Contemporary Indigenous Authorship: Contemporary Writing
Indigenous Voices
"Culture is all about the stories—whose stories are being told and how those stories are being framed. Whether or not they realize it, from the time they are small children, all people hear cultural stories that set their expectations from there on out. Colonization seizes control of the stories, their tellings, and their framework, reworking them to suit the convenience of the invader. No people go extinct, however, so long as they tell their own stories their own way. It is only when the stories stop, that the people die. Thus, the question is, WHO GETS TO SET THE INDIAN STORY FRAME, the conqueror or the First Peoples?"
Mann, B. A. (2019). Rejecting the European paradigm: Restoring Native American identity stories.
In The American Mosaic: The American Indian Experience. Retrieved from http://americanindian2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1521179
And so we draw your attention to the #ownvoices of contemporary Indigenous authors as they share their stories in novel, prose, and realities.
Writing About Writing
So You Want to Write about American Indians? by
So You Want to Write about American Indians? is the first of its kind--an indispensable guide for anyone interested in writing and publishing a novel, memoir, collection of short stories, history, or ethnography involving the Indigenous peoples of the United States. In clear language illustrated with examples--many from her own experiences--Choctaw scholar and writer Devon Abbott Mihesuah explains the basic steps involved with writing about American Indians. So You Want to Write about American Indians? provides a concise overview of the different types of fiction and nonfiction books written about Natives and the common challenges and pitfalls encountered when writing each type of book. Mihesuah presents a list of ethical guidelines to follow when researching and writing about Natives, including the goals of the writer, stereotypes to avoid, and cultural issues to consider. She also offers helpful tips for developing ideas and researching effectively, submitting articles to journals, drafting effective book proposals, finding inspiration, contacting an editor, polishing a manuscript, preparing a persuasive résumé or curriculum vitae, coping with rejection, and negotiating a book contract.
Call Number: PN 146 M54 2005ISBN: 9780803282988Publication Date: 2005-04-01
Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by ISBN: 9781550597165Publication Date: 2018
Select Book Titles by Indigenous Authors
The Faster Redder Road by
This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones's novels--including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, and The Gospel of Z--and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones's contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.'s introduction puts Jones on the literary map.
ISBN: 9780826355836Publication Date: 2015
Robogenesis by
The stunningly creative, epic sequel to Wilson's blockbuster thriller and New York Times bestseller Robopocalypse "The machine is still out there. Still alive." Humankind had triumphed over the machines. At the end of Robopocalypse, the modern world was largely devastated, humankind was pressed to the point of annihilation, and the earth was left in tatters . . . but the master artificial intelligence presence known as Archos had been killed. In Robogenesis, we see that Archos has survived. Spread across the far reaches of the world, the machine code has fragmented into millions of pieces, hiding and regrouping. In a series of riveting narratives, Robogenesis explores the fates of characters new and old, robotic and human, as they fight to build a new world in the wake of a devastating war. Readers will bear witness as survivors find one another, form into groups, and react to a drastically different (and deadly) technological landscape. All the while, the remnants of Archos's shattered intelligence are seeping deeper into new breeds of machines, mounting a war that will not allow for humans to win again. Daniel H. Wilson makes a triumphant return to the apocalyptic world he created, for an action-filled, raucous, very smart thrill ride about humanity and technology pushed to the tipping point.
ISBN: 9780385537094Publication Date: 2014
The Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories by
2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.
ISBN: 9781487001278Publication Date: 2017
Trail of Lightning by
2019 LOCUS AWARD WINNER, BEST FIRST NOVEL 2019 HUGO AWARD FINALIST, BEST NOVEL Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novel "Someone please cancel Supernatural already and give us at least five seasons of this badass indigenous monster-hunter and her silver-tongued sidekick." --The New York Times "An excitingly novel tale." --Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse and Midnight Crossroads series "Fun, terrifying, hilarious, and brilliant." --Daniel José Older, New York Times bestselling author of Shadowshaper and Star Wars: Last Shot "[C]rafts a powerful and fiercely personal journey through a compelling postapocalyptic landscape." --Kate Elliott, New York Times bestselling author of Court of Fives and Black Wolves While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive. Welcome to the Sixth World.
ISBN: 9781534413498Publication Date: 2018
Storm of Locusts by
Kai and Caleb Goodacre have been kidnapped just as rumors of a cult sweeping across the reservation leads Maggie and Hastiin to investigate an outpost, and what they find there will challenge everything they've come to know in this action-packed sequel to Trail of Lightning. It's been four weeks since the bloody showdown at Black Mesa, and Maggie Hoskie, Diné monster hunter, is trying to make the best of things. Only her latest bounty hunt has gone sideways, she's lost her only friend, Kai Arviso, and she's somehow found herself responsible for a girl with a strange clan power. Then the Goodacre twins show up at Maggie's door with the news that Kai and the youngest Goodacre, Caleb, have fallen in with a mysterious cult, led by a figure out of Navajo legend called the White Locust. The Goodacres are convinced that Kai's a true believer, but Maggie suspects there's more to Kai's new faith than meets the eye. She vows to track down the White Locust, then rescue Kai and make things right between them. Her search leads her beyond the Walls of Dinétah and straight into the horrors of the Big Water world outside. With the aid of a motley collection of allies, Maggie must battle body harvesters, newborn casino gods and, ultimately, the White Locust himself. But the cult leader is nothing like she suspected, and Kai might not need rescuing after all. When the full scope of the White Locust's plans are revealed, Maggie's burgeoning trust in her friends, and herself, will be pushed to the breaking point, and not everyone will survive.
ISBN: 9781534413528Publication Date: 2019
Select Book Titles by Indigenous Authors
The Round House by
The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction. One of the most revered novelists of our time--a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life--Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. Riveting and suspenseful, arguably the most accessible novel to date from the creator of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrich's The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction--at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.
ISBN: 9780062065247Publication Date: 2012
Heart Berries by
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018 A New York Times Editor's Choice Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection "A sledgehammer. . . . Her experiments with structure and language . . . are in the service of trying to find new ways to think about the past, trauma, repetition and reconciliation, which might be a way of saying a new model for the memoir." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small... What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined." --Roxane Gay, author of Hunger Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band 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. "I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot's deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words - but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say... [T]he writing is so good it's hard not to temporarily be distracted from the content or narrative by its brilliance...Perhaps, because this author so generously allows us to be her witness, we are somehow able to see ourselves more clearly and become better witnesses to ourselves." --Emma Watson, Official March/April selection for Our Shared Shelf Named One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2018 by: Goodreads Esquire Entertainment Weekly ELLE Cosmopolitan Huffington Post B*tch NYLON Buzzfeed Bustle The Rumpus The New York Public Library
ISBN: 1619023342Publication Date: 2018
Mapping the Interior by
Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones brings readers a spine-tingling Native American horror novella.Walking through his own house at night, a fifteen-year-old thinks he sees another person stepping through a doorway. Instead of the people who could be there, his mother or his brother, the figure reminds him of his long-gone father, who died mysteriously before his family left the reservation. When he follows it he discovers his house is bigger and deeper than he knew. The house is the kind of wrong place where you can lose yourself and find things you'd rather not have. Over the course of a few nights, chasing the ghost of his father and the promise of his Native American heritage, the boy tries to map out his house in an effort that puts his little brother in the worst danger, and puts him in the position to save his family . . . at terrible cost.
ISBN: 076539510XPublication Date: 2017
Braiding Sweetgrass by
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. InBraiding 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.
ISBN: 9781571313355Publication Date: 2013
Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction by
In this first-ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction Grace Dillon collects some of the finest examples of the craft with contributions by Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors. The collection includes seminal authors such as Gerald Vizenor, historically important contributions often categorized as "magical realism" by authors like Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie, and authors more recognizable to science fiction fans like William Sanders and Stephen Graham Jones. Dillon's engaging introduction situates the pieces in the larger context of science fiction and its conventions. Organized by sub-genre, the book starts with Native slipstream, stories infused with time travel, alternate realities and alternative history like Vizenor's "Custer on the Slipstream." Next up are stories about contact with other beings featuring, among others, an excerpt from Gerry William's The Black Ship. Dillon includes stories that highlight Indigenous science like a piece from Archie Weller's Land of the Golden Clouds, asserting that one of the roles of Native science fiction is to disentangle that science from notions of "primitive" knowledge and myth. The fourth section calls out stories of apocalypse like William Sanders' "When This World Is All on Fire" and a piece from Zainab Amadahy's The Moons of Palmares. The anthology closes with examples of biskaabiiyang, or "returning to ourselves," bringing together stories like Eden Robinson's "Terminal Avenue" and a piece from Robert Sullivan's Star Waka. An essential book for readers and students of both Native literature and science fiction, Walking the Clouds is an invaluable collection. It brings together not only great examples of Native science fiction from an internationally-known cast of authors, but Dillon's insightful scholarship sheds new light on the traditions of imagining an Indigenous future.
ISBN: 9780816529827Publication Date: 2012
Whereas by
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. --from "WHEREAS Statements" WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
ISBN: 9781555977672Publication Date: 2017
Perma Red by
One of the top 10 picks for the July/August Book Sense 76. Louise White Elk dreams of both belonging and escape, and of discovering love and freedom on her own terms. But she is a red-haired, tough, and beautiful temptation, and at least three men, each more dangerous than the other, want to control and possess her: Police Officer Charlie Kicking Woman, who struggles between worlds; charismatic but scary Baptiste, who refuses to yield to anyone; and Harvey Stoner, who owns nearly everything. On the reservation, danger looms everywhere, rising out of fear and anger, deprivation, hunger, and poverty. But just as often for Louise, and for those she loves, danger arises from longing and desire. And from making a choice. Perma Red is a love-crossed saga about a young woman coming of age under perilous circumstances, and about the consequences of her often contradictory desires. In this breathtaking tale of the American West, a tragic love story unfolds against a classic clash of cultures. In the tradition of Michael Dorris's Yellow Raft in Blue Water and the novels of Louise Erdrich, Perma Red is an enthralling, devastating debut by a commanding new voice.
ISBN: 9780399148996Publication Date: 2002
Indigenous Storywork by
Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with Coast Salish Elders and storytellers, who shared both traditional and personal life-experience stories, in order to develop ways of bringing storytelling into educational contexts. Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.
ISBN: 9780774814010Publication Date: 2008
Select Poetry by Indigenous Authors
Raven Eye by
Written from thirteen years of journals, psychic and earthly, this poetry maps an uprising of a borderland indigenous woman battling forces of racism and sexual violence against Native women and children. This lyric collection breaks new ground, skillfully revealing an unseen narrative of resistance on the Mexico-U.S. border. A powerful blend of the oral and long poem, and speaking into the realm of global movements, these poems explore environmental injustice, sexualized violence, and indigenous women's lives. These complex and necessary themes are at the heart of award-winning poet Margo Tamez's second book of poetry. Her poems bring forth experiences of a raced and gendered life along the border. Tamez engages the experiences of an indigenous life, refusing labels of Mexican or Native American as social constructs of a colonized people. This book is a challenging cartography of colonialism, poverty, and issues of Native identity and demonstrates these as threats to the environment, both ecological and social, in the borderlands. Each poem is crafted as if it were a minute prayer, dense with compassion and unerring optimism. But the hope that Tamez serves is not blind. In poem after poem, she draws us into a space ruled by mythic symbolism and the ebb and flow of the landscape--a place where comfort is compromised and where we must work to relearn the nature of existence and the value of life.
ISBN: 9780816525652Publication Date: 2007-03-29
- Academy of American Poets In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, check out this selection of poems, essays, books, and more by and about Native American poets.
Doubters and Dreamers by
Doubters and Dreamers opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned "in jest" before UC Berkeley's annual Big Game against Stanford: "What's a debacle, Mom?" This innocent but telling question marks the girl's entrée into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk'auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould, and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation, retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother's tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past. In the first half of the book, "Tribal History," Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt, who grew up when "muleback was the customary mode / of transport" and the "spirit world was present"--stories of "old ways" and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere, she remembers her mother's "ferocious, upright anger" and her unexpected tenderness ("Like a miracle, I was still her child"), culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem "Our Mother's Death." In the second half of the book, "It Was Raining," Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and "unfulfilled dreams" as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her "crazy longings" as a lesbian: "It's been hammered into me / that I'll be spurned / by a 'real woman,' / the only kind I like." The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair, doubt and devotion, veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time, Doubters and Dreamers explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban, lesbian, and middle class in the West.
ISBN: 9780816501298Publication Date: 2011
Evidence of Red: poems and prose by
Winner Of The 2006 Oklahoma Book Awards Evidence of Red: Prose and Poems rails against lost lands and lovers, heralds death and mad warriors, and celebrates a doomed love affair between Hollywood's invented characters: "Noble Savage" and "Indian Sports Mascot." The author, a Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma writes about modern life in America, as well as the strange and humorous encounters she's had with Arabs in Syria, and Jews in Israel. She writes of growing up in a family of native storytellers who tell of their lives and experiences.
ISBN: 9781844710621Publication Date: 2005
Bright Raft in the Afterweather: Poems by
In her dazzling new book, Jennifer Elise Foerster announces a frightening new truth: "the continent is dismantling." Bright Raft in the Afterweather travels the spheres of the past, present, future, and eternal time, exploring the fault lines that signal the break of humanity's consciousness from the earth. Featuring recurring characters, settings, and motifs from her previous book, Leaving Tulsa, Foerster takes the reader on a solitary journey to the edges of the continents of mind and time to discover what makes us human. Along the way, the author surveys the intersection between natural landscapes and the urban world, baring parallels to the conflicts between Native American peoples and Western colonizers, and considering how imagination and representation can both destroy and remake our worlds. Foerster's captivating language and evocative imagery immerse the reader in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. Each poem blends Foerster's refined use of language with a mythic and environmental lyricism as she explores themes of destruction, spirituality, loss, and remembrance. In a world wrought with ecological imbalance and grief, Foerster shows how from the devastated land of our alienation there is potential to reconnect to our origins and redefine the terms by which we inhabit humanity and the earth.
ISBN: 9780816537334Publication Date: 2018- Whereas by
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. --from "WHEREAS Statements" WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
ISBN: 9781555977672Publication Date: 2017
An American Sunrise: poems by
In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. 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. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.
ISBN: 9781324003861Publication Date: 2019-08-13
Recommendations from Tacoma Public Library
- Tacoma Reads: General ListCreated by the Tacoma Public Library: Continue the conversation started by Tacoma Reads 2019. Discover these titles at Tacoma Public Library that explore various Native American experiences and cultures.
- Tacoma Reads: List for Teens & TweensA list of reading recommendations for teens and tweens, selected by the Tacoma Public Library staff.
- Tacoma Reads: List for Kids & FamiliesA list of reading recommendations for kids and families, selected by the Tacoma Public Library staff.