Native Indian

A Time Must-Read Book of 2025 From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, a sweeping, personal exploration of Indigenous identity and the challenges facing Indigenous people around the world. Before Martha’s Vineyard became one of the most iconic vacation destinations in the country, it was home...

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the '60s and '70s.

Renowned author Joseph Bruchac tells a powerful story of a girl who learns more about her Penacook heritage while sheltering in place with her grandparents during the coronavirus pandemic. Malian loves spending time with her grandparents at their home on a Wabanaki reservation—she’s there...

Luther Standing Bear was seemingly everywhere in the course of his extraordinary life. He met Chief Crazy Horse on the eve of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was enrolled in the first class at the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School, witnessed the Ghost Dance movement, toured the US and Europe with showman Buffalo Bill, and devoted his later years to Indian rights. His firsthand accounts of those experiences—and his reflections on Sioux culture, customs, and traditions—combine to make this narrative a landmark of Native American literature.

Here's an amusing collection of Dakota-Sioux fables, often featuring the vain and mischievous imp Iktomi. Fables such as these were told to Dakota-Sioux children for entertainment but also to teach through negative example the importance of honor, modesty, manners, and other aspects of a noble Indian lifestyle.

This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early 16th to the early 21st century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then - in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion - as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.

Finalist for the Washington State Book Award From the award-winning author of The Mushroom Hunters comes the story of an iconic fish, perhaps the last great wild food: salmon. For some, a salmon evokes the distant wild, thrashing in the jaws of a hungry grizzly bear on TV. For others...

The seventh novel in the acclaimed Sean Stranahan mystery series: Scarecrows are appearing in the cliffs above the Smith River in Montana, and state investigator Harold Little Feather is trying to discover the culprit leaving the hay figures in the cliffs, with signs painted that read "No Smith River Mine - Not on My Watch." The event is related to a copper mine project that threatens the river, but his investigation takes an ominous turn when a little girl claims that a scarecrow chased her in the night.

Dark figures in the night. An owl's cry on the wind. Monsters watching from the edge of the wood. Some of the creatures in this book might only have a message for you, but some are the stuff of nightmares. These 32 short stories - from tales passed down for generations to accounts that could have happened yesterday - are collected from the thriving tradition of ghost stories from American Indian cultures across North America. Prepare for stories of witches and walking dolls, hungry skeletons, la llorona, and deer woman, and other supernatural beings ready to chill you to the bone.

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) was a mixed-blood Sioux. He became one of the best known Indians of his time, receiving a bachelor of science degree from Dartmouth in 1887 and a medical degree from Boston University three years later.

During the early twentieth century, the American government’s standing expectation was that Native Americans should be adopting Western customs. In the face of that prospect, anthropologist and musicologist Frances Densmore sought to preserve Native American culture—particularly as it was expressed through music. In her extensive writings on Native American lifestyles, music, and history, Densmore opened a window onto American experiences that had been obscured by stereotypes, and encouraged a better appreciation of the varied traditions of tribes nationwide.

First published in 1970 and long out of print, The Indians Won is a stunning work of speculative fiction that imagines that, following the defeat of Custer and Benteen at the Little Bighorn in 1876, the many Indigenous tribes of America formed an alliance to sweep the whites out of the center of the country and form a new nation, bounded on both coasts by the United States. One hundred years later the two nations, having taken very different paths toward stewardship of the land and resources, are on the brink of war again.

In 1673 the first European explorers to travel down the Mississippi River spot on the high, sheer bluffs the painting of a huge, winged monster. Where does it come from? Why did somebody take the trouble and risk to paint it on the bluff face? The Indians told them the terrifying story of a man-eating, dragon-like creature, and the brave chief who killed it.

A biography of America’s greatest all-around athlete that “goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe’s life, using extensive research, historical nuance, and bittersweet honesty” (Los Angeles Times), by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered. Jim...

Alaska aviation entrepreneur Finn Grant died in the fiery crash of his Piper Super Cub. Someone sabotaged his engine, and virtually everyone in southwestern Alaska has a motive, including his betrayed wife, his bullied children, and Liam’s wife, bush pilot Wyanet Chouinard. With few places to turn, Liam asks his former mentor Niniltna post commander Sergeant Jim Chopin, for help, and Jim quickly brings Kate onto the case. Working undercover as - of all things - a waitress at Bill’s Bar and Grill, Kate learns over beer and burgers that Grant’s business had expanded meteorically over the last two years.

In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.

New York Times bestselling author Dana Stabenow's latest, Bad Blood, finds Kate Shugak entangled in a bitter tribal rivalry and murder In Alaska, one hundred years of bad blood between the villages of Kushtaka and Kuskulana come to a boil when the body of a young Kushtaka ne'er-do-well is found...

An original, insightful recounting of an Indian boyhood with specific descriptions of the life, practices, nomadic movements, killings, warfare with other tribes, courtship, coming of age, and more. The best insight into true and accurate 19th-century Indian life from an insider, of a boy and young brave coming of age.

This synthesis of Indian-white relations west of the Appalachians from the end of the French and Indian War to the beginning of the Mexican War is not simply a story of whites versus Indians. The term "whites" encompassed British, Spanish, and American settlers and governments, and the hundreds of Indian tribes who opposed them were no more unified than their European colonizers.

An unlikely love story of a Cree maiden from Canada's James Bay and a descendant of the first settlers of Northern Canada who came from the Orkneys of Scotland to work for the Hudson Bay Company 300 years ago. A bittersweet tale of love, redemption, wisdom, racist attitudes, and marginalization of Canada's First Nations women spanning 300 years into the present days of missing and murdered aboriginal women.