Picks for Your Bookshelf by Indigenous Authors in Honor of National Native American Heritage Month
By Copper HQ
Celebrated annually in the U.S. during the month of November, it’s time to observe Native American Heritage Month! At Copper, we recognize the power that books have in changing our world. We hope you take the time to change your own personal world by reading the works of Indigenous authors — may you expand your perspective, learn more about the true history of this country, and enjoy the gorgeous storytelling that has been gifted to us by so many diverse members of so many diverse Native nations. Did you know that there are more than 500 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States?
This month is an opportunity to recognize both the challenges and triumphs of Native Americans throughout history and today. An opportunity to raise awareness. An opportunity to celebrate the rich cultures, traditions, histories, and resiliency of the Native people who were here first.
See below for some of Copper’s book recommendations for your reading list National Native American Heritage Month 2021 and beyond. Hit us up on Instagram or Twitter @copper.books to let us know what other books by Indigenous authors we should add to our nightstand!
- ‘Carry’ by Toni Jensen
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. 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. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country. (Source: Penguin Random House)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/native-american-heritage-month/
2. ‘There There’ by Tommy Orange
There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of America. Tommy Orange’s novel grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. (Source: Penguin Random House)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/native-american-heritage-month/
3. ‘Ceremony’ by Leslie Marmon Silko
Almost forty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature — a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power. (Source: Penguin Random House)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/native-american-heritage-month/
4. ‘Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In this luminous and wise book, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi Nation) makes a lyrical and convincing case for reimagining our relationship to nature as mutually beneficial. Taking the reader from her classroom to her lab to her (enviably abundant) garden to a rainforest in Oregon, Kimmerer demonstrates time and again how working with the land, as opposed to shaping it to one’s purpose, is a method rooted in Indigenous tradition and borne out by science. Brimming with knowledge and a deep love for the natural world, Braiding Sweetgrass is a hopeful guide to a better future for all life on our planet and an absolute joy to read. (Source: Powell’s Books)
https://www.powells.com/book/-9781571313560
5. ‘A Mind Spread Out on the Ground’ by Alicia Elliott
Publisher Comments: 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. (Source: Powell’s Books) https://www.powells.com/book/-9781612198668
