The best books about Indigenous survivance, place, and memory

This book is about the enduring presence of Native people in Seattle, a city located on the traditional land of the Duwamish Tribe that promotes its Indigenous heritage but marginalizes its living Indigenous residents.

Thrush challenges the myth that Indigenous people are not part of the history of modern U.S. cities and, if present at all, are merely ghostly remnants of the pre-colonial past. His is a smart, insightful, and engaging place-based, collaborative history of Seattle filled with powerful images of streetscapes that made me think about settler-colonial cities in a new light.

This book confronts stereotypes about where Indigenous people can be found by telling readers that cities are as familiar and as much home to them as reservations became. This is an edgy and quick-paced novel of “urban Indians” and what it means to live in a landscape that is yours but, practically speaking, no longer belongs to you.

In the vein of Erdrich and Silko, Orange weaves together the diverse experiences and complex emotions of a multigenerational cast of characters that had me eagerly tacking back and forth between their stories in anticipation of their reunion at the Big Oakland Powwow, where they put aside their personal pain and sorrow to celebrate Indigenous culture and values.

This memoir by Thomas Muller, a product of intergeneration trauma from Canada’s Indian residential schools, a broken home, serial father figures, and alcohol and sexual abuse, is filled with pain, heartbreak, and self-effacing humor.

Growing up, he navigated between Winnipeg and towns in British Columbia and the Pukatawagan Cree Nation’s homeland of his great-grandparents in northern Manitoba. Written with unflinching honesty and a survivor’s instinct, the memoir traces the depths of his frustration and despair and his healing and spirituality, fatherhood, and newly found purpose as a leader at the forefront of the environmental justice movement.

As I turned every page, I found myself rooting for him and his right to the city.

Erdrich’s novel is about Indigenous displacement in the 20th century. I’m hard-pressed to call this my favorite book—all have been inspiring—but this one resonated with me most recently.

Based on her grandfather’s efforts to fight Indigenous dispossession, the novel moves between the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural Minnesota and cities such as Washington D.C., where the central character (and later his daughter) testify before the U.S. Congress. Others leave the reservation for Minneapolis to encounter unexpected yet common forms of violence to women and exploitation.

Woven into their stories are those of still other figures juggling everyday life against the threat of termination. Erdrich, a gifted storyteller, sends a powerful message about continuing struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in the modern era. 

This evocative book addresses the conundrum of writing about an Indigenous place barely mentioned in narratives foundational to U.S. history. For Fenn, this was the ancestral homeland of the Mandan of the Northern Plains, once a flourishing hub of Native life.

This is history-writing at its finest, expertly braided from threads of archaeological, climatic, geological, epidemiological, and ethnographic evidence and enriched by Fenn’s eye-opening journey to North Dakota. Neither denying the impacts of European-American settler expansion nor portraying the Mandan merely as passive victims, the book led me on a journey of discovery that revealed complex interrelationships of colonialism, geography, and Indigenous persistence.