Nov. 5, 2025 – November is Native American Heritage Month. We've curated a list of recently published books by and about the diverse Native peoples in the United States. From novels including science fiction, historical fiction and romance to nonfiction including poetry, photography, and history, read these books this month and all year.
Browse the books below, and put titles on hold in the library's catalog by clicking on their covers.
Fiction
"Big Chief" by Jon Hickey (2025)
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe's Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack's reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack's estranged sister and Mitch's former love.
In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go – and what they will sacrifice – to win it all. But when an accident claims the life of Mitch's mentor, a power broker in the reservation's political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation's descent into violence.
"Hole in the Sky" by Daniel H. Wilson (2025)
Heliopause is a real place – the very outer edge of our solar system, where the sun's solar winds are no longer strong enough to keep debris and intrusions from bombarding our system. It is the farthest edge of our protected boundary (it was recently crossed by Voyager), and the line beyond which space experts look for extraterrestrial presences. This is where Daniel Wilson's fascinating novel begins. Weaving together the story of Jim, a down-on-his-luck absentee father in the Osage territory of Oklahoma, and his daughter, Tawny, with those of a NASA engineer, a misfit anonymous genius who lives in military isolation analyzing a secret incoming "Pattern," and a CIA investigator tasked with tracking unexplained encounters, "Hole in the Sky" explores a Native American first contact that pulls all five characters into something never before seen or imagined.
"Old School Indian" by Aaron John Curtis (2025)
Abe Jacobs is Kanien'kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne – or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. He met the love of his life, started writing poetry, and began an open marriage. Now at forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease – one his doctors in Miami believe will kill him. Running from his diagnosis and a marriage teetering on collapse, Abe returns to the Rez, where he's persuaded to undergo a healing at the hands of his Great Uncle Budge. But Budge – a wry, recovered alcoholic prone to wearing punk T-shirts – isn't all that convincing. And Abe's time off the Rez has made him a thorough skeptic. To heal, Abe will undertake a revelatory journey, confronting the parts of himself he's hidden ever since he left home and wrestling with the imprint left by his once-passionate marriage.
"The Buffalo Hunter Hunter" by Stephen Graham Jones (2025)
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor, is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.
"The Truth According to Ember" by Danica Nava (2024)
Ember Lee Cardinal has not always been a liar, not for anything that counted. But when her résumé is rejected thirty-seven times, she takes matters into her own hands. She gets creative listing her work experience and answers the ethnicity question on all job applications with a lie. No one wanted Native American Ember, but Caucasian Ember landed her dream accounting job on Park Avenue (Oklahoma). Accountant Ember thrives in corporate life – and her love life seems to be looking up, too: she starts to secretly date the IT guy and fellow Native, Danuwoa. But when they're caught in a compromising position on a work trip, a scheming mid-level executive threatens to expose them unless Ember manipulates the company's accounting books for him.
Nonfiction
"Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools" by Mary Annette Pember (2025)
From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise 'assimilate' into American life. In reality, these boarding schools – sponsored by the U.S. Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation – were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people.
Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, this book paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities.
"Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America" by Matika Wilbur (2023)
In 2012, Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and set out on a Kickstarter-funded pursuit to visit, engage, and photograph people from what were then the 562 federally recognized Native American Tribal Nations. Over the next decade, she traveled six hundred thousand miles across fifty states – from Seminole country (now known as the Everglades) to Inuit territory (now known as the Bering Sea) – to meet, interview, and photograph hundreds of Indigenous people. The body of work Wilbur created serves to counteract the one-dimensional and archaic stereotypes of Native people in mainstream media and offers justice to the richness, diversity, and lived experiences of Indian Country.
The culmination of this decade-long art and storytelling endeavor, "Project 562" is a sweeping, and moving love letter to Indigenous Americans, containing hundreds of stunning portraits and compelling personal narratives of contemporary Native people – all photographed in clothing, poses, and locations of their choosing. Their narratives touch on personal and cultural identity as well as issues of media representation, sovereignty, faith, family, the protection of sacred sites, subsistence living, traditional knowledge-keeping, land stewardship, language preservation, advocacy, education, the arts, and more.
"The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History" by Ned Blackhawk (2023)
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
"The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World" by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2024)
As Indigenous scientist and author of "Braiding Sweetgrass" Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth – its abundance of sweet, juicy berries – to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
"Washing My Mother's Body: A Ceremony for Grief" by Joy Harjo (2025)
A beautifully illustrated edition of Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s poem “Washing My Mother’s Body,” which offers a way through grief when the loss appears unbearable. Through lyrical prose and evocative watercolor illustrations by award-winning Muscogee artist Dana Tiger, "Washing My Mother’s Body" explores the complexity of a daughter’s grief as she reflects on the joys and sorrows of her mother’s life. She lays her mother to rest in the landscape of her memory, honoring the hands that raised her, the body that protected her, and the legs that carried her mother through adversity. Moving, comforting, and deeply emotional, "Washing My Mother’s Body" is a tender look at mother-daughter relationships, the complexity of grieving the loss of a parent, and the enduring love of those left behind.