Indigenous Peoples in the United States

Autumn Dawn has learned to deal with her dyslexia and her life is starting to look better, but a horrible accident threatens to change everything. When her mother and brother are crossing a street, they are accidentally hit by a car. Autumn's little brother is okay, but her mother ends up in intensive care. Autumn's father, who had walked away from his family awhile ago, leaving them to fend for themselves, is now back in their lives and trying to make amends. When Autumn's mom is released from the hospital, she still needs help, so Autumn's dad moves back home.

Can Autumn ever forgive her father for leaving his family in the first place, or will she continue to be angry and resentful? Is it possible to trust any male, including her devoted boyfriend?

Educator & Series Information
Recommended for ages 12+.

Fry Reading Level: 4.5

This book is part of the PathFinders Collection of Indigenous Hi-Lo- novels. Interest level is pre-teen on up. 

The PathFinders series of Hi-Lo (high interest, low readability) novels offers the following features:

• Indigenous teen protagonists
• Age-appropriate plots
• 2.5 – 4.5 Reading Level
• Contemporary and historical fiction
• Indigenous authors

The PathFinders series is from an American publisher. Therefore, Indigenous terminology in the PathFinders books is not the same as Canadian Indigenous terminology. This prompts a useful teaching moment for educators in discussing appropriate terminology use in Canada.

This book is also part of the Autumn Dawn Series, a subseries of the PathFinders.

Additional Information
120 pages | 4.50" x 7.00" | Paperback

A teenage survival expert finds all of his skills tested as he's pursued through the Canadian wilderness by men determined to silence him. On his way to teach at Camp Seven Generations, a Native outdoor school, Nick witnesses a murder and then is thrown off a train. Remembering and using the teachings of his Abenaki elders will prove to be the difference between life and death for him. Although his pursuers have modern technology to help them, Nick has something even more useful. In addition to the skills he's learned, he has an ally in the natural world around him. Found, like the famous story "The Most Dangerous Game,"is a tale that focuses on being hunted until a way can be found to become the hunter.

Reviews
Review from ALA Booklist: "This high/low adventure is the epitome of an adrenaline rush. It is a terrific survival story packed with fascinating facts (how to cover tracks and hide all evidence of a campsite, what to do if you find yourself in a cave with a bear) and wonderful nods to the Abenaki language and Native American cultural tenants of thanking animals and leaving no trace." — Becca Worthington

Educator & Series Information
Recommended for ages 12+

Fry Reading Level: 4

This book is part of the PathFinders series. The PathFinders series of Hi-Lo (high interest, low readability) novels offers the following features:

• Indigenous teen protagonists
• Age-appropriate plots
• 2.5 – 4.5 Reading Level
• Contemporary and historical fiction
• Indigenous authors

The PathFinders series is from an American publisher. Therefore, Indigenous terminology in the PathFinders books is not the same as Canadian Indigenous terminology. This prompts a useful teaching moment for educators in discussing appropriate terminology use in Canada.

Additional Information
96 pages | 4.50" x 7.00" | Paperback

Carson Mastick is entering his senior year of high school and desperate to make his mark, on the reservation and off. A rock band -- and winning Battle of the Bands -- is his best shot. But things keep getting in the way. Small matters like the lack of an actual band, or his brother getting shot by the racist owner of a local restaurant.

Maggi Bokoni has just moved back to the reservation with her family. She's dying to stop making the same traditional artwork her family sells to tourists (conceptual stuff is cooler), stop feeling out of place in her new (old) home, and stop being treated like a child. She might like to fall in love for the first time too.

Carson and Maggi -- along with their friend Lewis -- will navigate loud protests, even louder music, and first love in this stirring novel about coming together in a world defined by difference.

Reviews
"Gansworth's follow-up to If I Ever Get Out of Here has an incredible voice.... His characters are rich, well developed, and will stay with readers for a long time.... A stellar choice for YA realistic fiction shelves." -- School Library Journal, starred review

"Gansworth vividly captures the difficulties of reservation life and showcases his thoughtful protagonists' multidimensional interests and far-reaching aspirations." --Publishers Weekly

"An intimate look at the teens' lives.... A rich, honest story of family and friends, of a Nation within a nation." -- The Horn Book

"A 1980s Native American coming-of-age story grapples with the day-to-day details of teenagers’ lives on and off the reservation.... A classic teen novel, especially for Native youth and Beatles fans." - Kirkus Review

Educator Information
Recommended for ages 14+ 

Additional Information
432 pages | 5.50" x 8.25"

Award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones returns with Night of the Mannequins, a contemporary horror story where a teen prank goes very wrong and all hell breaks loose: is there a supernatural cause, a psychopath on the loose, or both?

We thought we'd play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead.

One last laugh for the summer as it winds down. One last prank just to scare a friend. Bringing a mannequin into a theater is just some harmless fun, right? Until it wakes up. Until it starts killing.

Luckily, Sawyer has a plan. He’ll be a hero. He'll save everyone to the best of his ability. He'll do whatever he needs to so he can save the day. That's the thing about heroes—sometimes you have to become a monster first.

Reviews
"Suffused with questions about the nature of change and friendship, “Night of the Mannequins” is a fairy tale of impermanence showcasing Graham Jones’s signature style of smart, irreverent horror." —The New York Times

"Stephen Graham Jones’s range and his understanding of horror in fiction and film is staggering. In this novella he juggles—sometimes in very sly ways—slasher stories, coming of age horror, traditions of madness and unreliability, and Kaiju to create an amazingly speedy, voice-driven read that's tons of fun. Each new book of his gives his own take on a different facet of horror, and together they all add up to something really expansive and original." —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

"Readers will delight more than once in the realization that they might be reading a different story from the one they thought was unfolding... trust Jones and enjoy the ride." —Shelf Awareness

Additional Information
144 pages | 5.00" x 8.00"

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Additional Information
80 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Experience the riveting, powerful story of the Native American civil rights movement and the resulting struggle for identity told through the high-flying career of West Coast rock 'n' roll pioneers Redbone.

You've heard the hit song "Come and Get Your Love" in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, but the story of the band behind it is one of cultural, political, and social importance.

Brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas were talented Native American rock musicians that took the 1960s Sunset Strip by storm. They influenced The Doors and jammed with Jimmy Hendrix before he was "Jimi," and the idea of a band made up of all Native Americans soon followed. Determined to control their creative vision and maintain their cultural identity, they eventually signed a deal with Epic Records in 1969. But as the American Indian Movement gained momentum the band took a stand, choosing pride in their ancestry over continued commercial reward.

Created in cooperation of the Vegas family, authors Christian Staebler and Sonia Paoloni with artist Thibault Balahy take painstaking steps to ensure the historical accuracy of this important and often overlooked story of America's past. Part biography and part research journalism, Redbone tells a vivid story about this neglected chapter of American history.

Reviews
"Compelling reading for fans of roots rock and Native American history in middle school and up." —School Library Journal

"An entertaining, enlightening history for music fans. Balahy’s loose, energetic drawings; imaginative layouts; and playful use of color make everything pop." —Publishers Weekly

"Musicians with heart put their people before profits in an inspirational tale. Well-researched and well-paced, this book will introduce a new generation to the music and impact of Redbone." —Kirkus Reviews (Starred review)

"In some eyes, the guys in Redbone, still the most successful Native American rock band this country has produced, are indeed superheroes. Not all heroes wear capes, and some wear buckskin." —Houston Chronicle

"In the early sixties, Pat and his brother, Lolly, perform on the Sunset Strip, crossing paths with The Byrds, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix, who gives the brothers the idea of forming 'an all Indian band. That'd make this country sit up.' The seed germinates and Redbone bursts forth. Staebler and Paoloni offer a lens onto aspects of the twentieth-century Native American struggle for civil rights and injustices like forced schooling and racist policing, as well as the 1968 birth of the American Indian Movement. Balahy's art is particularly splendid and well-varied in style for the complex subject matter." —Booklist

Additional Information
160 pages | 7.00" x 10.00"

Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated American master N. Scott Momaday returns with a radiant collection of more than 200 new and selected poems rooted in Native American tradition.

“The poems in this book reflect my deep respect for and appreciation of words. . . . I believe that poetry is the highest form of verbal expression. Although I have written in other forms, I find that poems are what I want and need most to read and write. They give life to my mind.”

One of the most important and unique voices in American letters, distinguished poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller N. Scott Momaday was born into the Kiowa tribe and grew up on Indian reservations in the Southwest. The customs and traditions that influenced his upbringing—most notably the Native American oral tradition—are the centerpiece of his work.

This luminous collection demonstrates Momaday’s mastery and love of language and the matters closest to his heart. To Momaday, words are sacred; language is power. Spanning nearly fifty years, the poems gathered here illuminate the human condition, Momaday’s connection to his Kiowa roots, and his spiritual relationship to the American landscape.

The title poem, “The Death of Sitting Bear” is a celebration of heritage and a memorial to the great Kiowa warrior and chief. “I feel his presence close by in my blood and imagination,” Momaday writes, “and I sing him an honor song.” Here, too, are meditations on mortality, love, and loss, as well as reflections on the incomparable and holy landscape of the Southwest.

The Death of Sitting Bear evokes the essence of human experience and speaks to us all.

Reviews
“These are the poems of a master poet, born of an age when our ears were not so bent towards digital production. Or should I say, these are the poems of a bear who has walked through several generations and stands before us, breathing clouds into a cold dawn, bearing this book of poetry. The bear’s journey is mythic, a migration through tragedy and beauty, over lands rich with horses and stories. When you read these poems, you will learn to hear deeply the sound a soul makes as it sings about the mystery of dreaming and becoming.”— Joy Harjo, Mvskoke Nation, U.S. Poet Laureate

"An admirable capstone to a distinguished literary career, this splendid selection should be a treasure for Momaday’s readers and an excellent introduction for those new to Native American writing."— Library Journal (starred review)

Additional Information
192 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.

Awards

• 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Additional Information
464 Pages | 6" x 9" 

From the award-winning and #1 bestselling author of The Back of the Turtle; Green Grass, Running Water and The Inconvenient Indian

Thumps DreadfulWater’s world is turned upside down when Nina Maslow, the producer of a true-crime reality-TV show, turns up dead after working on a cold case that Thumps has spent years trying to forget. What’s more, someone seems set on taunting Thumps, leaving reminders of the Obsidian murder case around town. Is it possible that the elusive serial killer who murdered his girlfriend and her daughter all those years ago has resurfaced in Chinook? Or is this the work of a copycat looking to mess with Thumps by stirring up memories from his past?

Dragged back into a case that has haunted him for years, Thumps DreadfulWater is determined to solve the mystery of the Obsidian murders. But as he works the case, he begins to realize just how dangerous the person he is dealing with is—and that he might be the next target.

Thumps DreadfulWater, the sly, wry, reluctant investigator of Cold Skies and A Matter of Malice, returns in another irresistible mystery that only Thomas King could create.

Series Information
This book is from the DreadfulWater Mystery series, a mystery/detective series from Thomas King.

Books in this series include:
- Dreadful Water
- The Red Power Murders
- Cold Skies
- A Matter of Malice
- The Obsidian Murders
- Deep House 
- Double Eagle
- Black Ice

Additional Information
240 pages | 6.00" x 9.00"

Who are you? What is racism? Where does it come from? Why does it exist? What can you do to disrupt it? Learn about social identities, the history of racism and resistance against it, and how you can use your anti-racist lens and voice to move the world toward equity and liberation.

“In a racist society, it’s not enough to be non-racist—we must be ANTI-RACIST.” —Angela Davis

Gain a deeper understanding of your anti-racist self as you progress through 20 chapters that spark introspection, reveal the origins of racism that we are still experiencing, and give you the courage and power to undo it. Each lesson builds on the previous one as you learn more about yourself and racial oppression. An activity at the end of every chapter gets you thinking and helps you grow with the knowledge. All you need is a pen and paper.

Author Tiffany Jewell, an anti-bias, anti-racist educator and activist, builds solidarity beginning with the language she chooses—using gender neutral words to honor everyone who reads the book. Illustrator Aurélia Durand brings the stories and characters to life with kaleidoscopic vibrancy.

After examining the concepts of social identity, race, ethnicity, and racism, learn about some of the ways people of different races have been oppressed, from Indigenous Americans and Australians being sent to boarding school to be “civilized” to a generation of Caribbean immigrants once welcomed to the UK being threatened with deportation by strict immigration laws.

Find hope in stories of strength, love, joy, and revolution that are part of our history, too, with such figures as the former slave Toussaint Louverture, who led a rebellion against white planters that eventually led to Haiti’s independence, and Yuri Kochiyama, who, after spending time in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII, dedicated her life to supporting political prisoners and advocating reparations for those wrongfully interned.

Learn language and phrases to interrupt and disrupt racism. So, when you hear a microaggression or racial slur, you'll know how to act next time.

This book is written for EVERYONE who lives in this racialized society—including the young person who doesn’t know how to speak up to the racist adults in their life, the kid who has lost themself at times trying to fit into the dominant culture, the children who have been harmed (physically and emotionally) because no one stood up for them or they couldn’t stand up for themselves, and also for their families, teachers, and administrators.

With this book, be empowered to actively defy racism and xenophobia to create a community (large and small) that truly honors everyone.

Educator Information
Recommended for ages 11 to 15.

Some, but limited, Indigenous content.

A journal filled with activities is also available: This Book Is Anti-Racist Journal: Over 50 Activities to Help You Wake Up, Take Action, and Do The Work

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.15" x 7.75" | Colour Illustrations | Paperback 

Alaskan Alison Bremner reclaims her ancestral language in this Tlingit coloring book featuring her original art. Alongside each drawing, each animal is identified by their English and Tlingit names. The English and Tlingit sentences below explain each animal’s cultural significance. Tlingit Animals is intended to teach younger generations Tlingit culture and language, in addition to developing reading skills and creativity.

Educator Information
24 pages colouring and language book Tlingit Indigenous Art

Printed in Canada

Additional Information
24 Pages

United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology.

This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries. Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize–winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organized sections. Each section begins with a poem from traditional oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake Skeets, a young Diné poet born in 1991, and including renowned writers such as Luci Tapahanso, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Ray Young Bear. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through offers the extraordinary sweep of Native literature, without which no study of American poetry is complete.

Reviews
This anthology is revelatory and stunning.… It shows the remarkable strength and diversity of Native poetry, which vitalizes all of American poetry. It is essential reading.—Arthur Sze, National Book Award–winning author of Sight Lines

Additional Information
352 pages | 6.14" x 9.29" | Paperback

When a TV producer asks Thumps to assist with an episode about a local woman from a wealthy family whose death was ruled “misadventure,” he is reluctant to get involved. Then the producer dies in the exact same manner, and Thumps finds himself solving two cases.

Can a reality TV show solve a cold case?

The crew of a true-crime reality TV show, Malice Aforethought, shows up in Chinook to do an episode about the death of Trudy Samuels. Trudy’s death had originally been ruled accidental, but with ratings in mind, one of the producers, Nina Maslow, wants to prove it was murder. And she wants Thumps to help. Thumps is reluctant to get involved until Nina dies in the exact same place and in the exact same way as Trudy. Are the two deaths related? Or are there two murderers on the loose in Chinook? Thumps uses Nina’s Malice Aforethought files to try to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, and in the process discovers that she had already started work on another case close to Thumps' heart: the Obsidian murders.

Series Information
This novel is part of the DreadfulWater Mystery series from Thomas King. Books in this series include:
- Dreadful Water
- The Red Power Murders
- Cold Skies
- A Matter of Malice
- The Obsidian Murders
- Deep House 
- Double Eagle
- Black Ice

Additional Information

A groundbreaking Dakota author and activist chronicles her refusal to assimilate into nineteenth-century white society and her mission to preserve her culture—with an introduction by Layli Long Soldier, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Whereas.

Bright and carefree, Zitkála-Šá grows up on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota with her mother until Quaker missionaries arrive, offering the reservation’s children a free education. The catch: They must leave their parents behind and travel to Indiana. Curious about the world beyond the reservation, Zitkála-Šá begs her mother to let her go—and her mother, aware of the advantages that an education offers, reluctantly agrees.

But the missionary school is not the adventure that Zitkála-Šá expected: The school is a strict one, her long hair is cut short, and only English is spoken. She encounters racism and ridicule. Slowly, Zitkála-Šá adapts to her environment—excelling at her studies, winning prizes for essay-writing and oration. But the price of success is estrangement from her cultural roots—and is it one she is willing to pay?

Combining Zitkála-Šá’s childhood memories, her short stories, and her poetry, American Indian Stories is the origin story of an activist in the making, a remarkable woman whose extraordinary career deserves wider recognition.

Additional Information
160 pages | 5.18" x 8.00"

Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples’ resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism.

Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.

The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

Reviews
“An important corrective to conventional narratives of our nation’s history . . . . An accessible, engaging, and necessary addition to school libraries and classrooms. An excellent read, dismantling American mythologies and fostering critical reasoning about history and current events.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“This adaptation of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014) should be required reading for all middle and high schoolers—and their teachers . . . . There is much to commend here: the lack of sugar-coating, the debunking of origin stories, the linking between ideology and actions, the well-placed connections between events past and present, the quotes from British colonizers and American presidents that leave no doubt as to their violent intentions . . . . The resistance continues, and this book urges all readers to consider their own roles, whether as bystanders or upstanders.” —Booklist, Starred Review

“Dunbar-Ortiz’s narrative history is clear, and the adapters give readers ample evidence and perspective to help them to engage with the text. A highly informative book for libraries serving high school students.”—School Library Journal, Starred Review

“This is the book I wish I’d had when I started teaching. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People represents a fundamental challenge to the textbooks that celebrate ‘liberty,’ ‘freedom,’ and the ‘rise of the American nation’ but fail to recognize the humanity—or often even the existence—of the Indigenous peoples who were here first, and are still here. Our students will see the history of this country much more clearly when we put Indigenous people’s lives at the center.” —Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools, and codirector, Zinn Education Project

Educator Information
Recommended for ages 12+

Additional Information
272 pages | 5.49" x 7.97"