Native and Indigenous American Studies

Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. With a forward by Markus Zusak, interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney, and black-and-white interior art throughout, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.

The 25th-anniversary edition. In the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, the Lone Eaters, a small band of Blackfeet Indians, are living their immemorial life. The men hunt and mount the occasional horse-taking raid or war party against the enemy Crow. The women tan the hides, sew the beadwork, and raise the children. But the year is 1870, and the whites are moving into their land. Fools Crow, a young warrior and medicine man, has seen the future and knows that the newcomers will punish resistance with swift retribution. First published to broad acclaim in 1986, Fools Crow is James Welch's stunningly evocative portrait of his people's bygone way of life.

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.

A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. A contemporary classic, this "astonishing literary debut" (Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale) "places Native American voices front and center" (NPR/Fresh Air). Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. They converge and collide on one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow and together this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism A book with "so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it's a revelation" (The New York Times). It is fierce, funny, suspenseful, and impossible to put down--full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable. Don't miss Tommy Orange's new book, Wandering Stars!

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich comes an arresting, lyrical novel set in North Dakota at a time when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands. Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance--yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. The reader will experience shock and pleasure in encountering characters that are compelling and rich in their vigor, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

A second book of poetry by Louise Erdich, author of the bestselling and award winning novels Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and Tracks. Baptism by blood, water, or desire is necessary for salvation in Roman Catholic tradition, and baptism of desire is the term used for the leap of trust by which a sincere believer can experience spiritual regeneration. Louise Erdrich's poems are acts of redemption. Everywhere evident is Erdrich's unique capacity for finding the perfect word, the fresh, yet absolutely right, metaphor that makes her work both profound and accessible.

In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician and a master" (San Francisco Chronicle), Joy Harjo is at the top of her form in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.

Absentee Indians and Other Poems evokes personal yet universal experiences of the places that Native Americans call home, their family and national histories, and the emotional forces that help forge Native American identities. These are poems of exile, loss, and the celebration of that which remains. Anchored in the physical landscape, Blaeser's poetry finds the sacred in those ordinary actions that bind a community together. As Blaeser turns to the mysterious passage from sleeping to wakefulness, or from nature to spirit, she reveals not merely the movement from one age or place to another, but the movement from experience to vision.

A collection of original haiku from a preeminent Native American poet and novelist. Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence. The haiku scenes in Favor of Crows are presented in chapters of the four seasons, the natural metaphors of human experience in the tradition of haiku in Japan. Vizenor honors the traditional practice and clever tease of haiku, and conveys his appreciation of Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson in these two haiku scenes, "calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet /water striders," and "cold rain / field mice rattle the dishes / buson's koto." Vizenor is inspired by the sway of concise poetic images, natural motion, and by the transient nature of the seasons in native dream songs and haiku. "The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and an original moment of perception," he declares in the introduction to Favor of Crows. Check for the online reader's companion at favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu.

In the books available to Patricia Riley as a child, Native Americans were almost always depicted as exotic, cultural artifacts from the past, the stereotypical "Vanishing Americans," sometimes noble, but always backward savages on their way out, and soon to be no more. It was only later in life that she discovered that the experience of growing up Native American has produced some of the most moving and powerful works of fiction and nonfiction ever written. Now, for the first time ever, these writings about childhood have been collected in an anthology that makes connections across history - while speaking to the enormous diversity of lives that make up Native America today. Selections range from recollections of first buffalo hunts to a story of a rebel girl in the 1960s, from remembrances of the mandatory boarding schools in the early part of the century to tales of modern suburban alienation. Here are short stories, excerpts from novels, and autobiographical sketches, from Canada and the United States, by the best-loved names in Native American writing. And here, too, are funny and haunting stories from provocative new and lesser-known voices.

Just as a basket's purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.

According to Cherokee legend, Grandmother Spider brought the light of intelligence and experience to the people. Spider Woman's Granddaughters, a superlative collection of traditional tales, biographical writings, and contemporary short stories, brings to the page the light of thought about the past and present lives of Native people. The storytellers represented here - who include Pretty Shield, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Siko, Linda Hogan, Anna Lee Walters, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Vickie Sears, and Mary TallMountain - are as varied in life-style, age, and attitude as in tribal and regional affiliation. Their stories are about love and death, poverty and pain, power politics and the power of the sacred.