Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Indigenous Stories

Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders, and she has since emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. In We Will Be Jaguars, she partners with her husband, Mitch Anderson, founder of Amazon Frontlines, digging into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, and hacking away at racist notions of indigenous peoples.--Description from NoveList

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. (Description from catalog.)

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territoty, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history ... Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. (Description from catalog.)

Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting on Native American boarding schools from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, the author traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.
(Description from NoveList)

The author presents a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.
(Description from NoveList)

Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. With World War II raging in Europe, the inn is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war.
(Description from catalog)

Abe Jacobs is Kanien’kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne—or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. Now forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease—one his doctors in Miami believe will kill him. Running from his diagnosis and a failing marriage, Abe returns to the Rez, where he’s persuaded to undergo a healing at the hands of his Great Uncle Budge.
(Description from NoveList)

On the surface, Alice is exactly where she should be in life: she's just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Dawn. Her ever-charming husband Steve is nothing but supportive and they've just moved into a new home in a wealthy neighborhood in Toronto, a generous gift from her in-laws. But Alice could not feel like more of an imposter. She isn't connecting with Dawn, a struggle made even more difficult by the recent loss of her own mother, and every waking moment is spent hiding her despair from Steve and their picture-perfect neighbors, amongst whom she's the sole Indigenous resident.
(Description from catalog)

A historical novel based on the life of the National Book Award-winning author’s grandfather traces the experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights. (Description from NoveList.)

It's 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women, presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine's father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church-a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But she does her best as a devoted daughter, until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.
(Description from catalog)

A young Native American boy in a splintering family grasps for stability and love, making all the wrong choices until he finds a space of his own.
(Description from catalog)

A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow.
(Description from NoveList)

When the facts surrounding her boyfriend Roddy's apparent suicide don't add up, Noemi, suspecting something sinister is stalking their tribal lands, relies on help from her uncle, who has returned to the reservation, bringing with him secrets, horror and what might be the key to determining Roddy's true cause of death.--Description by NoveList

Both on and off the rez, interlinked characters contend with history and identity as contemporary members of the Seneca Nation. (Description from NoveList.)

Orange delivers a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. A multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.
(Description from catalog)

The story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Maetis women and the land and bison that surround them.
(Description from Amazon)

Years after a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky's community is running out of resources in remote northern Ontario. Evan and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nangohns, lead a small scouting party to their traditional home on the north shore of Lake Huron, to discover what kind of life--and what dangers--still exist in the lands to the south. (Description from NoveList)

When a small town needs her help in finding a missing girl, Maggie Hoskie, a Dinetah monster hunter, reluctantly enlists the help of an unconventional medicine man to uncover the terrifying truth behind the disappearance and her own past. (Description from NoveList.)

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal.
(Description from catalog)