19 books
Charles C. Mann
I think we know now that what they taught us in school was…hmm…not always accurate. 1491 is the first book that opened my eyes to just how not accurate. Reporting from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and ecology, Charles C. Mann upends…
Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez spent five years going north — on the ice with Inuit and Iñupiat hunters, on ships, in camps with biologists — and came back with the book that made his name. It won the National Book Award in…
R.E. Burrillo
Burrillo took the long way to Cedar Mesa — upstate New York, then New Orleans tending bar for five years trying to be a writer, then seasonal work in Glacier and two summers on the North Rim, which is where…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
You’ve read it, right? Or seen it on the shelf? Or the bestseller list? How it got there is part of the story. Milkweed, a small nonprofit press in Minneapolis, published it in 2013 with no marketing budget, and for…
Omer Stewart
Omer Stewart wrote this in the 1950s and nobody would publish it. His claim was that the pristine wilderness the pioneers walked into wasn’t pristine at all — Native people had been burning it on purpose for thousands of years,…
Kiliii Yüyan
A book-length argument for entrusting Indigenous peoples with the land they have stewarded for millennia, and I’m convinced. The statistics do real work here, but it’s Yüyan’s photographs from nine Native communities that actually land the case.
Kathleen DuVal
A thousand years of Native North America told as the history of powerful nations rather than as a prelude to colonization. DuVal opens at Cahokia, the city on the Mississippi bigger than London at the time, and works forward through…
Ian Frazier
Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it…
Tyson Yunkaporta
Yunkaporta is an Apalech man from far north Queensland and also an academic, and the book asks what Indigenous thinking has to say about global systems — not as culture but as method. Each chapter starts with a symbol he…
M. Kat Anderson
The California the Spanish and then the Americans walked into looked like untouched abundance, and Anderson’s book shows it was a garden. Indigenous Californians burned meadows on schedule, coppiced hazel and redbud so the shoots would come back straight enough…
Stephen Graham Jones
In 1912, a Lutheran pastor in Montana takes the confession of a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who comes to the church weekly and tells his story in pieces. Good Stab is a vampire, made by a white creature he…
David Graeber
The standard story of human civilization development argues we went from small egalitarian bands, to farming, to cities, and then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that’s baloney. Evidence shows…
Chi Zijian
A ninety-year-old Evenki woman, wife of this northern China clan’s last chieftain, tells the story of a century of her reindeer-herding people’s life to “the rain and the fire” over the course of a single day, as the last of…
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works…
Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin went to central Australia to find out how Aboriginal songlines work — the invisible tracks across the country laid down by ancestral beings, sung into being, where the melody carries the shape of the land so a man can…
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, a writer and musician, and this book thinks with water rather than about it. She starts from a Nishnaabeg story about a woman and a flood and works outward through ice, rain, tributaries, and the…
Velma Wallis
During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To…
Julian Brave NoiseCat
NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is…
Keith H. Basso
Keith Basso spent decades at Cibecue, Arizona, and the idea for the book sparked when an elder asked him to make a map with the real names on it. Apache place names turn out to be whole sentences — water…
