IN his book The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969, UNM Press), the late Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday writes, āA word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.ā
Words give origin to better understanding, too, of someone elseās lived experience, whether that person comes from the same background as you or not.
To celebrate National Native American Heritage Month, Pasatiempo presents an opportunity, through an array of Native-written books, to support and immerse yourself in Indigenous history and wisdom and to revel in Indigenous storytelling from across several Native communities.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer, illustrated by John Burgoyne, Scribner, 128 pages
Fans of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2015) and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003) will rejoice at the news of this new book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, released November 19. The book is beautifully illustrated by John Burgoyne and speaks of ways to remodel our consumer economy through generosity, kindness, and mutuality. Wall Kimmerer reminds us that what we think and the stories we tell others and ourselves shape our lives, and that we can change things if we learn to think differently.
Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi botanist, author, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Wendy Red Star: BĆilukaa
By Wendy Red Star (text and illustrations), Radius Books, 2023, 224 pages (140 images)
Wendy Red Star is a multimedia artist and photographer and an enrolled member of the ApsƔalooke (Crow) Tribe. She is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and has exhibited her art across the country and abroad. This year, her work was included in Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms, and the Art of Protest exhibition at South London Gallery in the U.K., in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her art, which looks at the intersection of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the British Museum, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Her latest book explores the material culture and symbolism of the BĆilukaa (ApsĆ”alooke). BĆilukaa means āOur Side,ā and itās what the ApsĆ”alooke call themselves. The bookās journey began when Red Star left the Crow reservation to study at Montana State University in Bozeman and came upon, in a random book at the university library, an image of Medicine Crow, an ApsĆ”alooke chief.
In her book, she writes of the fact that so much of her communityās history and material culture is kept from the community itself, trapped hundreds of miles away in vaults of institutions. To this she adds interviews with members of her extended family and new works of collaged photography.
Panther Creek: A Pawnee Country Mystery
By Tom Holm, University of New Mexico Press, 2024, 264 pages
Tom Holm is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a descendent of the Muskogee Creek. Like The Osage Rose (2008) and Anadarko: A Kiowa Country Mystery (2015), his new crime novel Panther Creek takes place during the same era as the events that took place in Killers of the Flower Moon, in Oklahoma in the 1920s. And like The Osage Rose and Anadarko, Panther Creek features two recurrent protagonists: J.D. Daugherty, a crusty ex-cop who has set up his own private investigation firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, right after World War I, and his Cherokee associate, Hoolie Smith.
In Panther Creek, J.D. and Hoolie investigate separately the disappearances of Native American girls, who are preyed on by a sadist who murders them and leaves their bodies in two creeks, both named Panther Creek. Once their cases collide, J.D. and Hoolie rejoin forces to bring the killer to justice.
Fire Exit
By Morgan Talty, Tin House Books, 2024, 256 pages
Fire Exit is a debut novel by Morgan Talty, an award- winning short story writer and citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation of the Northeastern Woodland region in Maine. Taltyās previous and first book, a short story collection titled Night of the Living Rez (2022), earned him enormous praise, including the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, the New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree recognition. In other words, Fire Exit is already off to a good start.
The novel follows Charles Lamosway, who was forced to leave the Penobscot Reservation in Maine at the age of 18 due to blood quantum, a concept invented by white people to determine who among Native Americans deserved tribal membership based on their percentage of Native blood. He also holds on to a secret about his daughter, Elizabeth, who doesnāt know that Charles is her father. The narrative raises the question of what makes a family: blood or human emotions?
The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America
By Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, Flatiron, 2024, 304 pages
The Indian Card is a personal exploration of Native identity and Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American. Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina who holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard Universityās Kennedy School of Government. She worked for seven years in the Obama Administration on homelessness and Native policy issues. She is now professor of urban planning at the University of Iowa.
According to Schuettpelzās The Indian Card, the U.S. government requirements for tribal membership were meant not to support Native communities but to help eradicate them; to this day, these requirements continue to undermine the sovereignty of Native communities. The author writes about her own experience with enrollment in the non-federally recognized Lumbee tribe and notes the history of how the government categorized or recategorized members of different Native communities over centuries of colonization.
I Was a Teenage Slasher
By Stephen Graham Jones, Simon & Schuster/Saga Press, 2024, 384 pages
Stephen Graham Jones is a member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana and a writer with a never-ending energy and focus whoās published 20 books since his 2000 debut novel, The Fast Red Road. His genre, both in short fiction and long-form narratives, is sometimes characterized as Native American Gothic or Rez Gothic but it always touches upon racial inequalities, like those discussed in his novel The Only Good Indians.
I Was a Teenage Slasher takes place in 1989, in Lamesa, Texas, a small town driven by oil and cotton and where everyone knows everything everyone does. The story is told from the perspective of Tolly Driver, one of the kids in town who gets cursed to kill for revenge. The novel is like a summer teen movie with murderous drama.
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Where Wolves Donāt Die
By Anton Treuer, Levine Querido, 2024, 320 pages (YA)
Anton Treuer, Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, is a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, Minnesota, and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. Heās lectured in the U.S. and abroad on āEverything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Askā and on topics such as cultural competence and equity, tribal sovereignty, history, and language. He has also received more than 40 awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In Where Wolves Donāt Die, young Ezra Cloud lives in Northeast Minneapolis and hates it; heād rather be back on the Nigigoonsiminikaaning First Nation reservation. But he doesnāt have much choice, as Ezraās father teaches Ojibwe at a local college ā so Minneapolis it is. The same day Ezra gets into a fight with school bully Matt as he defends his friend Nora, Mattās house burns down and Ezra becomes the prime suspect. Heās innocent, but still his family sends him to a remote part of Canada to be with his grandfather while the investigation continues in Minneapolis.
Buffalo DreamerĢż
By Violet Duncan, Penguin Random House/Nancy Pulsen Books, 2024, 128 pages (10 and up)
Buffalo Dreamer is a finalist for the National Book Award for Young Peopleās Literature. Violet Duncan is Plains Cree and Taino from Kehewin Cree Nation. Her new book is based on her own discovery, in her childhood, of the Indian Residential school system, and the sadness and loss that ensued at knowing what her parents and ancestors had endured.
In Buffalo Dreamer, Summer, a young girl, holidays on her motherās familyās reservation in Alberta, Canada. This year is different, however, as Summer now has vivid dreams in which she runs away from a real-life residential school. Soon, Summer learns that ā in the real world ā unmarked graves of children have been found at the residential school her grandfather attended as a child.Ģż