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| From Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) |
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All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life.
1999, b/w photos.
“There is a direct relationship,” LaDuke says in her introduction, “between
the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous
peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity.” This
important book, by an Indian activist and wonderful writer, is a heartfelt
and in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural
degradation.
pb 16.00
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Last Standing Woman. 1997.
From the storyteller Ishkwegaabawiikwe, Last Standing Woman, each
of these stories of seven generations of Anishinaabe is related
by blood, by history,
by place, by spirit. These are stories of everyday heroes, strong
old people, struggling, in ways big and small, to regain what
is theirs. Although these
are said to be a work of fiction, they are, in fact, real. Chi-miigwech,
Winona.
pb 17.00
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The Winona LaDuke Reader. 2002.
This is a compilation of 40 speeches, essays and
fiction on Native environmentalism, Native traditions, women’s
issues and politics and the presidency.
From “Red Land and Uranium Mining” to “Mothers of
Our Nations: Indigenous Women Address the World” to “Reflections
on the Republic of Dubya,” this is essential reading for anyone
with any sense of moral imagination.
pb 17.00 |
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Lomawaima, K. Tsianina (Hopi), They Called it Prairie Light:
The Story of Chilocco Indian School. 1994, b/w photos.
Told
mostly in the words of people who had been taken there as children,
this is the story of the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School,
founded in 1884 as part of an educational crusade—“vast in scope,
military in organization, fervent in zeal, and violent in method”—to
transform Indian youngsters. Here, students from the 1920s and
1930s recall the loneliness and demoralization, but also the
creative rebellions against petty authority, the strong intertribal
friendships,
and the leadership skills they had to develop to survive. Like Boarding
School Seasons, this is recommended for teachers and upper-grade
students.
pb 14.00
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Maracle, Lee (Stoh:lo), and Sandra Laronde (Teme-Augama Anishinaabe),
eds., My Home As I Remember. 2000, b/w photos and color
art.
This awesome anthology of visual art, poetry and short stories
from Native women in the United States and Canada, New Zealand
and Mexico, comes together
as a richly varied creative expression of identity and place. Over
60 writers—some established, some published here for
the first time—represented
from nearly 25 nations, include Kenovjak Ashevak, Chrystos, Shelley Niro, Cheryl Savageau,
Sandra Abena Songbird, Jan Bourdeau Waboose, and Rosemary White Shield.
pb 18.00
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Matthiessen, Peter, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. 1991.
A meticulously researched account of the U.S. government’s renewed
assault on the American Indian Movement, this book was kept
off the shelves for
eight years because of one of the most bitterly fought legal cases
in publishing history.
pb 18.00
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McAdams, Janet (Creek), The Island of Lost Luggage. 2000.
A fish-shaped milagro placed into a bullet hole,
a piece of chrome from an exploded car, the severed hands of Taino
waving in pink-tinted
water,
orange popsicles and green mangoes, and the Island of Lost Luggage,
where the disappeared, the lost children ad the Earharts of modern
life line up—McAdams’ stunning poems connect all of these, seamlessly
weaving together individual and community, personal and political,
then and now.
pb 14.00 |
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Mihesuah, Devon A. (Choctaw), The Roads of My Relations.
2000.
In a somewhat fictional retelling of her family’s
stories, Mihesuah chronicles the lives of several generations as
they are forced from their
traditional lands in Mississippi through their sorrowful journey to Oklahoma.
Through the voices of family members living and not living, Mihesuah tells
stories of courageous and quirky relatives, strong women, bonepickers,
medicine people, ghost owls and not-human killers, and a horse with a hole
in his head that should’ve killed him but didn’t.
pb 18.00 |
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 Miranda, Deborah (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen/Chumash), The
Zen of La Llorona. 2005.
According to Miranda’s small gray Zen book, “everyone
loses everything.” “Nonsense,” La Llorona howls
back, “there’s always something left to lose.” La
Llorona, for whom Miranda named her book of poems and prose, appears
and disappears throughout it. Along life’s road, Miranda encounters
racism, domestic violence, rape, abandonment, addiction, and ultimately,
the loves of her life: her children and another Indian woman. She
writes with clarity and grace; and her poems are achingly beautiful.
They are, as acclaimed poet Sandra Cisneros, says, “wondrous
stuff.” Deborah Miranda has a brave and loving heart.
pb 17.00 |
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Molin, Paulette F. (Ojibwe), American Indian Themes in Young
Adult Literature. 2006.
Here, Paulette Molin analyzes contemporary literature,
historical fiction and non-fiction in young adult “books
about Indians,” with
a discerning eye for the portrayal of American Indian characters
and the presentation of narratives, histories, cultures, and settings.
In addition to her on-target analyses, she also demonstrates how
reviewers in generally respected school and library journals more
often than not applaud books deeply flawed by stereotypical depictions
of Native peoples. American Indian Themes is an important and eminently
readable book—a treasure—that has a place in every library,
and in every school where history and literature are taught.
hc 40.00 |
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Momaday, N. Scott (Kiowa), House Made of Dawn. (1966), 1989.
Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a classic story of Abel,
lost between two worlds. Abel’s loss of language becomes a metaphor
for the loss of
the Native voice in American society.
hc 30.00, pb 13.00
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Montejo, Victor (Maya), Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village.
1987.
In this eyewitness account of an army attack on a Guatemalan
village and its tragic aftermath, Montejo describes the daily
reality of dictatorship
and repression. Like I, Rigoberta Menchú, this important
book is not for the faint of heart.
pb 15.00
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Moore, MariJo (Cherokee), Spirit Voices of Bones. 1997.
Marilou Awiakta says of this book, “In the context of
our violent and often despairing times, MariJo Moore evokes
the marrow
of ancestral bones—the
regenerative powers of blood memory, of spirit voices that spur and heal.
She calls us to remember that ‘we all create each other.’”
pb 13.00
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Morris, Irvin (Diné), From the Glittering World: A Navajo
Story. 1997.
When the Diné finally came up into the Fifth World, the
Glittering World, today’s world, they understood their instructions
to remain within the boundary of the rainbow and the land
and receive the blessings of the Holy People. That was before the
Long March, the forced march outside of the holy rainbow
circle,
and General James Carleton’s instructions to Kit Carson to “kill
them wherever they can be found.” That was before the BIA
boarding schools and before the missionaries. That was before
the world
of dead-end jobs and glittering technology and other alien
influences from outside the sacred land. Here, Morris weaves
together personal
memory and tribal history, spiritual realities and urban
harshness, fiction and truths, in to the collective story
and song of the
Diné people.
pb 20.00
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Nabokov, Peter, ed., Native American Testimony: A Chronicle
of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present. 1992,
b/w photos.
An important history of Native-white relations seen through Indian
eyes and told through Indian voices.
pb 18.00
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Nahohai, Milford (Zuni), and Elisa Phelps, Dialogues with Zuni
Potters. 1995, color and b/w photos.
“I went to my grandfather for him to teach
me the prayers. I didn’t realize that there were prayers
for each stage of pottery. Once I learned the prayers, everything
really fell
into place. I felt good about it.” Here, the reader
visits with Zuni potters and their families as they talk about
their lives and their work. This is much more than “just” a
beautiful art book.
pb 20.00
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Naranjo-Morse, Nora (Tewa), Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay. 1992, color photos.
“In the Tewa language,” Naranjo-Morse says, “there
is no word for art. There is, however, the concept for an artful
life, filled with inspiration
and fueled by labor and thoughtful approach.” Each of her poems, accompanied
by a color photo of one of her sculptures, is a gift to anyone who can appreciate an “artful
life.”
pb 18.00 |
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Ortiz, Bev, as told by Julia Parker (Miwok/Paiute), It Will
Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation.
1991, b/w photos.
In this intimate book, which grew out of the friendship of Julia
Parker and Bev Ortiz, Parker describes how acorns are gathered,
dried, stored, cracked,
pounded, winnowed, sifted, leached, cooked, and eaten. This book is an
honoring for the elders, who, as Ortiz says, “are the
best and true teachers...”
pb 14.00
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| From Simon Ortiz (Acoma) |
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After and Before the Lightning.
(1994), 1998.
This volume of poems comes from a winter—“after
the last thunder and lightning and before the first thunder and
lightning”—that
Ortiz lived and worked, teaching at Sinte Gleska College on the Rosebud
reservation. Surrounded by the “reality of a South Dakota winter
demanded to be dealt with,” Ortiz found his “poetry reconnecting
my life to all Existence with a sense of wonder and awe” like that of the
Lakota people, who “know the harshness of this reality... and...
the sacred beauty of the prairie homeland which they regard with wonder
and
awe.”
pb 18.00
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Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature.
1983.
Edited by Ortiz, this is one of the very best anthologies, with fiction by such
wonderful writers as Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Anna
Lee Walters, Joseph Bruchac,
Gordon Henry, Peter Blue Cloud, Mary TallMountain, and many others.
pb 16.00
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From Sand Creek. (1981), 1999.
On the morning of November 29, 1864, a volunteer militia led
by Colonel John Chivington massacred about 155 Cheyenne—mostly
elderly men, women, and children—who had been camped
at Sand Creek, Colorado. In this book, Simon Ortiz’s stunning
poems are about violence, victims, aggressors;
about what it is to exist as a people: excluded, colonized, conquered,
made to disappear, and therefore, to have “no history.” But
there is resistance here, and the deep understanding that change happens,
always. “This
America/has been a burden/of steel and mad/death,/but, look now,/there
are flowers/and new grass/and a spring wind/rising/from Sand Creek.” Simon
Ortiz is a wonderful writer, and everyone ought to read this.
pb 11.00
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Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing.
1998.
“Now it is my turn to stand,” says Ortiz in the traditional way. Those
who are given the gift of writing, he believes, have the responsibility to
speak for the culture, community, land, and language. These essays, by Ortiz,
Leslie
Marmon Silko, Gloria Bird, Esther G. Belin, Roberta J. Hill, A.A. Hedge Coke,
Daniel David Moses, Elizabeth Woody, Jeannette C. Armstrong, and Victor Montejo,
speak for the sake of the land and the people, of the inextricable relationship
and interconnection between them.
pb 17.00
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Woven Stone. 1992, 1998.
This collection of three of Ortiz’s previously published
works—Going
for the Rain, A Good Journey, and Fight Back:
For the Sake of the People, For
the Sake of the Land—is a fine opportunity for those not already
familiar with it to see writing of one of the most remarkable
poets of our time.
pb 23.00
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Pilkington, Doris/Nugi Garimara (Mardu), Rabbit Proof Fence. 1996.
This is the true story of three little girls, called “half-caste” by the Australian government, part of the “stolen generations” kidnapped from their families and communities and brought to the Moore River Native Settlement, one of the Aboriginal residential schools whose mission was to train them as domestic workers and assimilate them into Australian society. Young Molly Craig, leading her little sister, Daisy, and cousin, Gracie, in a daring escape, attempt to elude the authorities and walk the dangerous 1,500 miles along the rabbit-proof fence that will lead them home. Set down by Molly's daughter, this story is an affirmation of strength and determination in the face of racism and colonialism.
pb 11.00. Also available: DVD drama based on this book, 20.00.
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