Native American Heritage Month is here, and so is your reading list. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what books I would suggest to people looking to learn more about NDN Country, especially now that it’s Native American Heritage Month.
Most Americans learn about Native people from a few textbook pages that stop with the 5 Civilized tribes or Wounded Knee at the latest, if they learn about us at all. I chose these books because they’re a good place to start learning about the vast realities and histories of Native communities.
You’ll find boarding schools in more than one of these books, since so many of our families still carry those memories. Rebecca Nagle takes a single murder case to the Supreme Court and shows how the fight changed who governs much of eastern Oklahoma. Kyle Mays and Alaina Roberts tell Black and Native history as one story, because for plenty of families, it always was. When it all gets heavy, Tiffany Midge and Joey Clift step in to prove we’re pretty funny, too.
The picks run from Wilma Mankiller’s 1993 autobiography to books published this year. The list is split into history, memoir and essays, and land and resistance. Start with whatever grabs you. Better yet, finish one before Thanksgiving, so you’ll have something more honest and interesting to bring to the table than the Pilgrim story.
History that reframes the story
Start here for context: five histories that put Native nations at the center of the American story, plus two guides to the questions people hesitate to ask.
1. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone) · 2023
The best single place to begin. Blackhawk retells U.S. history from Spanish colonization through the 20th century with Native nations as central actors rather than background. It won the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
2. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
David Treuer (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) · 2019
Treuer picks up where most histories stop, rejecting the idea that Native life ended with the 1890 massacre. He blends reporting and family history to trace a century of survival, policy fights, and reinvention. It was a 2019 National Book Award finalist.
3. Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
Mary Annette Pember (Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe) · 2025
An Ojibwe journalist investigates the Catholic boarding school her mother was sent to in Odanah, Wisconsin. Part memoir and part reporting, it shows how that system’s damage carried through generations, and how families are recovering. NPR, TIME, and Smithsonian named it a best book of the year.
4. An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
Kyle T. Mays (Afro-Indigenous, Saginaw Chippewa) · 2021
Mays shows how slavery and the taking of Native land built the country together, from before the Revolution to today’s Black and Indigenous movements. He is candid about both the solidarity and the tensions between Black and Native communities. Part of Beacon Press’s ReVisioning History series, it covers a lot of ground in a conversational voice.
5. We’ve Been Here the Whole Time!: A Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America
Joey Clift (Cowlitz Indian Tribe) · 2026
Comedian and TV writer Clift takes on the misconceptions and odd assumptions non-Native people bring to Native America, starting with what to even call people. It is the funny, illustrated companion to Treuer’s book: same mission, more jokes. Simon & Schuster published this debut with a foreword by Shane Hawk.
6. I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
Alaina E. Roberts (Chickasaw and Chickasaw Freedmen descent) · 2021
Roberts tells the story of Reconstruction from Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, where people once enslaved by Native nations received land after the Civil War. Using her own family, including a great-great-grandmother who got an allotment, she shows how that freedom was bound up with taking land from Native nations. It won the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize.
7. Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask
Anton Treuer (Ojibwe) · 2012
Short, direct answers to the questions non-Native readers often hesitate to ask, from terminology to treaties to tribal enrollment. A young readers’ edition makes it a good pick for families and classrooms.
Memoir and personal essays
Nine books that show Native life from the inside, from boarding-school aftermath to punk shows to tribal government, and some that are genuinely funny.
8. We Survived the Night
Julian Brave NoiseCat (Canim Lake Band Tsq̓éscen̓; descendant of the Líl̓wat Nation) · 2025
The newest book on this list and one of the most talked about. NoiseCat’s father was found as a newborn in an incinerator at a Catholic-run residential school, and the book weaves that story into reporting and Coyote stories. The title comes from his family’s Secwepemc morning greeting, which means “you survived the night.”
9. Whiskey Tender
Deborah Jackson Taffa (Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo) · 2024
Born on the Quechan reservation in California and raised in New Mexico, Taffa grew up in a family pushed to assimilate for a “better life.” Her memoir weighs what that bargain cost. It was a 2024 National Book Award finalist.
10. Crazy Brave
Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation) · 2012
Harjo traces her path from a violent childhood in Oklahoma to finding her voice as an artist and poet. She later served three terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, the first Native American in the role. Read it for the prose alone.
11. Heart Berries
Terese Marie Mailhot (Seabird Island Band) · 2018
A short, raw memoir in fragments about trauma, mental illness, motherhood, and love. You can read it in an afternoon, but it stays with you much longer.
12. Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation) · 2013
A collage of family stories, mission records, photos, and poems that confronts what California’s Spanish missions did to Native people. Essential reading for anyone in California who grew up learning a softer version of that history.
13. Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (Nooksack and Upper Skagit) · 2022
LaPointe heals from trauma by turning to the women in her lineage, including her great-grandmother, the Lushootseed language keeper Vi Hilbert. It won the Washington State Book Award for memoir. Her 2024 essay collection, Thunder Song, is a strong follow-up.
14. Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s
Tiffany Midge (Hunkpapa Lakota) · 2019
Sharp, very funny essays on politics, pop culture, and being Native in modern America. A welcome reminder that Native writing isn’t only about tragedy.
15. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee Nation), with Michael Wallis · 1993
The autobiography of the first woman to serve as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. It interleaves her own life, from federal relocation to San Francisco to tribal leadership, with Cherokee history.
16. Black Indian: A Memoir
Shonda Buchanan (Black; descendant of Coharie, Choctaw, and Eastern Band Cherokee people) · 2019
Buchanan traces six generations of a Michigan family with African American and Native roots that official records kept erasing. It is a hard, honest book about addiction, family secrets, and who gets counted as Indian. PBS NewsHour picked it as one of 20 books to read on institutional racism.
Land, water, and resistance
Four books on the relationship between Native nations and the land, and the long fight to protect it.
17. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) · 2019
Estes places the 2016 Standing Rock protests in a centuries-long line of Lakota and Dakota resistance. It is history and argument at once, and highly readable for both.
18. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) · 2019
Gilio-Whitaker shows why Native environmental fights are about sovereignty and treaty rights, not only conservation. A clear, accessible introduction for readers new to the topic.
19. By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) · 2024
Nagle follows a murder case that put a basic question to the Supreme Court: does the Muscogee reservation in eastern Oklahoma still exist? The 2020 McGirt decision said yes, and later rulings extended that answer to reservations covering nearly half the state. Woven with her own Cherokee family history, it won the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.
20. Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity
Joseph Lee (Aquinnah Wampanoag) · 2025
The Aquinnah Wampanoag hold only a sliver of Martha’s Vineyard, where rising property taxes threaten to price them out. Lee pairs his tribe’s story with reporting on Indigenous communities elsewhere to ask what Indigenous identity means now. It was a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.
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