10 Books About Plants You Need To Read Now
There are many elements around us like air, light, water, soil and plants that we take for granted. Just consider plants, for example, on how
Recently, I wrote about Indigenous books, discussing different Indigenous authors from around the globe. In that post, I focused on Indigenous communities that many people might not be familiar with.
I didn’t cover any Native American books or authors, despite Native Americans belonging to some of the most well-known Indigenous peoples with a rich history and great literature.
The reason is that I wanted a separate post dedicated entirely to authors and books about Native Americans.
Please note that the list of these best native American books includes only Native American authors. Before we begin, do you know who Native Americans are?
Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the United States, with some communities living in the Southwest as early as 1200 BCE. They have major nations like the Navajo, Cherokee, Lakota, and Haudenosaunee. Each of these has a unique society with its governments, trade systems, and spiritual traditions.
After the arrival of Europeans in 1492, Native peoples experienced displacement, broken treaties, and cultural suppression. Despite this suppression and systematic brutalization, Native Americans have preserved their languages, rights, and culture even today.
Now, let’s talk about the best Native American books.
Tiffany McDaniel is a Native American author of Cherokee descent. Her writing has the influences of the oral traditions of her Cherokee roots and the experiences of her family. Betty is her first novel which became one of the best-selling Native American books.
Betty is about the young girl Betty Carpenter. She was born to a white mother and a Cherokee father. She grows up in rural Ohio and faces the harsh realities of poverty, racism, and family trauma.
However, her father’s love and storytelling help her find strength and beauty in a world that often tries to break her spirit. As Betty grows older, she begins to uncover dark family secrets and deals with painful truths.
She eventually finds solace in writing as a way to process her past and reclaim her voice. This novel is a sort of auto-biography novel and coming-of-age novel about the Native American experience.
You can also check coming of age movies for stories of resilience and inspiration.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, author, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her upbringing and education include both Western science and the Indigenous teachings of her ancestors. As a professor, she uses her academic knowledge and Potawatomi traditions to write an insightful book.
She blends memoirs, scientific observation, and Indigenous wisdom to explain the relationship between humans and nature. There are chapters on plants like sweetgrass, maple trees, and strawberries. And, she uses these plants to share stories from her life as a mother, scientist, and Potawatomi woman.
Kimmerer emphasizes the idea of reciprocity. It’s a belief that we must give back to the Earth as much as we take. She shares her efforts about Potawatomi’s “Honorable Harvest”, and how to restore native landscapes to show that nature should not be a commodity.
This Native American book became a New York Times bestseller. Interestingly, it became so after nearly a decade of its release due to word-of-mouth and grassroots support.
If you want to read more about spiritual teachings and Indigenous tribes, check out the Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, which I covered in the best nonfiction books of all time.
Tommy Orange belongs to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born in Oakland, California. Since Oakland is a city, he grew up disconnected from tribal lands. This disconnection has influenced his writing, where he explores what it means to be Indigenous in an urban context.
There is one of the best books on Native Americans, and is about 12 Native characters living in Oakland. Each character is dealing with their own struggles like recovering from addiction, loss to cultural disconnection, etc. Also, every native character comes from the urban environment.
Now, all these characters move towards the Big Oakland Powwow. Each of these characters has their own intentions, including a robbery that turns violent. Eventually, each character’s paths intersect in unexpected, often tragic ways.
This conflicting intersection is all about the tensions between heritage, survival, and hope in a modern urban setting. The plot of this Native American book is somehow similar to The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the American Book Award, and many others.
Nick Medina is a Native American author of Tunica-Biloxi heritage from Louisiana. He uses Indigenous history, mythology, and contemporary social issues in his writing. This is his debut novel influenced by the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).
Anna Horn is a teenager living on a reservation and starts investigating the disappearances of Indigenous girls and her sister, Grace. Anna, as an outsider in her community, works at a fading casino-hotel owned, where she notices unsettling patterns and stories that no one else seems willing to confront.
Her search becomes complicated when she encounters supernatural elements that tie her sister’s disappearance to the ancient spirits. As she uncovers a deeper conspiracy, she must choose between exposing the dark truth or protecting the community’s peace.
It is one of the best books on Native Americans that blends mystery, folklore, and social commentary.
Louise Erdrich is an acclaimed Native American writer and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The Night Watchman is one of her best Native American novels, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The novel is about the life of her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who fought against the U.S. government’s attempts to terminate tribal rights in the 1950s.
Thomas Wazhashk is a night watchman at a jewel-bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. By day, as a tribal council member, he is worried about the House Concurrent Resolution 108, a legislation that intends to terminate federal recognition of Native tribes.
As Thomas and his community organize to resist, they face threats to their identity, land, and sovereignty. His story intersects with his niece, Pixie “Patrice” Paranteau, who travels to Minneapolis to search for her missing sister Vera.
She experiences exploitative boarding houses and racial violence in her search. Overall, it’s a great Native American novel that blends the political fight for tribal rights with the personal struggles of identity.
If you like historical fiction, you should check out the best historical fiction books.
Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfeet Native American writer who blends Indigenous stories with contemporary horror and speculative fiction. He is the author of over 30 books across genres, including horror, science fiction, and literary fiction.
The Only Good Indians follows four Blackfeet men haunted by a traumatic event from their youth. Years earlier, they took part in a forbidden elk hunt on tribal land that ended with the brutal killing of a mother elk and her calf.
Ten years later, a supernatural entity begins to haunt them, looking for vengeance for the wrongs. Now, each man must confront the consequences of his past. It’s a great novel on the themes of guilt, survival, spiritual disconnection, and cultural erasure.
Angeline Boulley belongs to the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Before becoming a Native American writer, she spent 25 years as a Native educator, including as the Director of the Office of Indian Education. Firekeeper’s Daughter is one of her best native American books about her Ojibwe community.
Daunis Fontaine is an 18-year-old biracial Ojibwe girl who struggles to find her place in her white mother’s community and her late father’s Anishinaabe roots. When a shocking murder rocks her town, Daunis finds herself pulled into a covert FBI investigation looking for a drug ring in her community.
As she works undercover, she wonders who she can trust and how far she’ll go to protect the people she loves. So, a thriller, a mystery, that is also coming of age for a girl who must choose sides.
Rebecca Roanhorse is a speculative fiction author of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo descent through her husband. Although she herself is African American and identifies as an outsider to the tribes, she brings Indigenous futurism and mythology into fantasy and science fiction.
Black Sun is her first Native American book in The Between Earth and Sky trilogy, which takes inspiration from the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas. It takes place in the fictional city of Tova and has several characters, including Serapio and Xiala.
Serapio is a blind man who becomes the vessel of a god bent on vengeance, and Xiala is a Teek sea captain with magical song powers. Their destinies collide as the solar eclipse approaches, where Watchers of Tova prepare for a once-in-a-generation convergence.
Andrea L. Rogers is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and blends horror, Indigenous history, and speculative fiction. Man Made Monsters is one of her best Native American books.
It is a short story collection of 18 interconnected stories that follow a single Cherokee family across 200 years. It all starts in the 1830s during the era of Indian Removal and ends in a dystopian future.
And, the stories are about different generations as they encounter vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, zombies, ghosts, and even artificial intelligence. Each story is unique in its plot but the narrative is common, which is about survival, identity, and legacy.
Interestingly, the different “monsters” in this book aren’t just fictional beings, as they represent colonization, violence, and generational trauma. Rogers creatively uses horror as a medium to show historical injustice and cultural endurance.
Taté Walker is an award-winning Two Spirit Lakota storyteller, poet, activist, and citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes. She works on Indigenous justice, gender identity, and decolonization. The Trickster Riots is their debut poetry collection, which is about cultural reclamation and resistance.
The Trickster Riots reimagines Iktómi, the mischievous Spider of Lakota oral tradition, as a voice for the present-day struggles and triumphs of Native life. So, Iktómi has multiple forms like protestor, storyteller, auntie, lover, and survivor.
Through these poems, Iktómi’s clever chaos connects with the experiences of colonization, gender fluidity, and Indigenous strength. This great book about Native Americans touches on subjects like police violence, generational trauma, Two Spirit identity, and the power of community.
One interesting observation that I made while writing about Native American books is that they have thousands of Goodreads reviews. It pretty much tells us that people have keen interest in knowing about the history and culture of Native Americans.
I would also like to give credit to Indigenousbookshelf, whose curated lists were quite helpful in compiling the best books on Native Americans. If you have any other recommendations of books about Native American people, please leave a comment.
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