Fiction
Fajardo-Anstine, Kali. Woman of Light : A Novel. First edition. New York: One World, 2022.
- Merging two multi-generational storylines in Colorado, this is a novel of family love, secrets, and survival. With Fajardo-Anstine’s immense capacity to render characters and paint vivid life, set against the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Woman of Light is full of the weight, richness, and complexities of mixed blood and mica clay. It delights like an Old Western, and inspires the hope embedded in histories yet-told.
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. 1st Perennial Classics ed. New York: Perennial Classics, 1999.
- House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel, home from a foreign war and caught between two worlds: one his father’s, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons and the harsh beauty of the land; the other of industrial America, a goading him into a compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust.
Orange, Tommy. There There. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
- Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene 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 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.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
- Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. First University of Minnesota Press edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
- In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s ‘Noopiming’ braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy. Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension.
Treuer, David. The Hiawatha. 1st Picador USA ed. New York: Picador USA, 1999.
- A tale of revenge featuring an Indian in Minneapolis who killed his brother. He returns home from prison and adjusts to normal life, until the day the brother’s son discovers the truth and comes to settle scores with his uncle.
Wagamese, Richard. Indian Horse: A Novel. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012.
- Saul Indian Horse is in trouble, and there seems to be only one way out. As he journeys his way back through his life as a northern Ojibway, from the horrors of residential school to his triumphs on the hockey rink, he must question everything he knows.
Welch, James. The Heartsong of Charging Elk : A Novel. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
- Richly imagined from historical fact, this is a novel of cultural crossing, as Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, journeying from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the back streets of nineteenth-century France.
Podcasts
All My Relations – Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene
- All My Relations is a podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) to explore our relationships— relationships to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another.
Telling Our Twisted Histories – CBC – Kaniehti:io Horn
- Words connect us. Words hurt us. Indigenous histories have been twisted by centuries of colonization. Host Kaniehti:io Horn brings us together to decolonize our minds– one word, one concept, one story at a time.
This Land – Crooked Media – Rebecca Nagle
- How a string of custody battles over Native children became a federal lawsuit that threatens everything
from tribal sovereignty to civil rights.
Films
- Kanopy provides streaming on-demand access to thousands of documentaries, feature and independent films, and training videos. Licensing partners include Criterion Collection, Universal Paramount, The Great Courses, New Day Films, California Newsreel, PBS, First Run Features, Media Education Foundation, Documentary Educational Resources, and others.
- There is a Native American category for browsing – https://www.kanopy.com/en/northwestern/category/24/11074
- Searching for ‘indigenous’ also brings up >260 films to browse
Images
Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant
Digital Repositories
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center
- “This website represents an effort to aid the research process by bringing together, in digital format, a variety of resources that are physically preserved in various locations around the country. Through these resources, we seek to increase knowledge and understanding of the school and its complex legacy, while also facilitating efforts to tell the stories of the many thousands of students who were sent there.”
Primary Source Databases available through NUL
American Indian Experience: The American Mosaic
- The American Indian Experience: The American Mosaic illuminates the historical and contemporary practices and tribulations of more than 150 Native American tribes from all regions of North America. Featuring articles and essays from Native American authors and contributors, it gives voice to the American Indian experience with respect to colonial conflict, trade economies, decisive wars, parsing of Native American land enabled by American policy, assimilation, and native claims to land, among other topics.
- This resource provides researchers with the opportunity to understand and analyze Native American migration and resettlement throughout U.S. history, as well as U.S. Government Indian removal policies and subsequent actions to address Native American claims. Content includes decisions, transcripts, docket books, journals of the Indian Claims Commission, a judicial panel for relations between the U.S. Government and Native American tribes; and related statutes and congressional publications.
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America
- The wide range of material included in Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America presents a unique insight into interactions between Indigenous Peoples in North America and European colonists from their earliest contact, continuing through the turbulence of the American Civil War, the on-going repercussions of government legislation, right up to the civil rights movement of the mid- to late-twentieth century. This resource contains material from the Newberry Library’s extensive Edward E. Ayer Collection; one of the strongest archival collections on histories of Indigenous Peoples in North America in the world. – Publisher
North American Indian Thought and Culture
- North American Indian Thought and Culture represents the largest compilation ever created of biographical information on indigenous peoples from all areas of North America. Included are biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories dating from the 17th through 21st Centuries.
Native American Tribal Histories, Series 1-4, 1813-1880
- Official record of encounters between Indigenous peoples and American Territorial officials as chronicled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Series 1-4, 1813-1880.
Through much of the 19th century, the education, land rights, treaty negotiations and other affairs of Native American tribes were overseen by a cadre of superintendents from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). BIA superintendents scrupulously recorded their interactions with Native American tribes. It contains all the manuscript letters and reports that the superintendents sent to Washington, D.C., as well as the responses and instructions received from the nation’s capital. These primary source documents cover not only encounters between Indigenous people and the U.S. government, but also accounts of Native American cultures during a time when disease and forced relocation were transforming their lives. Now, these rare materials are available for the first time in a readily accessible digital collection, which also contains detailed historical background notes created by the curators of the National Archives. – Publisher
Indigenous Peoples: North America
- This database allows users to trace the history of Native Peoples in North America from colonial relations in the 1600s to twentieth-century issues such as civil rights. Includes manuscript collections, rare books and monographs, newspapers, periodicals, census records, legal documents, maps, drawings and sketches, oral histories, and photos, as well as video content from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
- Indigenous Peoples of North America, Part I: Provides users with a robust, diverse, informative source that will enhance research and increase understanding of the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada. Researchers will explore the impact of invasion and colonization on Indigenous Peoples in North America, and the intersection of Indigenous and European histories and systems of knowledge through the use of manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, photographs, motion pictures, images of artwork, and more. These are the primary sources that take students beyond the facts and figures of history and into a deeper understanding of indigenous peoples.
- Indigenous Peoples of North America, Part II: The Indian Rights Association, 1882–1986 provides a near complete record of the efforts of the first organization to address Native American interests and rights. This collection includes the contains incoming and outgoing correspondence; organizational records; printed material (including early pamphlets and publications both by the Indian Rights Association and other American Indian and Indian-related organizations); Indian Rights Association annual reports; draft legislation; administrative files, the papers of Indian Rights Association founder Herbert Welsh, photographs (often from Western field trips), materials from the Council on Indian Affairs, and manuscripts and research notes regarding social and cultural Indian traditions.
Indigenous Newspapers in North America
- Indigenous Newspapers in North America aims to present a diverse and robust collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada over more than 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016.