Friends of Navajoland Booklist

Leslie Marmon Silko (Navajo/Pueblo)
CEREMONY
Follows a half Pueblo/ half white man named Tayo after his return to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation following his service in from WWII. The doctors say he is suffering from battle fatigue PTSD. The book opens with a defense of storytelling, a way of making the world, a way of protecting self and culture.
STORYTELLER
ALMANAC OF THE DEAD

Lucy Tapahonso (Navajo)
BLUE HORSES RUSH IN
Born on the Navajo Reservation in Shiprock, NM, Lucy is a Navajo poet and lecturer on Native American studies.

Joy Harjo (Cherokee/ current Poet Laureate of the United States)
Crazy Brave (a memoir)
CONFLICT RESOLUTION for HOLY BEINGS /poetry
AMERICAN SUNRISE /poetry

Sherman Alexie (Coeur d’Alene, Choctaw, Colville)
The ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY of a PART-TIME INDIAN
This story is an award winning young adult novel that gets some conservative school districts up in arms due to it discussing the poverty, alcoholism and sexual nature of a 14 year old living on the Spokane Indian reservation in Wellpinit WA. The main character is a promising cartoonist and the book is illustrated.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME (a memoir about his relationship with his mother)

Robin Wall Kimmerer (member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation)
BRAIDING SWEETGRASS
The book is about plants and botany as seen through Native American traditions and Western scientific traditions.

Roxanne  Dunbar-Ortiz (CHerokee)
AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Kent Nerburn
NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG
VOICES IN THE STONES
CHIEF JOSEPH and THE FLIGHT OF THE NEZ PERCE
Nerburn has been commended as a non-native author who attempts to respectfully bridge the gap between native and non-native cultures. Born in Minnesota he initially began his career as a sculptor carving large images from a single tree trunk. His writing is wonderful, creating a unique comprehensive respect and awe for all.

Historical books:
THE NAVAJO LONG WALK
The Tragic story of a Proud People’s Forced March from their Homeland
Joseph Bruchac
A National Geographic Society publication

A CENTURY OF DISHONOR
(1880,1993)
Helen Jackson
First published 1881, the book chronicles the experiences of Native People’s in the US, focusing on injustices. Jackson dug thru news articles, journals and diaries capturing the facts; she was an activist in the 19th century and also write Ramona in 1884. Both books spurred progress toward recompense fir the mistreatment of Native peoples by the US govt.

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE (1970)
Dee Brown
Details the history of American expansionism from a perspective that is critical of its effects on Native Americans and  covers the history of the Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century.

AMERICAN GENOCIDE
The US and the California Indian Catastrophe
(2017)
Benjamin Madley
(Professor of History UCLA)

ISHI in Two Worlds
(1961)
Theodora Kroeber
Written by an American author, ISHI is a biographical account of the last known Yahi Native American people.

 ISHI, THE LAST YAHI
An absorbing documentary on an Indigenous man, Ishi, who stepped onto a ranch in 1911 north of the Sacramento area and wound up being studied/documented by anthropologists at UCBerkeley. It is a beautiful and piercingly poignant portrait of a person who was the last of his tribe forced to enter the white world out of loneliness and how he acclimated to the urban world of San Francisco, befriending many. You can find it on google/Youtube. (The 56 minute version is best.)
https://youtu.be/BmZTXWZ_q08

Playing Indian, Philip J. DeLoria
New Haven, Yale Historic Publications, 1999
The Boston Tea Party, the Order of Red Men, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, Grateful Dead concerts are just a few examples of the American tendency to appropriate Indian dress and act out Indian roles. This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Indians to shape national identity in different eras―and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual.

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, Thomas King
St Paul, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2018
King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian–White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada–U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask.
Anton Treuer, St Paul,  Borealis Books, 2012
What have you always wanted to know about Indians? Do you think you should already know the answers—or suspect that your questions may be offensive? In matter-of-fact responses to over 120 questions, both thoughtful and outrageous, modern and historical, Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist Anton Treuer gives a frank, funny, and sometimes personal tour of what’s up with Indians, anyway.
White/Indian relations are often characterized by guilt and anger. Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask cuts through the emotion and builds a foundation for true understanding and positive action.

THERE THERE
by Tommy Orange, 2018
Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange opened his novel with a prologue essay that should be required reading for anyone over the age of 12 in the Unites States. His story involves a large cast of Native Americans that prepare for individual trips which all converge at a powwow in Oakland, California. The sense of urgency that revs up at the end of the novel is palpable and heart racing! Tommy Orange calls himself and Urban Indian.

Looking for Lost Bird
(1999)
Yvette Melanson
Haunting memoir of Yvette Melanson, about being raised to believe she is white and Jewish. She discovers her roots at age 43, and comes to learn that she was taken away from her mother against the family’s wishes. After searching she found her Navajo family, who welcomed her into the clan, along with her biligaána husband.

NAVAJOS WEAR NIKES, A Reservation Life
(2011)
by Jim Kristofic
Just before beginning second grade, Jim Kristofic moved from Pittsburgh, PA across country to Ganado, AZ, where his mother to a job at a hospital on the NavJ9 Reservation. His story reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexist in a tenuous truce. After the births of his Navajo half-siblings, Jim’s family relocated to an Arizona border town where they struggled to readapt to an Anglo world that n9 longer felt like home.

Conversational Navajo Workbook: Tucson: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2018.

Perston Zah and Peter Iverson
We Will Secure Our Future: Empowering the Navajo Nation.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012.

Chester Nez and Judith Avila
Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII.
New York: Dutton Caliber, 2011.

Diyin God Bizaad: The Holy Bible.
New York: American Bible Society, 2011.

Tony Hillerman,
The Blessing Way
The Dark Wind
Skinwalkers
A Thief of Time
Coyote Waits
The Shape Shifter (2006).

John Holiday and Robert S. McPherson,
A Navajo Legacy: The Life and Teachings of John Holiday.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.

 Marjorie S. May,
The Highly Adaptable Gospel
A Journey Through the Life of H. Baxter Liebler.
Chicago: dv polymedia, 2003.

Owanah Anderson,
400 Years: Anglican/Episcopal Mission among American Indians.
Cincinnati:  Forward Movement Publications, 1997.

H. Baxter Liebler,
Boil My Heart for Me.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994.

Tiana Bighorse,
Bighorse the Warior.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.

Jesus Woodlaaji Sin: Navajo Hymns of Faith.
Farmington: Navajo Hymnal Conference, 1979.