The CSUN University Library invites you to celebrate Native American Heritage Month by exploring one of our recommended books that explores Native American History and Culture. Since its inception in 1990, Native American Heritage month celebrates the traditions and stories of Native Americans. It is a time for education and reflection. It is also an opportunity for people of all backgrounds to learn more about the contributions and experiences of Native Americans.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s recommended reading lists (physical and eBook) celebrate the contributions of selected Native American authors whose fictional works offer readers powerful insights into the generational trauma experienced by Native Americans and the resilience of their communities. The fiction of Stephen Graham Jones, Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange and the other highlighted authors are listed in our recommended title list for their powerful storytelling skills. \u00a0These authors combine insightful personal narratives with the historical realities of racism, displacement, and violence that have shaped Indigenous life in the United States and North America. These fictional works do not merely recount history like non-fiction works\u2014 rather they effectively transfer and embody it though creative writing that reveals how collective memory and the past persist in the minds of Native families and their communities today. By blending contemporary voices with ancestral memories and historical events, these authors and their selected works create an important bridge between history and the present, illustrating how generational trauma has been inherited in Native American communities, and how resilience, strength and spirit have been a constant.<\/p>\n
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Stephen Graham Jones<\/a> is a Blackfeet Native American author known for his works like The Only Good Indians<\/em> (2020 Ray Bradbury Prize Winner) and My Heart is a Chainsaw (2022 Bram Stoker Award Winner) which use the horror and speculative fiction genres as vehicles to explore historical violence against Indigenous people and the lingering emotions it creates. His novels often reference the erasure of traditions and the alienation caused by assimilation policies, such as Indian boarding schools and forced conversions. A master of the horror fiction genre, Stephen Graham Jones impressively conveys the haunting effects of colonial violence\u2014as ghosts, monsters, and curses fill in for the emotional and psychological scars left by centuries of cultural genocide and systemic oppression within America. Phoenix Scholz, who profiled Jones for Strange Horizons,<\/a> a weekly magazine of and about speculative fiction, notes that\u00a0\u201cIn all of his books, [Jones] deliberately uses the word \u201cIndian\u201d to refer to Native Americans. This is clearly an example of reclaiming language, taking words historically used as slurs and reappropriating them with positive or neutral meanings as an act of resistance against discriminating and oppressive power structures and promoting empowerment\u201d.<\/p>\n All the featured NAHM title recommendations illustrate how these selected Indigenous authors have creatively and powerfully told stories that counter cultural and historical erasure and strengthen reader awareness about Native American heritage and history, while reminding readers that Native American identity is marked by generational traumas and sustained by enduring strength, resilience, and activism within Indigenous communities. They are also wonderful books to read with memorable characters and impactful stories.<\/p>\n Winner of the National Book Award Washington Post Best Book of the Year A New York Times Notable Book From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Changing Is Not Vanishing simultaneously reinvents the early history of American Indian literature and the history of American poetry by presenting a vast but forgotten archive of American Indian poems. Through extensive archival research in small-circulation newspapers and magazines, manuscripts, pamphlets, rare books, and scrapbooks, Robert Dale Parker has uncovered the work of more than 140 early Indian poets who wrote before 1930. Changing Is Not Vanishing includes poems by 82 writers and provides a full bibliography of all the poets Parker has identified-most of them unknown even to specialists in Indian literature. In a wide range of approaches and styles, the poems in this collection address such topics as colonialism and the federal government, land, politics, nature, love, war, Christianity, and racism. With a richly informative introduction and extensive annotation, Changing Is Not Vanishing opens the door to a trove of fascinating, powerful poems that will be required reading for all scholars and readers of American poetry and American Indian literature.<\/p>\n A fearless novel about a lost boy in search of his identity-who happens to be a time-traveling mass murdererFlight, the third novel by National Book Award winner\u00a0Sherman Alexie, is both shattering and full of laughter. The story of Zits, an orphaned Indian boy, resonates profoundly in a country scarred by violence.\u00a0Alexie\u00a0works his trademark magic to turn Zits’s experiences into a fable about identity, race, and American history. In a gutsy, challenging book that the Village Voice called “fierce and defiant, manic and irreverent,” a literary icon gives us a blast of unforgettable tragicomedy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The fifteen Native women writers in Reckonings document transgenerational trauma, yet they also celebrate survival. Their stories are vital testaments of our times. Unlike most anthologies that present a single story from many writers, this volume offers a sampling of two to three stories by a select number of both famous and lesser known Native women writers in what is now the United States. Here you will find much-loved stories, many made easily accessible for the first time, and vibrant new stories by well-known contemporary Native American writers as well as fresh emergent voices. These stories share an understanding of Native women’s lives in their various modes of loss and struggle, resistance and acceptance, and rage and compassion, ultimately highlighting the individual and collective will to endure against all odds. Reckonings features short stories by: Paula Gunn Allen, Kimberly M. Blaeser, Beth E. Brant, Anita Endrezze, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Reid Gomez, Janet Campbell Hale, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Misha Nogha, Beth H. Piatote, Patricia Riley, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Anna Lee Walters.<\/p>\n “Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville’s luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. With World War II raging in Europe, the inn is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war. Soon, Cowney’s refuge becomes a cage when the daughter of one of the residents goes missing and he finds himself accused of abduction and murder. Even As We Breathe invokes the elements of bone, blood, and flesh as Cowney navigates difficult social, cultural, and ethnic divides. After leaving the seclusion of the Cherokee reservation, he is able to explore a future free from the consequences of his family’s choices and to construct a new worldview, for a time. However, prejudice and persecution in the white world of the resort eventually compel Cowney to free himself from larger forces that hold him back as he struggles to unearth evidence of his innocence and clear his name”<\/p>\n Print book recommendations can be found the in the Library’s book display.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Book selections and blog post by Lynn Lampert, AIS Librarian The CSUN University Library invites you to celebrate Native American Heritage Month by exploring…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/library.csun.edu\/blogs\/cited\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/10\/Picture3-198x300.jpg\")
Another featured author, Louise Erdrich<\/a>, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is renowned for crafting multi-generational stories that trace the enduring effects of colonization and government policies on Native American families. In her novels The Round House<\/em>, she explores how the U.S. government\u2019s theft of land, the trauma of violence, and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous people reverberates across generations. Erdrich often places her characters within the aftermath of real historical injustices, such as the allotment system and the failure of U.S. law to protect Native women, highlighting how colonial violence persists through bureaucratic neglect and systemic racism. Erdrich\u2019s most recent work, The Night Watchman which won The Pulitzer Prize<\/a> in 2021<\/em>, was inspired by the author\u2019s grandfather, who chaired the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and fought a U.S. Congressional initiative to move Native people off their land.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/library.csun.edu\/blogs\/cited\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/10\/Picture5-198x300.jpg\")
Tommy Orange<\/a> is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. His breakout novel There There<\/em>, received the 2019 American Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. He is also a 2025 MacArthur Fellow<\/a>. There There<\/em> takes place in Oakland, CA and creatively connects urban Native experiences to centuries of forced relocation and cultural disintegration. The novel references historical atrocities such as the Trail of Tears, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which forced many Native American families to cities under the guise of opportunity. Orange\u2019s fiction explains how this history can be connected to characters struggles with addiction, feelings of alienation, and the sense of a loss of cultural connection while also simultaneously searching for identity and community. As Lynn Neary, who interviewed Orange for NPR<\/a> noted, \u201cThere There<\/em> is a work of fiction, but it begins with a nonfiction essay. It shatters the myth of the stoic native that’s been portrayed over the years by the iconic image of the Indian head, which was once ubiquitous on nickels and on late-night TV. Orange replaces that benign image with brutal examples from history of violence against Indians\u201d. Orange\u2019s latest novel, Wandering Stars<\/em>,<\/em> traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather’s shooting in There There. Orange\u2019s Wandering Stars<\/em> is set in, “Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison-castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines. In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous,\u00a0Tommy Orange\u00a0has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in ‘There There<\/em>‘ — warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts — asking what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. ‘Wandering Stars’ is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of\u00a0Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.”\u2014Dust Jacket flap<\/p>\nRecommended e-books<\/h2>\n
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The Round House: A Novel <\/span><\/span><\/a>by Louise Erdrich<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/library.csun.edu\/blogs\/cited\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/10\/index-199x300.jpg\")
Changing is not vanishing : a collection of early American Indian poetry to 1930<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/library.csun.edu\/blogs\/cited\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/10\/index-1-197x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n Flight : a novel <\/span><\/span><\/a>by Sherman Alexie<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n
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Reckonings : contem<\/span><\/span><\/a>porary short fiction by Native American women<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
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Even As We Breathe : A Novel <\/span><\/span><\/a>by Annette Saunook Clapsaddle<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n