The best books about the Ojibwe

Though we are thankful for the current movements to decolonize archives and museums, from at least 1750, Native writers have been doing this important survival work of asserting Native ways of knowing. This revelation is the subject of Wisecup’s ground-breaking study. It shows how early Native writers assembled lists, collages, and literary texts that, through juxtaposition and recontextualization, resisted the way colonial archives defined their bodies, belongings, and words as ethnographic evidence of vanishing peoples. Wisecup offers revealing ways to read the Indigenous compilations of key figures like Mohegan Samson Occom’s medicinal recipes, Ojibwe Charlotte Johnston’s poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent’s vocabulary lists. We also deeply appreciate how Wisecup ends each chapter by connecting the early writer it focuses on to contemporary Indigenous culture.

The main character in this book is bicultural, white American and Native, but I really related to the way the author shows what it’s like to belong to two cultures that don’t necessarily understand each other—and the way someone can become a bridge between cultures because of that. I also really appreciated the main character’s struggles with the expectations people have of her based on what she looks like, which doesn’t match the fullness of her cultural identity.

In her fifteenth novel, Erdrich, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, attempts to answer the question, “Can a person do the worst possible thing and still be loved?” by showing readers how native American parents living on a reservation cope when the father, Landreaux, accidentally kills his best friend’s five-year-old son in a hunting accident. Landreaux is distraught, wracked with horror, guilt, and grief. After consultation and attending a sweat, guided by an old native custom, he gives La Rose, his and his wife’s youngest child–whose best friend was the deceased–to the bereaved parents and siblings in a version of justice. It’s a twist on an eye for an eye, intended to equalize the suffering and prevent the escalation and further death that can occur when acts of grief-fueled revenge begin. Now both families are suffering unbearable loss, and so is LaRose, a five-year-old boy.

I don’t know if there’s… show more.

This readable book shows how – contrary to the narrative of the famous Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee – Native history did not end with the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Although the title says it starts in 1890, Treuer actually does a great job of sketching the long histories of the diverse Indigenous peoples that lived in the Americas before the invasion of Europeans and showing their continuing vibrant cultures.

Treuer combines his personal experiences – having grown up Ojibwe on a reservation – with his research into Indigenous struggles to preserve their culture in the face of assimilation and erasure. Importantly, he shows the ways in which Native peoples have become part of urban and ‘modern’ society, showing their capacity for change and adaptation and their ubiquitous presence in America today.

Picking out one of this master storyteller’s plethora of great reads is nearly impossible, but this 2002 novel features Father Damien Modeste, a woman who has lived as a man on the remote Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse. The gripping plot takes a turn amid an investigation into a potentially phony saint named Sister Leopolda.

We Americans are obsessed with mysteries from TV to Film to Books. And I am obsessed with the young sleuth, Cash Blackbear, the unlikely shero of Marcie R. Rendon. To date, there are three Blackbear mysteries: Murder on the Red River, Girl Gone Missing, and Sinister Graves. Blackbear did not have an enchanted childhood, but she not only survives—she thrives and solves cases with the astuteness, curiosity, and moxie of the most seasoned detective. Set in Northern Minnesota in the 1970s, the series heroine is 19, totally independent, hard-working, and somewhat of a pool hustler. Her one friend, Sherriff Wheaton, recognizes her brilliance and intuition and accepts and supports her. Blackbear helps him solve crimes, even if he protests. If you're a mystery fan, follow some Indigenous sleuths and Rendon's series is a great place to start.   

Bagonegiizhig, better known as Hole in the Day, is an extremely charismatic figure in the history of Minnesota, yet few know of his life and leadership. In The Assassination of Hole in the Day, Ojibwe historian and scholar Anton Treuer skillfully reveals the rise and downfall of this clever, polarizing figure. An expert at his craft, Treuer provides readers with an excellent historical context to understand the world in which Hole in the Day lived. Then, Treuer shows readers how Hole in the Day rose to prominence and why he should not be overlooked by the annals of history.  

I can never decide which of Erdrich’s books is my favorite, but The Plague of Doves is definitely a major contender. Erdrich’s novelistic style is more like a chorus than a solo: she presents various stories involving different characters in different times, but the stories are in orbit around the central conflict, in this case, a pair of horrific crimes committed long ago. Yet even when the content is dark, her writing is so beautiful that my primary feeling reading it is joy. For me, the title of this book perfectly captures that contradictory experience. 

Louise Erdrich is one the premier writers of our time and in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel she doesn’t disappoint. This is a deeply revealing and completely engrossing novel about everyday people who fought against the U.S. government’s 1953 Indian Termination Policy. Using a fictional representation of her own grandfather, Erdrich exposes yet another tragic moment in the history of U.S. relations with Native Americans. What’s brilliant is that she does so without clichés or gimmicks. Her characters are not heroic figures or caricatures that exist to prove a point or embellish an important historical moment. They are deeply human and therefore profoundly real. It’s this wonderful mixture of character and history that raises The Night Watchman to another level.  

The Light in the Forest is a classic beloved by generations of school children and surely reigns as one of the first great Young Adult novels. I read it several times as a child in the 1960s and still recall scenes from the book, which tells the tale of young John Cameron Butler, who was captured at the age of four by the Lenni Lenape Indians and raised as the adopted son of a war chief. Eleven years later an angry and unwilling 15-year-old John is returned to his white family at the end of the French and Indian War. He longs to return to his Indian family, having forgotten the ways of white settlers.

This is the forerunner of many books about settlers captured by the Indians who are unwilling to return to white society, including the likes of News of the World and Flight of the Sparrow.… show more.

Josie wants to dance at next summer’s powwow. But she needs nearly everyone in her family to help make this possible. As Josie’s story unfolds we are introduced to the special people in her family. We learn of their love, their kindness, and their special talents. We are also introduced to the beautiful connections to many parts of our natural world.  

My parents were anthropologists who took me as a pre-teen to visit the pueblos of the southwest. There we attended ritual dances, and I was deeply impressed by their devotion, beauty, and power. I incorporated those impressions into the modern dance I was studying and would continue to practice as my first career. Now as a writer I continue my interest in indigenous cultures, and I admire the way the Plains Ojibwe, as portrayed by Erdrich, expand the meaning of “medicine” beyond scientific facts. “Medicine” comes to mean love, the healing force that overcomes envy and anger in communities from the plains to the pueblos to families around the world, including my own.

I met Carole LaFavor, Ojibwe, when I was writing for community newspapers and local magazines. I wrote a profile of LaFavor detailing her activism work in the Native community. Later, we were both in a writing group. I first heard some of the early writing she was doing for Evil Dead Center. She was the first Native woman I met writing crime and she inspired me to keep going on the book I was writing at the time.  University of Minnesota Press re-released Evil Dead Center in 2017 with the forward reading, “to underscore the significance of her writing to the Indigenous literary canon, to remind us of the power of her activism for HIV-positive Native peoples, and to return her important claims for the centrality of Two-Spirit peoples, bodies, and histories to the public eye.” - Lisa Tatonetti

Jim Northrup, Fond du lac Ojibwe author, was my writing mentor from the time I met him in 1991 until he passed away in 2015. He would always ask, “What are you writing today?” That was his way of encouraging me to keep writing. His crime novel, Dirty Copper is the story of Luke Warmwater, who returns to the Reservation after serving in Vietnam. Luke becomes a deputy sheriff on the Rez and sees firsthand the war raging below the appearance of peace.

I would listen to Jim talk about his writing and the progress he was making on his story as he wrote it. Listening to him encouraged me to keep going with my writing. Jim’s way of storytelling through the written word is something I have tried to emulate.

I had not read Louise Erdrich in many years when I picked up this book, but I was especially interested as it addresses violence against Indigenous women, an all-too-common reality rarely reported in the mainstream. The author makes a fascinating choice: to tell the story from the perspective of the victim’s thirteen-year-old son. On the reservation, where intersecting law and law enforcement—federal, state, and tribal—only leads to massive injustice, the boy takes matters into his own hands, as investigator, prosecutor, and judge. Erdrich goes there for a shocking climax, and perhaps an even more riveting denouement. A visionary examination of Indian jurisprudence as dictated by the United States, and its discontents.

Superficially, The Minnesota Trilogy is a murder mystery. When two Norwegian tourists are slaughtered in a national forest, it seems like an open and shut case. All the evidence points in one direction, but park ranger Lance Hansen is not convinced. He suspects his own brother. Hansen’s amateur investigation accidentally uncovers a second mystery involving his ancestor and the death (murder?) of a nineteenth-century Ojibwe medicine man. Sundstøl’s depiction of contemporary rural Minnesota is as full of magic, menace, and intrigue as the best fantasy world-building. The American Midwest becomes a land of prophetic dreams and roaming ghosts. The clash of cultures is less political than mythic, and the stakes are spiritual. History is still happening. Family is deeper than blood. These books open my imagination and tear my heart in half.

This is the first book I’ve read by William Kent Krueger, but it made me want to read the whole series. Set during a miserably cold winter in the northeast corner of Minnesota, a stone’s throw from Lake Superior, this mystery about a brutal murder and a missing native American boy will make you fear frostbite just from turning pages. 

Cork O’Connor is a complicated character in a seemingly downward spiral. Once the sheriff of this small town, he’s since lost his wife, his job, and is worried about losing his children. His mixed heritage of Irish and Ojibwe makes him see things a little differently than the new sheriff, but not having a badge won’t stop him from taking action when people he cares about are in danger.

In Rez Life, David Treuer, an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation, shows us the real-life consequences of historical events and policy. Through scholarship and anecdote, Treuer teaches readers what it really means to be Native American in a country that has tried, time and again, to erase them. Rez Life is not the history book rendition of past wrongs and tragic events. Instead, it is an articulate, expressive look at the people who live with the legacy of those past wrongs and tragic events. It shows readers the Native Americans they won’t see in history books—the ones that exist today, fighting to overcome the trauma thrust upon them.

This fictional account of the life of an English fur trader is a sentimental favorite for me out of my respect for historian Charles Cleland.

Cleland tells the story of Alexander Henry who was captured by the Odawa Indians during the attack on Fort Michillimackinac in 1763. Henry lived among the Indians through the seasons, giving an eye-witness account of their lives as hunter-gatherers. Cleland is better as a historian than a novelist, but this is still a fun read and would also be a good book on any Young Adult list.

Keepers of the Game is a great book for provoking arguments. Martin asks why Native Americans willingly participated in the European fur trade, overhunting beavers and other wild furbearers to near-extinction in the process. His succinctly explained answer is a creative one that centers on the cooperative spiritual relationship between indigenous peoples and indigenous animals. His thesis has generated multiple scholarly counters—a clear sign of true originality. This book really made me think about the different kinds of relationships people have with animals. I think it’s far too easy to assume that we all see the same thing when looking at a wild creature. Martin’s work, though, impressed upon me the need to take seriously other, more unfamiliar perspectives on the natural world.