Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2024 - Nonfiction by Indigenous Authors
- Sara M.
- Thursday, January 25
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.
New Native Kitchen
Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian
Published in 2021
"From Freddie Bitsoie, the former executive chef at Mitsitam Native Foods Cafae at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and James Beard Award-winning author James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen is a celebration of Indigenous cuisine.Accompanied by original artwork by Gabriella Trujillo and offering delicious dishes like Cherrystone Clam Soup from the Northeastern Wampanoag and Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin from the Pueblo peoples, Bitsoie showcases the variety of flavor and culinary history on offer from coast to coast, providing modern interpretations of 100 recipes that have long fed this country"-- Provided by publisher.
Native
Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God
Published in 2020
"Drawing on her Native American heritage, Kaitlin Curtice shares her journey toward a better self-understanding, showing how her sense of nativeness both informs and challenges her Christian faith"-- Provided by publisher.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Published in 2014
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. As the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them."
A Mind Spread out on the Ground
Published in 2020
"The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes thrilling connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political. A national bestseller in Canada, this updated and expanded American edition helps us better understand legacy, oppression, and racism throughout North America, and offers us a profound new way to decolonize our minds."-- Amazon..
Dwellings
A Spiritual History of the Living World
Published in 2007
"'We want to live as if there is no other place,' Hogan tells us, 'as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life.' In offering praise to sky, earth, water, and animals, she calls us to witness how each living thing is alive in a conscious world with its own integrity, grace, and dignity. In Dwellings, Hogan takes us on a spiritual quest borne out of the deep past and offers a more hopeful future as she seeks new visions and lights ancient fires."-- From Amazon.
Notable Native People
50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present
Published in 2021
"An accessible and educational illustrated book profiling 50 notable American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people, from NBA star Kyrie Irving of the Standing Rock Lakota to Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation"-- Provided by publisher.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Published in 2013
"An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as "the younger brothers of creation." As she explores these themes she circles toward a central argument: the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return"-- Provided by publisher.
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
Published in 2021
"Mays explores the relationship and differences between the Black American quest for freedom and the Native American struggle for sovereignty in the U.S"-- Provided by publisher.
Wild Girls
How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation
Published in 2023
A National Book Award-winning, New York Times best-selling historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America. Harriet Tubman, forced to labour outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World's Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls also brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sakakawea and Pocahontas, and to under-appreciated figures like Gertrude Bonin, Dolores Huerta and Grace Lee Boggs. For the girls at the centre of this book, woods, rivers, ball courts and streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude but also space to envision new spheres of action. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, this book evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them-and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for girls of every race and class today.
Brother Eagle, Sister Sky
A Message from Chief Seattle
Published in 1991
A Suquamish Indian chief describes his people's respect and love for the earth, and concern for its destruction.
The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen
Published in 2017
"Here is real food--our indigenous American fruits and vegetables, the wild and foraged ingredients, game and fish. Locally sourced, seasonal, "clean" ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare--no fry bread or Indian tacos here--and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef's healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut-maple bites. The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen is a rich education and a delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with a vision and approach to food that travels well beyond those borders"-- Provided by publisher.
Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask
Published in 2023
A revised and updated edition of a modern classic offers answers to nearly 200 essential and thought-provoking questions about the Native people of North America. What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you feel like you should already know the answers-or are concerned that your questions may be offensive? For more than a decade, Anton Treuer's clear, candid, and informative book has answered questions for tens of thousands of readers. This revised edition both revisits old questions from a new perspective and expands on topics that have become increasingly relevant over the past decade, including activism and tribal enrollment; truth and reconciliation efforts; gender roles and identities in Indigenous communities; the status of Alaskan Natives and Canadian First Nations; and much more. Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist, addresses nearly 200 questions on a range of topics-questions that are thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, and always interesting. -What are we supposed to call North America's first people? -Can white people dance at powwows? -What's the point of land acknowledgments? -Does tribal sovereignty mean that tribes can offer abortion services in states where it is now otherwise illegal? With frank, funny, and sometimes personal prose, this book cuts through myths, guilt, and anger and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.
Making Love with the Land
Essays
Published in 2022
"In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly-even joyfully-maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial"-- Provided by publisher.
Sand Talk
Published in 2020
A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability?and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta's writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It's about how we learn and how we remember. It's about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It's about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it's about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.