The most recommended Navajo books

Who picked these books? Meet our 36 experts.

36 authors created a book list connected to the Navajo, and here are their favorite Navajo books.
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Book cover of A Voice In Her Tribe: A Navajo Woman's Own Story

Philip Burnham Author Of Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn

From my list on true stories about Indian country.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been teaching, writing, and learning about Indian issues, past and present, for more than four decades. I taught for several years on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and for years I was a correspondent for Indian Country Today and reported from reservations across the country and several Mexican states. I’ve written and published widely about rez issues including cultural repatriation, land use, Native corporations, language preservation, environmental dumping, and Indian law. I’ve spent a lot of time listening, watching, and reading before putting my own thoughts down on paper, and these are some of the books that have deeply moved me.

Philip's book list on true stories about Indian country

Philip Burnham Why did Philip love this book?

Thankfully, not all Indian stories are written or recounted by men. Irene Stewart, born at the base of Canyon de Chelly in 1907, grew up in the shadow of her father, a medicine man who had her kidnapped and taken against her will to boarding school. She survived three of those schools, including Haskell Institute, where she learned to bob her hair, studied home economics, and later became a Presbyterian. But this is no simple tale of assimilation. Like many of her schoolmates, she remained attached to tribal ways and remained true to Navajo tradition even while transforming herself for the world beyond the rez. 

By Irene Stewart,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Voice In Her Tribe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is the story of Irene Stewart, a Navajo woman, told in her own words. Born in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, she was raised by her grandmother after the death of her mother and the departure of her father. Yet her life has not been that of the traditional woman rug weaver of the sheep camp. From the moment when, at the age of nine, her father sent a Navajo policeman to kidnap his daughter from formal schooling, she was set on a path toward becoming a bilingual-bicultural Indian. She has learned to live in both Navajo and white American…


Book cover of Code Talker

Jo A. Hiestand Author Of The Cottage

From Jo's 3 favorite reads in 2024.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Mystery novelist World War 2 espionage enthusiast Reader Cat parent

Jo's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Jo A. Hiestand Why did Jo love this book?

Author Chester Nez was one of the Navajo code talkers in WWII. I knew of them, knew a bit about their purpose, but actually reading about their exploits and code was eye-opening. I admit I know nothing of the Navajo language. Consequently, I was amazed to learn the code talkers had to invent words for submarine, bomber, regiment, general, Japan, and the like. Which makes sense, if I had stopped to really think. Why would they have words for Africa, truck, machine gun and so on? The men had to invent the words during training. That in itself I found fascinating. It also was interesting how the talkers were actually employed during battles. Chester Nez also explained about his early life and the way of his people. His childhood schooling was, to me, appalling -- the Navajo children being forced to cut their long hair, conform to "white man's ways"…

By Chester Nez, Judith Schiess Avila,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Code Talker as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.

His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength—both physical and mental—to excel as a marine.

During…


Book cover of Loving Chloe

Melissa Yi Author Of Code Blues

From my list on smart women who kick ass.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love to read and write about strong women. I don't necessarily mean gunning down aliens while wearing tight pants. Those books can be good too, but let's be honest, tight pants encourage yeast infections. I prefer books where women handle anything from murder to wayward cats with intelligence and compassion, while wearing whatever they want. The women, I mean. Cats already figured out to skip the pants.

Melissa's book list on smart women who kick ass

Melissa Yi Why did Melissa love this book?

Everything about this book steals my heart, from Chloe's tenderness with horses to the Diné (Navajo) children who don't have enough books at their school.

But let me back up and tell you that Chloe is pregnant with Hank's child. She shouldn't be riding horses at all, but the call is too strong. Hank's a good guy who can't find professor work in Arizona, ends up teaching the Diné children, and finds he loves them more than working at a university.

It should be a happy ending between Hank and Chloe and the upcoming baby, except the horse belongs to an artist named Junior Whitebear, who returns to town and forms an instant, overpowering connection with Chloe. Mapson writes so well that she makes me ache.

By Jo-Ann Mapson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Loving Chloe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When 34-year-old Chloe Morgan appears on Hank Oliver's doorstep in Cameron, Arizona, she arrives with more than her old white German shepherd, Hannah, and a rambunctious horse in tow. Chloe is pregnant with Hank's child, and she's as tough-talking and vulnerable, skittish and tender as when last we saw her, in Jo-Ann Mapson's acclaimed first novel Hank & Chloe.

Loving Chloe takes up where the earlier novel leaves off. As Chloe and Hank settle somewhat uneasily into domesticity in his grandmother's cabin, a local Navajo legend named Junior Whitebear, an artist whose work has been praised by the eastern commercial…


Book cover of Trail of Lightning

R.M. Olson Author Of Redshift

From my list on restoring your faith in humanity.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a former journalist-turned-lawyer and a recovering news junky, I’ve spent much of my life watching unhappy scenarios play out. But what’s always astonished me me is how, no matter how bad things get or how difficult the situation, there’s a spark of humanity, of kindness and compassion and optimism, that comes out in people at the most unexpected of times. Now, as an author and a parent, I find myself drawn to stories that remind me of that—that no matter how bleak life may look, how cruel or arbitrary the circumstances, there’s something good and beautiful and worth fighting for, not “somewhere out there,” but inside us. 

R.M.'s book list on restoring your faith in humanity

R.M. Olson Why did R.M. love this book?

I read this book after a long, dull period when I couldn’t seem to find anything to read that sparked my interest. Trail of Lightning picked me up, whirled me around, and made me fall head-over-heels in love with speculative fiction again.

Set in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, it’s brutal and gripping, but where there should only be sadness and despair, there are unexpected moments of un-looked-for kindness. This isn’t a light read, and it isn’t exactly happy—but there’s a beautiful optimism underlying the bleakness, that after all, even in the worst of circumstances and at the worst of times, people can be kind. 

By Rebecca Roanhorse,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Trail of Lightning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the Time 100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time

2019 LOCUS AWARD WINNER, BEST FIRST NOVEL

2019 HUGO AWARD FINALIST, BEST NOVEL

Nebula Award Finalist for Best Novel

One of Bustle's Top 20 "landmark sci-fi and fantasy novels" of the decade

"Someone please cancel Supernatural already and give us at least five seasons of this badass Indigenous monster-hunter and her silver-tongued sidekick." -The New York Times

"An excitingly novel tale." -Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse and Midnight Crossroads series

"Fun, terrifying, hilarious, and brilliant." -Daniel Jose Older, New York Times bestselling…


Book cover of Healer of the Water Monster

Laura Shovan Author Of Welcome to Monsterville

From Laura's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Poet Avid reader Lifelong educator

Laura's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Laura Shovan Why did Laura love this book?

This contemporary middle-grade novel is infused with Navajo culture. Protagonist Nathan is spending the summer out in the desert on his grandmother’s ancestral land.

It’s hot, dusty, and there is no running water. He’s miserable until he meets a Water Monster, whose mysterious illness is causing a decades-long drought.

This is a great quest/adventure story blended with contemporary themes about family dynamics. The storytelling is so rich that I was totally caught up in Nathan’s quest to save the Water Monster.

By Brian Young,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Healer of the Water Monster as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 8, 9, 10, and 11.

What is this book about?

American Indian Youth Literature Award Winner: Best Middle Grade Book! Brian Young’s powerful debut novel tells of a seemingly ordinary Navajo boy who must save the life of a Water Monster—and comes to realize he’s a hero at heart.

When Nathan goes to visit his grandma, Nali, at her mobile summer home on the Navajo reservation, he knows he’s in for a pretty uneventful summer, with no electricity or cell service. Still, he loves spending time with Nali and with his uncle Jet, though it’s clear when Jet arrives that he brings his problems with him.

One night, while lost…


Book cover of Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code: A Navajo Code Talker's Story

Mara Rockliff Author Of Doctor Esperanto and the Language of Hope

From my list on picture books about languages.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a children’s author best known for digging up fascinating, often funny stories about famous people—and forgotten people who deserve to be famous again. But only one of them inspired me to take up a whole new hobby: L. L. Zamenhof, creator of the international language Esperanto. Learning Esperanto turned out to be fun and easy. It helped me make friends all over the world, and got me interested in how language works.

Mara's book list on picture books about languages

Mara Rockliff Why did Mara love this book?

If I had to recommend just one picture book about languages, I’d choose this one, because it does so much. First, of course, it shares a long-secret episode in American history—the triumph of the Navajo “code talkers” in World War II. (Not the first time bilingual heroes came to our country’s rescue: see my own picture book Gingerbread for Liberty! How a German Baker Helped Win the American Revolution.)  But this book also addresses language justice in a way that kids will find easy to understand. Through Chester, we feel the pain and confusion of being told one’s own language is “bad” and worthless, and the pride of having it finally treated with respect. We also see how language isn’t just a set of words, but carries culture, tradition, religion, a whole way of life.   

By Joseph Bruchac, Liz Amini-Holmes (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Junior Library Guild Selection April 2018
2018 Cybils Award Finalist, Elementary Non-Fiction
BRLA 2018 Southwest Book Award
2019 Southwest Books of the Year: Kid Pick
2020 Grand Canyon Award, Nonfiction Nominee
2020-2021 Arkansas Diamond Primary Book Award Master List

STARRED REVIEW! "A perfect, well-rounded historical story that will engage readers of all ages. A perfect, well-rounded historical story that will engage readers of all ages."―Kirkus Reviews starred review

As a young Navajo boy, Chester Nez had to leave the reservation and attend boarding school, where he was taught that his native language and culture were useless. But Chester refused…


Book cover of Whereas: Poems

Adin Dobkin Author Of Sprinting Through No Man's Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France

From my list on people and societies grapple with the end of wars.

Why am I passionate about this?

Before I started writing, my understanding of war largely came about through its manifestation over subsequent decades in individuals. My grandfather selectively shared stories from his time as a bomber, then as a POW in Germany. Maybe it was this conjunction, a personal sense of rebuilding and of storytelling, that has driven my interest in the subject over these years, as a journalist and critic and then as an author of a book on the subject.

Adin's book list on people and societies grapple with the end of wars

Adin Dobkin Why did Adin love this book?

Wars take a long time to end. Work is done to bury the loss, grief, and guilt described above as quickly as possible. Oftentimes the forces that stand to profit from this forgetting succeed, except among those groups which are either ignored or for whom the loss is too deep. What Layli Long Soldier’s brilliant Whereas discloses is how the acts of government, the papers generated like planks over a well, seek to hide that grief and loss, and how those groups might reclaim the stories those papers hope to disappear. 

By Layli Long Soldier,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Whereas as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.


Book cover of The Blessing Way

Gregory Zeigler Author Of The Straw That Broke

From my list on makes you want to enjoy nature and hug trees.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a leader of mountaineering and field science programs, I learned that Mother Earth knows a thing or two about magic. When I see the magic of nature under attack, I have the same response as when witnessing a helpless person being bullied: I want to join the fight. As a writer, my most powerful weapons are my words. And the best use of my words is in the telling of riveting stories—that both entertain and educate—in defense of the wild. 

Gregory's book list on makes you want to enjoy nature and hug trees

Gregory Zeigler Why did Gregory love this book?

I would suggest anything by Hillerman, but you might as well start with the first in the series. Without overtly advocating for activism to protect nature, Hillerman renders the desert southwest in such achingly beautiful detail that one can’t help but want to fight to protect it. In fact, Hillerman is where I got my start in reading/writing environmental thrillers.

By Tony Hillerman,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked The Blessing Way as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!  

“Brilliant…as fascinating as it is original.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

From New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman, the first novel in his series featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn & Officer Jim Chee who encounter a bizarre case that borders between the supernatural and murder

Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place—a corpse with a mouth full of sand—abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues.…


Book cover of The Navajo People and Uranium Mining

Bruce E. Johansen Author Of Resource Devastation on Native American Lands: Toxic Earth, Poisoned People

From my list on Native Americans and lethal uranium mining.

Why am I passionate about this?

I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.

Bruce's book list on Native Americans and lethal uranium mining

Bruce E. Johansen Why did Bruce love this book?

Brugge., et al. rests its case on the personal lives of Navajos who became poisoned by the uranium that pervaded nearly the entire Navajo Nation from the 1940s until the mines were closed in the 1970s to about 2015.

Much of the editing was done by Navajos, which provides a clear and strong message describing how the many deaths from uranium poison have shredded the cultural fabric of Navajo life.

It is an intensely personal book that is very strong in its account of these effects on families, elders, and future generations.

By Doug Brugge (editor), Timothy Benally (editor), Esther Yazzie-Lewis (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Navajo People and Uranium Mining as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Sixty years ago, the United States turned to the tiny atom to unleash the most destructive force known to mankind and bring an end to World War II. Ironically, the uranium used to create the most technologically advanced weapon ever invented came from the land of the most traditional indigenous people of North America, and was dug from the earth with picks and shovels...Lost in the history of this era is the story of the people - the Dine - who pulled uranium out of the ground by hand, who spoke and continue to speak an ancient tongue...By the thousands,…


Book cover of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country

Bruce E. Johansen Author Of Resource Devastation on Native American Lands: Toxic Earth, Poisoned People

From my list on Native Americans and lethal uranium mining.

Why am I passionate about this?

I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.

Bruce's book list on Native Americans and lethal uranium mining

Bruce E. Johansen Why did Bruce love this book?

While several other books describe uranium’s effects on the Navajos and other Native American peoples from individual effects of exposure and death, Wastelanding is strongest in building a strong case that all of these individual efforts constitute a clear case that environmental racism, as well as colonization, and gender discrimination, combine with the United States’ hunger for uranium in a new atomic age to make victims of people who had lived in the areas for millennia while leaving the uranium in the ground, which is exactly where the people decided it should stay.

By Traci Brynne Voyles,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Wastelanding as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike.

Traci…


Book cover of A Voice In Her Tribe: A Navajo Woman's Own Story
Book cover of Code Talker
Book cover of Loving Chloe

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