There’s a lot of great work that falls into the broad category of “urban Native American literature." Depictions of Native Americans and the urban experience are crucial for understanding Indigenous peoples in the U.S. today. Some of these books deal with the transitions and dissonance that Native people experience between their lives at home and urban settings. There are also books that reflect the great number of Native peoples in the U.S. who do not live on reservations. #indypladults
Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is 1953, and a night watchman works at the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is fighting the “emancipation”…
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022. This short story collection deals with what it means to be Penobscot in Maine in the twenty-first century. It captures the admixture of contemporary urban influences to communal reservation life with humor,…
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, House Made of Dawn tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel. Home from a foreign war, he is caught between two worlds: Los Angeles and the Jemez Pueblo with its rhythm of the seasons and the harsh…
Lewis Blake, from the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in 1970s upstate New York, is beginning 7th grade at a mostly white junior high. He's tired of not fitting in and cuts off his braid, tries to hide that he's in the free-lunch program, and won't…
Winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Fiction. A widow and mother, Rosalie Iron Wing has spent the previous two decades on her white husband's farm away from her Dakota family. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, searching for…
This novel is about life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexi captures the ironies of modern Indian life, recording the estrangement between Indians and the rest of the world, while affirming the continuing power of his tribe's…
This first novel is set in past and present-day Oakland. It brings twelve Native Americans to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. A chronicle of domestic violence, alcoholism, addiction, and pain, the book reveals the perseverance and…
Set on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine was the first novel of a master storyteller. The lives and destinies of the Kashpaws and the Lamartines intertwine on and around a North Dakota Indian reservation from 1934 to 1984, in an…
This debut novel tells a story of the contemporary experiences of Indigenous people. At its core is the birth-to-adulthood story of Ever Guimesaddle, a man of Kiowa, Cherokee, and Mexican descent living in Lawton and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Each…
One of Alexi's first publications, these sharp-edged, high-impact poems, prose poems, mini-essays, and fragments of stories are woven together in a tapestry of pain about death by fire, outraged pride, broken promises, and the scourge of alcoholism.…
