Native American Poetry

Dreams of the Golden Eagle, a novel in rhyming narrative verse, is a must-listen for lovers of high Native American adventure who will enjoy its action-packed storylines and clarity of image. Set immediately prior to the onset of the Indian Wars, this stirring Native American adventure involves a web of murder, mystery, intrigue, betrayal, love, hatred, and revenge as a far-sighted and fearless chief, in collaboration with the tribal totem, the Golden Eagle, strives to create an alliance between the warring tribes in a concerted effort to thwart the White invasion.

Thirty years ago, tribal college educator and poet Thomas Davis began writing poems about the tribal college movement, beginning with the founding of College of Menominee Nation in Northern Wisconsin. He had no intention of developing a book out of the poems, using napkins and scraps of papers to create a mostly free verse poetry that chronicled the events and people trying to build a new kind of educational system that would preserve and evolve Indigenous language, history, and culture. Davis gave these poems away and many were lost. Until now.

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY “This is an incredibly powerful book of poetry that is also fiction but it is so real, and singular, as to defy definition, and I defy anyone to read it and come away unchanged.” —Tommy Orange, author...

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey...

The text relates the powerful and dramatic history of the Smoky Mountain Cherokees, who for 40,000 years thrived in the difficult terrain of the Great Smoky Mountains and its surrounding regions areas of what is now Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.