and contrasts her bipolar highs and lows with those of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain. Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain, My Body Is a Book of Rules pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility.
White Magic
Essays
Published in 2021
"Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life-Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham-to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule"-- Provided by publisher.