Reader's Place: November 1, 2022
November is National American Indian Heritage Month. Following are titles by contemporary Native American writers from the Driftpile Cree, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Anishinaabe, Cherokee, Mohawk and Penobscot Nations. For more suggestions, check out our Reading Recommendations page.
A history of my brief body, by Billy-Ray Belcourt, 2020. (Catalog)
Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve.
There there: A novel, by Tommy Orange, 2018. (Catalog)
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.
The sentence, by Louise Erdrich, 2021. (Catalog)
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
Crooked hallelujah, by Kelli Jo Ford, 2020. (Catalog)
Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine-a mixed-blood Cherokee woman-and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma's Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn't easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world-of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces.
A mind spread out on the ground, by Alicia Elliott, 2020. (Catalog)
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to 'a mind spread out on the ground.' Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation.
Night of the living rez, by Morgan Talty, 2022. (Catalog)
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, Talty breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau