The Business of Fancydancing. 1992.

Alexie’s first book, in poetry and story, “paints painfully honest visions of our beautiful and brutal lives” (Adrian C. Louis).
hc 25.00, pb 16.00

First Indian on the Moon. 1993.

Joy Harjo says of this book, “[T]hese elegiac poems and stories will break your heart. Watch this guy. He’s making myth.”
hc 20.00, pb 14.00

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. 1993.

With wrenching pain and wry humor, Alexie presents contemporary life on the Spokane Reservation. Simply and beautifully written, the stories creep up on the reader, capturing the reservation’s strong sense of community and tenacity.
pb 14.00

Old Shirts & New Skins. 1993, b/w illustrations.

Simon Ortiz says, “His vision is an amazing celebration of endurance, intimacy, love and creative insight...it is a victory that can be known only by a people who refuse to submit to the thieves, liars, and killers that have made them suffer tremendous loss and pain.”
pb 12.00

Reservation Blues. 1995.

Alexie’s first novel, the tale of Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic rock-and-roll band, blends narrative, visions, songs, and dreams to describe the effects of Christianity on Indian people today. Reservation Blues will make you laugh and break your heart—all in the same sentence.
pb 13.00

Smoke Signals. 1998.

This is Alexie’s screenplay for the movie based on his story, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The section entitled “Screen Notes” is worth the price of the book.
pb 12.00

Summer of the Black Widows. 1996.

This guy pulls no punches. In this book of poetry, as in his others, he writes straight from—and to—the heart.
hc 22.00, pb 15.00

Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. 1995, b/w photos.

The title says it all. Here, Adams chronicles the U.S. government’s policy of education as warfare in its relentless effort to subjugate the Indian nations through the children. Excellent for teachers and upper-grade students.
pb 18.00

American Indian Contemporary Arts, Indian Humor. 1995, color photos and paintings.

In this catalog of a national touring exhibition organized by American Indian Contemporary Arts are the works of 38 Native artists depicting their interpretation of Indian humor. There is, for instance, Coyote dressed in red, white and blue, cane in hand and wearing a top hat and sneakers, dancing on a vaudeville stage. The painting is framed by images of running buffalo, and artist Harry Fonseca (Maidu) calls it “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” There is “Buenos Dias, Juan Valdez,” Peter Jones’ (Onondaga) idea of what a coffee can would look like if there really were truth in advertising. There is a nude reclining woman made of clay. She is holding up a metal cylinder with a string attached to it. Nora Naranjo-Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo) calls it “Rosita Fished With a Metal Rod During Electrical Storms Because Grandma Taught Her That Strong Spiritual Conduct Was Essential to Pueblo Living.” There are stinging installations such as “Land O’Plenty” by Jean LaMarr (Paiute/Pit River), that use dehumanizing postcard images of Native women to call attention to racism disguised as humor. As AICA executive director Janeen Antoine (Sicangu Lakota) says in the introduction, “Humor gives us a cosmic fix and takes us out of our center of the universe, enabling us to laugh at ourselves.”
pb 20.00

Annharte (Anishinaabe), Being on the Moon. 1990.

“Her poetry celebrates the vitality of the survival of the street life for her generation of urban Indians and explores...a spirituality that occurs when Indian humor and laughter take over.”
pb 11.00

Archuleta, Margaret L. (Pueblo), Brenda J. Child (Ojibwe), and K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Hopi), eds., Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000. 2000, color and b/w photos.

“Beginning in 1879, tens of thousands of Native (children) left or were taken from their tribal homes to attend Indian boarding schools, often long distances away. Some struggled bitterly. Some suffered in silence. Some succumbed to tuberculosis or influenza and lost their lives. Others flourished and built a new sense of self within a wider world, while preserving Indianness in their hearts. This book is dedicated to them all.” This beautiful book—a gathering of many voices—ought to be required reading for all teachers of American history, and for all students whose textbooks fail to discuss this shameful part of the U.S. war against the Indian peoples.
pb 30.00

Awiakta, Marilou (Cherokee), Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom. 1993, b/w illustrations.

Awiakta contemplates the Cherokee story of the Corn Mother and traditional teachings of other Native peoples, including the Hopi and the Six Nations. With respect and a twinkle in her eye, she suggests ways the ancient wisdoms apply to nowday issues through poems, stories and essays.
pb 17.00

Not Far Away: The Real-life Adventures of Ima Pipiig. 2007.

“We did not come over here on the Mayflower,” Ima Pipiig writes. “We did not come up the Cumberland Gap. We did not follow Daniel Boone or De Soto or a black-robed priest. We came from the tops of tall trees that softly bent down and laid their boughs upon the earth so that she would not be lonesome. We came from the clouds, life-giving mist and sky. We came from the soil itself, from crevices that opened up and gifted us to the open air. We came from the rich mud at the bottom of the waters to mingle with the other life forms and make them complete.” Told in alternating voices—Beardslee’s and that of her semi-fictional protagonist, Ima Pipiig—Not Far Away deals with the issues of racism, poverty, and struggles over the remaining natural resources in the Northern Great Lakes as well as access to public lands, jobs, education, and even social comfort. Unlike scholars and anthros whose works emphasize community and individual responsibility for racism and environmental degradation, Beardslee and Pipiig unflinchingly point their fingers directly at the educational system that willingly participates in the racist practices of America’s heartland. Lois Beardslee and Ima Pipiig are strong Indian women whose stories, songs and poems are at once achingly beautiful and painfully honest.
pb 28.00

The Women’s Warrior Society.

“They are reaching out and touching one another, nurturing one another, strengthening one another. They are making each other stronger. They are making each other bolder.” They are the ogitchidaakweyag, da wimen warriors. These women are invisible, no, they are at the forefront, readying for battle; they are underpaid factory workers, no, they are wolves, readying for the hunt; they walk into a bar, no, a library, no, a sweatlodge, and they make magic and they survive: “They cook and clean and bring home paychecks. They wash the dirt and the offensive nuances from their children’s hair, and they braid into those long tresses magical things, like elk and windstorms and wild mustangs and ’57 Chevys. And they teach their children how to care for these things, to groom them, and to keep them perfect for the next generation: because these things are more enduring and powerful than racism and self-loathing.”
Whether staggering from exhaustion, confronting baby stealers by design or indifference, taking on white privilege and Manifest Destiny, combing their daughters’ hair, battling racist textbooks and the teachers who hold them dear, ridiculing clueless wannabes and their endless quest for secrets, or showing by example the many ways we love our children and try to keep them safe, these ogitchidaakweyag—despite the best intentions of the dominant society—are not going away. And someone really ought to give Lois Beardslee that Pulitzer.
hc 30.00, pb 17.00

Belin, Esther G. (Navajo), From the Belly of My Beauty. 1999.

In this tough, bold, in-your-face collection of poems and autobiographical essay, Esther Belin writes of being “raised on a mixture of traditional knowledge and urban life.” Sometimes furious, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Belin bears witness to the sacrifice and endurance of all of her relatives. “To tell or retell our story,” she writes, “is not pleasant. And it is not short. It did not begin with the civil rights movement. It is not as simple as the word genocide....It is mixedblood, crossblood, fullblood, urban, rez, relocated, terminated, non-status, tribally enrolled, federally recognized, non-federally recognized, alcoholic, battered, uranium-infested...”
pb 16.00

Bird, Gloria (Spokane), Full Moon on the Reservation. 1993.

Joy Harjo says, “Gloria Bird’s gift is a bright integrity of American diaspora. These burning poems are astute songs, necessary for the journey.”
pb 10.00

Blue Cloud, Peter/Aroniawenrate (Mohawk) , Elderberry Flute Song: Contemporary Coyote Tales. 2002, b/w illustrations by the author.

In these 56 poems and stories, Coyote the comic, Coyote the amoral, Coyote the obscene—well, you know, Coyote—creates daylight and chases the moon, goes on a trip to England and exposes anthropologists, discusses relativity and does some things with a certain part of his body that some might think impossible.
pb 15.00

Brant, Beth (Mohawk), I’ll sing ’til the day I die: Conversations with Tyendinaga Elders. 1995, b/w photos.

“This is our history as passed down from generation to generation by the Elders. They have acquired lifetimes of knowledge during their stay on Mother Earth...it is the way we have recorded our story since our existence—long before Columbus, or the coming of Cartier.”
pb 12.00

Bullchild, Percy (Blackfeet), The Sun Came Down: The History of the World as My Blackfeet Elders Told It. (1985), 2005.

“I do not have a good education in the whiteman language,” Bullchild says in his preface, and, at the age of 67, he set out to put into writing the traditional Blackfeet stories his elders told him—“to write the Indian version of our own true ways in our history and legends.” “The sun came down,” he writes, “and abided with his children in many instances to talk with them, to teach them certain things they must learn to use or do, and to give advice to them of how to survive the many treacherous things in the world he created for them.” This amazing work is not a book for children, but an oral history put down by a Blackfeet elder that illustrates the breadth and scope of a creation story as oral history in print.
pb 23.00

Child, Brenda J. (Ojibwe), Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940. 1998, b/w photos.

This is a study of the boarding school experience from the perspective of the Indian students who lived at Haskell in Kansas and Flandreau in South Dakota. At the heart of this book are the hundreds of letters from the children and their parents, counterposed with those of school officials. As is Education for Extinction, this is excellent for teachers and upper-grade students.
pb 15.00

Culleton, Beatrice (Métis), April Raintree. 1984.

In a narrative unsweetened by sentiment or apology, Culleton tells of the anguish, bewilderment and anger of two Métis sisters who try in different ways to live in a society that rejects and abuses them.
pb 19.00

Indians in Unexpected Places 2004, b/w archival photos.

Why do white expectations of Indians continue to remain frozen in time? What’s so ironic about Red Cloud Woman, in full regalia, sitting under a hair dryer? What so ironic about Geronimo’s wearing a top hat, sitting in a Cadillac? Focusing mainly on the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, cultural historian Deloria shows how popular culture interpreted (and continues to interpret) images of Indians, while Indian communities were engaging in the same kinds of modernization that were enveloping white society. In bringing together these images with the realities of power and place, continuity and change, tradition and modernity, Deloria tells some achingly beautiful stories of the kinds of lives his own relatives managed to carve out in the face of these expectations. For the Indian communities at the turn of the 20th Century, US colonialism manifested itself in shrunken land bases, forced acculturation “devastating legal decisions, political helplessness, grinding poverty, white racist antipathy—all of these combined to place Native peoples in a truly desperate state.” With Indians in Unexpected Places following his Playing Indian, Phil Deloria’s trenchant work in identity representation is eminently readable, and touches a nerve besides.
hc 25.00, pb 18.00

Playing Indian. 1998, archival b/w photos and drawings.

Ever since the Boston Tea Party, there have been white people “playing Indian.” Here, Deloria chronicles and analyzes the history of the “wannabe” movement. Deloria has inherited from his father a razor-sharp wit and a gift for telling a good story. And some of the black-and-white photos, like Frank Hamilton Cushing in Zuni garb, are priceless.
pb 17.00

Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths. 2002.

In his earlier book, Red Earth, White Lies, Vine Deloria adroitly debunked the “myth of scientific fact.” Here, he takes on both the evolutionists and religious fundamentalists, giving the reader a critical analysis of flaws and anomalies in each side’s arguments. “The views of both are passé,” he says, “and represent only a quarrel within the Western belief system, not an accurate rendering of Earth history.” “When the smoke clears and we mall the proper adjustments in our thinking,” he says, “we will come to understand that quite possibly we are not the first humanoid species to live on this planet; that there is a rough repeating pattern in the Earth’s history in which the planet is transformed and new biospheres come into existence through processes of which we have not yet dreamed.” This traditional tribal worldview, “may turn out to be our only glimpse of the real planetary past.”
pb 19.00

Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. 1997.

Here, Deloria battles those anthros trying to hold up, as he says, the “tottering bastions of Western knowledge.” Among others, theories that fall by the wayside include “Low Bridge, Everybody Cross” (the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to America) and the “Pleistocine Hit Men” (hunting the wooly mammoth to extinction). Vine says that of all his books, this was the “most pleasant to write and the most fun to defend.” We’d add “the most fun to read.”
pb 20.00

Spirit & Reason. 1999.

The essays in this “Vine Deloria, Jr., reader” include pieces from his most remembered books, some of his lesser-known articles, and ten new pieces. Deloria’s arguments challenge and provoke with insight, honesty, wit, and great good humor. With topics ranging from ethnic studies to film clichés to the Bering Strait Theory to “a flock of anthros,” we hope that readers will come away with an understanding of how traditional Native peoples look at the universe.
pb 19.00

We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (1970), 2007.

Originally published in 1970, Deloria’s second book (following Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto) provides more insights into the workings of the dominant society. “A century ago,” Deloria writes, “whites broke the Fort Laramie Treaty with the Sioux so they could march into the Black Hills and dig gold out of the ground. Then they took the gold out of the Black Hills, carried it to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and buried it in the ground.” In challenging the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, capitalism, genocide, and self-defeating liberalism, Deloria’s scathing analysis is as applicable now as it was 37 years ago.
pb 20.00

Deloria, Vine Jr. (Lakota), and Daniel Wildcat (Muscogee), Power and Place: Indian Education in America. 2001.

These 15 essays look at the complex issues facing Native students, from preschool through college, a journey spanning two distinct worldviews and value systems. Beginning with an essay on American Indian metaphysics and ending with a call for fundamental changes in the way we educate our children, this volume is a must reference for anyone involved in the education of Indian children.
pb 18.00

Dubin, Margaret ed., The Dirt is Red Here. 2002, color photos, color paintings.

This absolutely gorgeous anthology brings together established poets and visual artists from the California Indian communities, as well as previously unpublished new voices. Each of the poems is a song, each of the paintings is a story. There is passion here, and pain and blood, running through Harry Fonseca’s “The Discovery of Gold in California #27” to Deborah Miranda’s “Deer” and “Baskets” to Wendy Rose’s “Is it crazy to want to unravel.” There is great good humor and not a little irony in James Luna’s performance/installation, “High-Tech Peace Pipe” and L. Frank’s “Coyote Paints Erotica Whilst Wearing Pajamas” and Judith Lowry’s “Roadkill Warrior: Last of His Tribe.” And there is the intricate beauty of Linda Yamane’s and Linda Aguilar’s baskets and Bradley Marshall’s abalone necklace. Together, all these voices and more, in ways that are different and the same, are saying, “Despite the worst intentions of the dominant society, here we are. We are still here.”
pb 17.00

Dunn, Anne (Ojibwe), Uncombed Hair. 2005.

Deep snow and buffalo spirits, uncombed hair and canned milk, aching feet and dancing geese, the stench of cruelty and the bitterness of grief, metastasizing hatred and corporate empires built on forgotten bones and young children finding a moment of joy in the fantasy of safety in a burned-out bus in Nasiriyah. And let us not forget the Indian residential school where a little girl bravely refuses to speak English. This raging grannie is no pushover; she dreams dreams and does not suffer abuse, war or racism passively: “We must gather the last great army./We must proclaim the final agenda/And reclaim the soul of justice.” ‘Chi Miigwech, Anne.
pb 12.00

Dunn, Carolyn (Cherokee/Choctaw/Muscogee/Seminole), and Carol Comfort (Cherokee/Choctaw), eds., Through the Eye of the Deer: An Anthology of Native American Women Writers. 1999.

This outstanding anthology of poetry and fiction features the voices of established women writers such as Beth Brant, Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich and Linda Hogan, along with the voices of their younger and no less talented sisters such as MariJo Moore, Deborah Miranda, and Inés Hernández-Ávila.
pb 17.00

Fawcett, Melissa Jayne (Mohegan), Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon. 2000, b/w photos.

James Fenimore Cooper’s novel notwithstanding, the Mohegan people are still here. Medicine Trail is autobiography, history and traditional knowledge and—through the story of a beloved elder, 100-year-old medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon—is about cultural survival, continuance, commitment and renewal.
pb 18.00

Fife, Connie (Cree), Beneath the Naked Sun. 1992.

Connie Fife’s poetry sings “songs of sorrow, of celebration, of anger, of love, of giving and receiving. Connie Fife has made music out of the chaos and pain of being indigenous and lesbian in a culture that respects neither.” (Beth Brant)
pb 9.00

Fife, Connie (Cree), ed., The Colour of Resistance: A Contemporary Collection of Writing by Aboriginal Women. 1993.

This anthology is a testament to the lives of Native women, “a reinvention of our survival.”
pb 18.00

Flood, Renée Sansom, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota. 1995.

On December 29, 1890, at a place called Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, an attack by the Seventh Cavalry killed some 300 unarmed Lakota women, men and children. Four days after the Wounded Knee Massacre, as a blizzard swept over the area, a burial detail heard the cries of an infant. Adopted by Brigadier General Leonard R. Colby as a “living curio” of the massacre and brought home to his wife, suffragist Clara Colby, Zintkala Nuni—Lost Bird—lived a short life marred by racism, abuse and poverty. This is the story of the little girl who came to symbolize all of the “lost birds” adopted away from their tribes.
pb 18.00. Also available: DVD documentary based on this book, 25.00

Four Worlds Development Project, The Sacred Tree: Reflections on Native American Spirituality. 1984.

“For all the people of the earth, the Creator has planted a Sacred Tree under which they may gather, and there find healing, power, wisdom, and security... The fruits of this tree are the good things the Creator has given to the people: teachings that show the path to love, compassion, generosity, patience, wisdom, justice, courage, respect, humility...” This book was originally produced for use in healing programs in Native communities.
pb 11.00

Harjo, Joy (Muscogee) and Gloria Bird (Spokane), eds., Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. 1997.

This strong anthology features prayer, poetry, fiction and personal narrative from 87 Native women writers and activists. Some are recognizable names, such as Linda Hogan, Winona LaDuke, Wilma Mankiller, Bea Medicine, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso; others are published here for the first time.
pb 19.00

Dog Road Woman. 1997.

In her first collection of poems, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke tells contemporary stories about surviving the Indian holocaust, and of the toughness and fragility of life under occupation.
pb 13.00

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival. 2004.

“Our world was thick with green, everything swallowed and devoured with greenness, the blanket of flora pocked by daisies. Come fall the leaves would redden and yellow, the moisture draining back into the trunk, brittling them as they fell, the branches brittling as well and tumbling down to dirt paths, blocking the way home—except for willows. The willows would simply sway in the colder breeze, retaining their own suppleness, lithe, with endurance and strength far surpassing the heavy oak branches or apple limbs.”

Like a willow bending in a bad wind, Hedge Coke writes about her life with resilience and courage. As she bears witness to the alcoholism, insanity, rape and domestic violence within and outside of her family, Hedge Coke walks unashamed, connecting her personal suffering with the struggle of Indian people to survive the diaspora that continues today. This is an awful and beautiful book by a brilliant writer—and survivor.
hb 25.00

The Book of Medicines. 1993.

Joy Harjo says, “Linda Hogan’s poetry has always been a medicine of sorts...They bring back words for healing, the distilled truth of all these stories that are killing us with tears and laughter.”
pb 15.00

Power. 1998.

What happens when one people’s power is another people’s broken law? How does a person who is witness to a power that is simultaneously “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad,” endure? That person is Omishto, a Taiga teenager who watches her Aunt Ama track, shoot, and kill a sacred golden panther in what is left of their Florida homeland. In the context of ecological, environmental, political, tribal and personal power, the excruciating questions traced in one girl’s mind make this critical and essential reading for high school-age readers.
hc 23.00, pb 14.00

The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. 2001.

“Self-telling is rare for a Native woman,” Linda Hogan writes; yet, when she works with young people on reservations, they want to know how she survived her life. So she put down these stories that come out of her life, each word carefully placed, and delicate as the broken clay statue of the woman for whom her book is named. There is great pain here, over and over again. And throughout, there is great beauty, and compassion, and wisdom, and hope. “What is a human being? I still ask myself each day. What is the self that, as a young woman, I had wanted to destroy it even though I would tenderly pick up an insect and move it, give it water, allow the wasps to live in my ceiling, and let in every stray or hurt animal? Why did I place more importance on their lives than on my own? But, in this reversed world, I did. I would cry as a child, looking up at the sky, asking God to take me back. I could see, even then, the full scope of the world that held so much suffering when it didn’t have to.”
hc 25.00

Jensen, Vickie, Totem Pole Carving. 1992, b/w photos.

If this were “merely” a photographic documentation of the process of carving and raising a modern pole by Nisga’a artist Norman Tait and his apprentices, it would be a beautiful book. As it stands, it is a celebration of how we educate our young.
pb 23.00

Johnston, Basil (Ojibwe), Ojibway Tales. 1978.

Six hunters learn that it’s probably not a good idea to humiliate a moose you’re about to kill. To untutored white (tourist) eyes, three men fending off a bee attack could appear to be “blood-thirsty savages” killing each other. Two Indian war veterans who really want some beer have to pretend to be of another ethnicity in order to be served. A recalcitrant priest finds out that bologna is to meat what sawdust is to wood. Sometimes potatoes fall off the face of the earth. These 22 stories will have high school readers laughing out loud.
pb 17.00

From Thomas King (Cherokee)

Green Grass, Running Water. 1993; Blackfoot.

See, there’s these four old Indin guys, name of Hawkeye, Lone Ranger, Ishmael, and Robinson Crusoe. And then there’s Coyote, and, well....This story defies description. Guess you’ll just have to read it yourself.
pb 16.00

Medicine River. 1989; Blackfoot.

When Will returns to Medicine River to attend his mother’s funeral, he doesn’t count on Harlen Bigbear and his unique brand of community planning. With understated, deadpan humor, King entertains, while deftly slipping his serious messages into the reader’s consciousness.
pb 14.00

Truth & Bright Water. 1999.

Like King’s earlier book, Green Grass, Running Water, this novel is one that readers will want to read more than once. Within the story of the coming of age of Tecumseh and Lum is the mystery of a child’s skull they find on a bluff overlooking the river that separates sister towns in Montana and on a reserve in Alberta. There are other questions, such as why Tecumseh’s Auntie Cassie is home to stay this time and why she’s brought a suitcase full of baby clothes; why no one protects Lum from his father’s rage; why Monroe Swimmer plants iron buffalo and disappears a church; and why those buckskin-clad Germans keep showing up at Indian Days. Truth & Bright Water is a deeply moving, richly layered, and funny-in-places story of tragedy, reconciliation, and love.
pb 13.00

The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. 2003.

“The truth about stories,” Tom King says, “is that that’s all we are.” It’s a known fact that stories can be our greatest teachers—when they’re well told, when their lessons remain unstated, when we can ponder their many nuances. Stories can be strong enough to make magic. Stories are medicine: they can heal or kill. Once told, they remain in the universe forever. Once heard, they can inform our choices and our lives. They can be given, sold, traded, or stolen. Sometimes a good story is the only defense against colonialism, against genocide, against appropriation. Tom King is nothing if he’s not direct and honest. In this series of lectures that read like told stories, he confront white privilege, class privilege, and the social construct called “race.”
hc 25.00, pb 19.00