Favorite Fridays Indigenous Peoples' Voices

Favorite Fridays highlight media the HCDL staff recommend. Find your next favorite book, audiobook, movie, TV show, magazine, etc., here every Friday—and share your own favorites in the weekly posts’ comments!

The Read Woke Challenge runs October 1 through November 30. Today we’ll be sharing the book list for the Indigenous Peoples’ Voices category— keep an eye out for the ones that our staff particularly recommend!

Have you read any of these titles? Do you recommend any not listed? Share with us in the comments!

Indigenous Peoples’ Voices Fiction

  • Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie

    HCDL Catalog | Hoopla*

    A killer has Seattle on edge. The serial murderer has been dubbed “the Indian Killer” because he scalps his victims and adorns their bodies with owl feathers. As the city consumes itself in a nightmare frenzy of racial tension, a possible suspect emerges: John Smith. An Indian raised by whites, John is lost between cultures. He fights for a sense of belonging that may never be his—but has his alienation made him angry enough to kill? Alexie traces John Smith’s rage with scathing wit and masterly suspense.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby | Hoopla*

    Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher’s precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family—which includes Eva and four sons—and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New—in the person of Delphine Watzka—the great adventure of Fidelis’s life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine’s life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an ’emancipation’ bill; but it isn’t about freedom – it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal? Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Pixie – ‘Patrice’ – Paranteau has no desire to wear herself down on a husband and kids. She works at the factory, earning barely enough to support her mother and brother, let alone her alcoholic father who sometimes returns home to bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to get if she’s ever going to get to Minnesota to find her missing sister Vera.

  • The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    Peter Straub’s Ghost Story meets Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies in this American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends.

  • Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears by Diane Glancy

    HCDL Catalog

    In 1838, 13,000 Cherokee were forced from their land to walk 900 miles along the “Trail of Tears” to present-day Oklahoma. This illuminating and challenging chronicle of loss, despair, and regeneration brings this ordeal to life via the haunting voices of a young Cherokee woman, her husband, and a host of others–Cherokee and white, soldier and missionary, parent and child, the living and the dead.

  • Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby | Hoopla*

    The life of Spokane Indian Thomas Builds-the-Fire irrevocably changes when blues legend Robert Johnson miraculously appears on his reservation and passes the misfit storyteller his enchanted guitar. Inspired by this gift, Thomas forms Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic band who find themselves on a magical tour that leads from reservation bars to Seattle and New York–and deep within their own souls.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • The Round House by Louise Erdrich

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby | Hoopla*

    When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • There There by Tommy Orange

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame in Oakland. Dene Oxedrene is pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle’s memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the Big Oakland Powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions–intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path. 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.

  • Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse * Staff Choice *

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinaetah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinaetah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive.

  • The Yield by Tara June Winch

    HCDL Catalog

    Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, in the fictional Australian town of Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people, the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, and everything that was ever remembered by the ancestors. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living in Europe for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with the memories of life in poverty before her mother’s incarceration, her hometown’s racism against her people, and the mysterious disappearance of her sister when they were kids that changed August’s life forever. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends, she endeavors to save their land – a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.

Indigenous Peoples’ Voices Nonfiction

  • Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting his whole long life. He had come to see if the rumors were true—if an army of blue-suited soldiers had swept in from the East and utterly defeated his ancestral enemies. As Narbona gazed down on the battlements and cannons of a mighty fort the invaders had built, he realized his foes had been vanquished—but what did the arrival of these “New Men” portend for the Navajo?

  • Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby | Hoopla*

    Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby | Hoopla*

    Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes’ distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don’t know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance.

  • An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby | Hoopla*

    Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph Marshall III

    HCDL Catalog | Hoopla*

    As a brilliant leader of a desperate cause and one of the most perennially fascinating figures of the American West, Crazy Horse crushed Custer’s 7th Cavalry and brought the United States Army to its knees. Now, with the help of celebrated historian Joseph Marshall, we finally have the opportunity to know Crazy Horse as his fellow Lakota Indians knew him. Drawing on extensive research and a rich oral tradition that it rarely shared outside Native American circles, Marshall – himself a descendent of the Lakota community that raised Crazy Horse – creates a vibrant portrait of the man, his times, and his legacy. From the powerful vision that spurred him into battle to the woman he loved but lost to duty and circumstance, this is a compelling celebration of a culture, an enduring way of life, and the unforgettable hero who remains a legend among legends.

    *Hoopla is available to Howell library district residents only.

  • Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gran * Staff Choice *

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    Killers of the Flower Moon presents a true account of the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and startling new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward American Indians that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long.

  • Native Universe: Voices of Indian America by Clifford E. Trafzer

    HCDL Catalog

    Native Universe draws from the vast archives of the National Museum of the American Indian and the voices of some of the most prominent Native American scholars, writers, activists and tribal leaders. More than 300 full-color illustrations depict the artistry and culture of our hemisphere’s diverse indigenous peoples. With its insightful, firsthand prose, the book is a reminder that the ancient philosophies and folkways are just as valuable and relevant in today’s world as they were generations ago.

  • Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle

    HCDL Catalog

    One of the many ironies of U.S. government policy toward Indians in the early 1800s is that it persisted in removing to the West those who had most successfully adapted to European values. As whites encroached on Cherokee land, many Native leaders responded by educating their children, learning English, and developing plantations. Such a leader was Ridge, who had fought with Andrew Jackson against the British. As he and other Cherokee leaders grappled with the issue of moving, the land-hungry Georgia legislators, with the aid of Jackson, succeeded in ousting the Cherokee from their land, forcing them to make the arduous journey West on the infamous “Trail of Tears.”

  • You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie

    HCDL Catalog | Overdrive/Libby

    A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, and loss from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award winner. When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is this stunning memoir. Featuring 78 poems, 78 essays and intimate family photographs, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine–growing up dirt-poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents.

* Adapted from the summaries provided by the publishers