National Native American Heritage Month

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.

Dragonfly Dance is a collection of poems remarkable for their candor and sense of catharsis. Writing from the vantage point of an American Indian women, Denise Lajimodiere opens a door into the lives of Native girls and women. Her poems often reflect the deep tensions between Native culture and white culture.

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great-grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

This collection, including poems from her early chapbooks as well as later writing, was first announced in 1994. The title poem, she says, is not only sexually suggestive, but alludes to the idea of a forked tongue liar or a gossip from which many of the other pieces derive.

In Cheryl Savageau's new book of poetry, Mother/Land, she radically re-maps New England as Native American space. Savageau retells and re-imagines creation stories, revealing a landscape of trees, ponds, rivers and mountains rich in meaning for Abenaki people, and weaves traditional, personal and family stories, with stories of colonization and resistance. Savageau's "unhistory" tells the stories of her people without privileging the moment of contact with Europe as the defining moment for viewing the culture.

Native traditions scrape against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, an interweaving painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. Poet Sherwin Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race. At the same time, he comes from a traditional indigenous family, and Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine (Navajo) myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, his poems draw variously upon medicine song and contemporary language and poetics.

In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization. Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images--the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log--that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing.

Editor and poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke assembles this multilingual collection of Indigenous American poetry, joining voices old and new in songs of witness and reclamation. Unprecedented in scope, Sing gathers more than eighty poets from across the Americas, covering territory that stretches from Alaska to Chile, and features familiar names like Sherwin Bitsui, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Lee Maracle, and Simon Ortiz alongside international poets--both emerging and acclaimed--from regions underrepresented in anthologies.

The author draws on her Native American heritage to offer poems combining elements of storytelling, prayer, and song.

Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little-known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England's Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions.

This is the first anthology to bring together Diné writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose into a single collection of Navajo literature. The book includes author biographies and interviews with a selections of the writers' most important creative work, as well as a chronology and resources for teachers and readers.

Anthology of Native women's contemporary theater bringing together works from established and new playwrights. This collection, representing a rich diversity of Native communities, showcases the exciting range of Native women's theater today from the dynamic fusion of storytelling, ceremony, music and dance to the bold experimentation of poetic stream of consciousness and Native agitprop.

This is one of a series of brief anthologies designed for ethnic, multicultural and American literature courses. The series aims to introduce undergraduates to the rich but often neglected literary contributions of established and newer ethnic writers to American literature. Each text is organized chronologically by genre and represents a wide range of literature. An introduction provides an historical overview and a celebration of the diversity within each ethnic group. It also addresses the general literary concerns students are likely to encounter in their readings.

This anthology of fiction, prose, and poetry celebrates the rich diversity of writing by Native American women today. Editors Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe have gathered stories from across the nation that celebrate, record, and explore Native American women's roles in community. The result is a rich tapestry that contains work by established writers along with emerging and first-time authors.

Anna Thunder, a Sioux living in North Dakota, is the central character in this novel that tells the generational stories of Anna's family. Set on a North Dakota reservation, The Grass Dancer reveals the harsh price of unfulfilled longings and the healing power of mystery and hope.

A fresh, funny look at growing up Native in the North, by award-winning author Richard Van Camp. Larry is a Dogrib Indian growing up in the small northern town of Fort Simmer. His tongue, his hallucinations and his fantasies are hotter than the sun. At sixteen, he loves Iron Maiden, the North and Juliet Hope, the high school "tramp." When Johnny Beck, a Metis from Hay River, moves to town, Larry is ready for almost anything. In this powerful and often very funny first novel, Richard Van Camp gives us one of the most original teenage characters in fiction. Skinny as spaghetti, nervy and self-deprecating, Larry is an appealing mixture of bravado and vulnerability. His past holds many terrors: an abusive father, blackouts from sniffing gasoline, an accident that killed several of his cousins. But through his friendship with Johnny, he's ready now to face his memories--and his future. Marking the debut of an exciting new writer, The Lesser Blessed is an eye-opening depiction of what it is to be a young Native man in the age of AIDS, disillusionment with Catholicism and a growing world consciousness.

Mean Spirit tells the story of a government official who learned to honor his Native American heritage and fall in love with its people through the investigation of Grace Banket: a young woman who was once the richest person in her territory, until the greed of white men led to her murder and a future of uncertainty for her family. What the official found has been documented by history: rampant fraud, intimidation, and murder. But he also found something truly extraordinary--his deepest self and abiding love for his people, and their brave past.

With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. The community leadearship loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.

The lovely & surprising coming-of-age story of Morning Girl & Star Boy, Arawak Indians on the eve of Columbus's exploration of the West Indies.

From New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a novel that is equal parts psychological horror and cutting social commentary on identity politics and the American Indian experience. Fans of Jordan Peele and Tommy Orange will love this story as it follows the lives of four American Indian men and their families, all haunted by a disturbing, deadly event that took place in their youth. Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Linda Hogan, Solar Storms tells the moving story of Angela Jenson, a troubled Native American girl coming of age in the foster system in Oklahoma, who decides to reunite with her family. Harrowing, lyrical, and boldly incisive, Solar Storms is a powerful examination of the clashes between cultures and traumatic repercussions that have shaped American history.

A wondrous and shattering novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. There There is 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.

Michael Dorris has crafted a fierce saga of three generations of Native American women, beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of kinship. Starting in the present day and moving backward, the novel is told in the voices of the three women.