November is Native American Heritage Month, and I always try to dive into a book by at least one indigenous author during this time. So, after some solid research and recommendations from fellow readers, here’s a list of top-rated fiction and nonfiction books you might want to check out. We’ve got three categories to explore:
First up, books penned by Native American authors, showcasing their unique voices and perspectives. Then, there are bestselling works by non-Native authors that still explore Indigenous culture and issues. Finally, there are several honorable mentions. These gems might not have gathered as many reviews, but they’re worth your consideration.
Oh, and just a heads-up. I tried to keep the list clear of horror and fantasy, though there are a couple of Native American authors who venture into those genres. There are no vampires or graphic novels on this list. However, I did include a few young adult and middle-grade novels to cater to different tastes.
Inside each category, you’ll find the books neatly listed in alphabetical order (skipping opening words such as The/An/A/To/And. Where appropriate, I’ve included a link to my review. Happy reading!
Bestselling Books by Native American Authors
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie: Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver: Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life’s largest commitments.
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich: Orphaned fourteen-year-old Carl and his eleven-year-old sister, Mary, travel to Argus, North Dakota, to live with their mother’s sister, in this tale of abandonment, sexual obsession, jealousy, and unstinting love.
The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich: Omakayas, a seven-year-old Ojibwe girl, lives through the joys of summer and the perils of winter on an island in Lake Superior in 1847 and learns about her past.
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John G. Neihardt, Black Elk: Reveals the life of Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk as he led his tribe’s battle against white settlers who threatened their homes and buffalo herds, and describes the victories and tragedies at Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee.
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse: Xiala, a disgraced Teek who can calm waters or cause madness with her song, arrives and disrupts the holy city of Tova during the winter solstice.
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon: An unforgettable journey along our nation’s back roads. William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him. His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer: As a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers.
The Break by Katherena Vermette: When a Métis woman sees a possible crime, she telephones the police. Told from the perspectives of various people connected to this violence in a Métis community, we hear their stories leading up to that fateful night.
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko: On a New Mexico reservation, one Navajo family—including Tayo, a World War II veteran deeply scarred by his experiences as a Japanese POW and by the rejection of his own people—struggles to survive in a world no longer theirs in the years just before and after World War II.
Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two by Joseph Bruchac: After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power: Details the story of three women from different generations, told through the stories of the dolls they carried in 1888, 1925 and 1961 bringing to light the damage done to indigenous people through history.
Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse: The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent.
The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk: A world without poverty or hunger that honors the Four Sacred Things that sustain life—earth, air, fire, and water—is poised to clash with a nightmare society of authoritarian regimes and food and water shortages.
The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley: Daunis, who is part Ojibwe, defers attending the University of Michigan to care for her mother and reluctantly becomes involved in the investigation of a series of drug-related deaths.
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good: Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie are finally released after years of detention. Alone and without any skills, support, or families, the teens find their way to Vancouver, where they cling together, searching for a place of safety and belonging.
Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown: In 1676, Mary Rowlandson is captured by Indians and sold into the service of a powerful woman tribal leader where she, a pawn in the ongoing bloody struggle between English settlers and native people, witnesses harrowing brutality as well as unexpected kindness.
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich: A tale set in a world of reversing evolution and a growing police state follows pregnant twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who investigates her biological family while awaiting the birth of a child who may emerge as a member of a primitive human species.
A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter: The story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Métis women and the land and bison that surround them.
Green Grass, Running War: Strong, Sassy women and hard-luck hardheaded men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by Cherokee author Thomas King.
Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot: Terese Mailhot’s debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation.
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday: A young American Indian returning from World War II searches for his place on his old reservation and in urban society.
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese: Saul Indian Horse, having hit rock bottom in a treatment centre for alcohol addiction, wants peace. He sees the only way to find it is to tell his life story as a Northern Ojibway with all its joys and sorrows. As he journeys back, he comes to recognize the influence of everyday magic on his life.
Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie: Dubbed the “Indian Killer,” a serial killer stalks the streets of Seattle, taking the scalps of white male victims, and thrusts the city’s Native American community into turmoil and John Smith, an Indian raised by a white family, into the investigation.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was genocidal and imperialist, designed to crush the original inhabitants.
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King: A critical and personal meditation on what it means to be a Native American in North America.
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell: Left alone on a beautiful but isolated island off the coast of California, a young Indian girl spends eighteen years, not only merely surviving through her enormous courage and self-reliance but also finding a measure of happiness in her solitary life.
Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog: Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies.
LaRose by Louise Erdrich: Horrified when he accidentally kills his best friend’s 5-year-old son while hunting, Landreaux Iron gives away his own young son to his friend’s family according to ancient tradition, a decision that helps both families reach a tenuous peace that is threatened by a vengeful adversary.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich: As a priest nears the end of his life, he is asked to prove or disprove the sainthood of a woman he knows well and struggles to guard his own secret identity in the process.
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline: In this futuristic dystopian novel for teens, the Indigenous people of North America are on the run in a fight for survival.
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich: Returning to his quiet German village home after World War I, trained killer Fidelis Waldvogel, accompanied by his new wife, starts a new life in America and finds his life irrevocably changed by a new relationship.
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese: Set in the dramatic landscape of the BC Interior, 16-year-old Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, Eldon, a man he barely knows. The rare moments they have shared haunt and trouble Frank, but he answers the call, a son’s duty to a father. He finds Eldon dying of liver failure after years of heavy drinking. Eldon asks his son to take him into the mountains, so he may be buried in the traditional Ojibway manner.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott: A personal meditation of trauma, legacy, oppression, and racism in North America, in an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about Native people in North America.
Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson: In a novel set in Canada, on the Haisla reservation of Kitamaat, a young Native American woman’s visions facilitate a journey of self-discovery that will take her into the heart of her troubled society.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice: Moon of the Crusted Snow imagines a small community on the precipice of winter without power or communication where leaders must grapple with control, restore order, and save their people from a grave fate.
Mother Earth Father Sky by Sue Harrison: In a time before history, in a harsh and beautiful land near the top of the world, womanhood comes cruelly and suddenly to beautiful young Chagak. Surviving the brutal massacre of her tribe, she sets out across the icy waters off America’s northwest coast on an astonishing odyssey that will reveal to Chagak powerful secrets of the earth and sky.
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones: Protected by horror movies, especially the ones where the masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them, Jade Daniels, an angry, half-Indian outcast, pulls us into her dark mind when blood starts to spill into the waters of Indian lake.
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich: A historical novel based on the life of the author’s grandfather traces the experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights. The Night Watchman
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden: Set in 17th-century Ontario during the French conquest of Canada. In the remote winter landscape, a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes.
The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich: Discovering a cache of valuable Native American artifacts while appraising a family estate in New Hampshire, Faye Travers investigates the history of a ceremonial drum, which possesses spiritual powers and changes the lives of people who encounter it.
The Pale-Faced Lie by David Crow: Growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation, David Crow and his three siblings idolized their dad, a self-taught Cherokee who loved to tell his children about his World War II feats. But as time passed, David was coerced into doing his criminal bidding.
People of the Fire by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear: The chief of the Red Hand people watches his people die in a period of severe drought while a false dreamer is in power.
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich: Unaware of a violent event that marked the beginning of her mixed ancestry, ambitious young Evelina Harp, a part-Ojibwe, part-white girl prone to falling hopelessly in love, learns disturbing truths from her gifted storyteller grandfather, while a sentimental judge weighs the legacy of a century-old crime as reflected by his own love life.
The Removed by Brandon Hobson: A Cherokee family takes in a remarkable foster child on the eve of the Cherokee National Holiday and anniversary of a loved one’s death.
The Round House by Louise Erdrich: When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, fourteen-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.
The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson: A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich: An unusual novel in which a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. (This was a DNF for me.)
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga: Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of students from a residential school, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.
Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich: After she discovers that her husband has been reading her diary, Irene America turns it into a manipulative farce, while secretly keeping a second diary that includes her true thoughts, through which the reader learns of Irene’s shaky marriage, its effect on her children and her struggles with alcohol.
Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson: Everyone knows a guy like Jared—the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who’s often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. Jared is also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can’t rely on anyone for consistent love and support. He’s only sixteen, but feels like he is the one who must stabilize his family’s life and look out for his elderly neighbors. But he struggles to keep everything afloat… and sometimes ravens speak to him.
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq: The story of a girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. By the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer.
The Strangers by Katherena Vermette: The Strangers brings readers into the dynamic world of the Stranger family: the strength of their bond, the shared pain in their past, and the light that beckons from the horizon. This is a searing exploration of race, class, inherited trauma, and matrilineal bonds that—despite everything—refuse to be broken.
There There by Tommy Orange: A novel which grapples with the complex history of Native Americans; with an inheritance of profound spirituality; and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide, follows 12 characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow.
Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden: The nephew of a Canadian Oji-Cree who is the last of a line of healers and diviners, Cree reserve student Xavier enlists in the military during World War I, a conflict throughout which he and his friend, Elijah, are marginalized for their appearances, their culturally enhanced marksmanship, and their disparate views of the war.
Tracks by Louise Erdrich: Set in North Dakota at a time in the past century when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance–yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender.
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse: When a small town needs her help in finding a missing girl, Maggie Hoskie, a Dinetah monster hunter, reluctantly enlists the help of an unconventional medicine man to uncover the terrifying truth behind the disappearance and her own past.
Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage, and Survival by Velma Wallis: The retelling of a classic Alaskan legend about two elderly women abandoned by their tribe during a severe winter famine depicts their friendship, fierce determination, desperate struggle for survival, and ultimate need to forgive.
Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy: The ultimate skeptic when it comes to the mystical, Seattle cop Joanne Walker comes to the aid of a woman claiming to be hunted by Cernunnos, an ancient Celtic god who leads the Wild Hunt, a situation that brings her face to face with an angry god and awakens in her shamanic powers that she must learn to harness to save the world from an unleashed Wild Hunt.
Wenjack by Joseph Boyden: An Ojibwe boy runs away from a North Ontario Indian School. He realizes too late just how far away home is. Along the way, he’s followed by Manitous, spirits of the forest who comment on his plight.
Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: In 1930s Denver, Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, begins having visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory where she must save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion. Woman of Light Review
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris: Moving backward in time, Dorris’s critically acclaimed debut novel is a lyrical saga of three generations of Native American women beset by hardship and torn by angry secrets.
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie: The author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian presents a literary memoir of poems, essays and intimate family photos that reflect his complicated feelings about his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation with his siblings and alcoholic parents.
Books Written by Non-indigenous Authors
Barkskins by Annie Proulx: Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation.
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver: Taylor Greer hits the road wanting only to get as far away from Kentucky as possible, ending up in Arizona with a 3-year-old Cherokee girl she has inherited from a woman in a bar.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian history of the American West by Dee Brown: A bestselling, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks: Forging a deep friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain’s son on the Great Harbor settlement where her minister father is working to convert the tribe, Bethia follows his subsequent ivy league education and efforts to bridge cultures among the colonial elite.
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow: When a National Park ranger is reported missing and the man sent to find him disappears as well, former investigator Kate Shugak decides to brave the cold wilderness of north Alaska to crack the case.
Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry: As Buffalo Hump becomes older, his Comanche children rise to power, but his son Blue Duck breaks away to form a renegade group favoring guns over bows and arrows, in a prequel to Lonesome Dove.
The Cork O’Connor Series by William Kent Krueger: Corcoran “Cork” O’Connor is a former Chicago cop living in the north Minnesota woods. He is part Irish and part Anishinaabe Indian. (19 books) Fox Creek
Crow Mary by Kathleen Grisson: A sweeping saga inspired by the true story of Crow Mary—an indigenous woman torn between two worlds in 19th-century North America.
Dances with Wolves by Michael Blake: a powerful epic follows Lieutenant John Dunbar, the only soldier at an army outpost deep in Indian territory, who befriends the local Comanche tribe and learns their ways from the beautiful Comanche woman whose life he saved.
Dawn on a Distant Shore by Sara Donati: Settler Elizabeth Bonner must cross the frozen wilderness of New York State in the winter of 1794 in a desperate bid to save her husband from being hanged as an American spy.
The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper: Natty Bumppo, a young white hunter brought up in a Delaware Indian tribe, has to defend settlers before returning to the Iroquois who have allowed him parole.
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne: Describes the actions of both whites and Comanches during a 40-year war over territory, in a story that begins with the kidnapping of a white girl, who grew up to marry a Comanche chief and have a son, Quanah, who became a great warrior.
Fire Along the Sky by Sara Donati: In 1812, Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner mark the return of Nathaniel’s daughter Hannah, while her half-brother Daniel joins the militia and his twin, Lily, falls in love with a dark and dangerous stranger.
Follow the River by James Alexander Thom: Captured by the Shawnee Indians, Mary Ingles escapes and follows the Ohio River for a thousand miles back towards her home in Virginia.
I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven: A young priest with a short time to live is sent to a parish of Kwakiutl Indians, where he learns not to fear death.
Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati: Sara Donati’s epic novel sweeps us into another time and place… and into the heart of a forbidden affair between an unconventional Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Interweaving the fate of the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two lovers, Sara Donati’s compelling novel creates a complex, profound, passionate portrait of an emerging America.
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks: A nine-year-old boy receives a plastic Indian, a cupboard, and a little key for his birthday and finds himself involved in adventure when the Indian comes to life in the cupboard and befriends him.
Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI by David Grann: Presents a true account of the early 20th-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati: Elizabeth, Nathaniel, and Hannah, a gifted healer and Nathaniel’s half-Indian daughter, find their lives in jeopardy when Hannah insists on caring for a dangerously ill runaway slave, who is being pursued by a bounty hunter.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper: The classic tale of a disillusioned man who exiles himself from a society whose values he abhors. Despite this exile, he agrees to take two sisters through hostile Indian country with the help of a Mohican scout.
Leaphorn & Chee Series by Tony Hillerman (18 books).
Little Big Man by Thomas Berger: The astonishing reminiscences of an ancient and immodest Indian frontiersman form a witty, lusty, and highly impressive epic, a panoramic enlargement of the way of life in the Old West.
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie, where they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry: Set in the late-nineteenth century, this novel chronicles a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and follows the lives of Gus and Call, the cowboys heading the drive, Gus’s woman, Lorena, and Blue Duck, a sinister Indian renegade.
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall: Half-Apache orphan Edgar is taken from his home on an Arizona reservation after he is run over by a mailman, which sets in motion a journey from the hospital to a school for delinquents to a Mormon foster family and his eventual, unexpected return home.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles: A live news reader traveling the Antebellum South is offered $50 to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, back to her family in San Antonio.
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus: One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians.
People of the Wolf by Kathleen O’Neal: Runs-in-Light and Raven Hunger, born brothers in the Ice Age clan of the The People, Children of the Father Sun, chose different paths, one being a proud, violent warrior and the other a Dreamer serving his people.
Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver: When a six-year-old child named Turtle is the sole witness to a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, she and her adoptive mother Taylor have a moment of celebrity that will change their lives forever. Turtle is claimed by Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee activist, to have been wrongly taken from the Cherokee nation. Fear of losing Turtle sends Taylor fleeing across the country with her mother Alice, pursued by Annawake.
Queen of Swords by Sara Donati: Imprisoned in the French Antilles for endangering the Crown, Jennet Huntar awaits rescue by her kinsman, Luke Bonner, and together they set out to find their child, surrendered to a virtual stranger at the time of her imprisonment.
The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger: When the body of a wealthy landowner is found floating in the Alabaster River on Memorial Day in 1958, Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero, struggles to solve this murder that has the town of Jewel, Minnesota, up in arms, while putting to rest the demons from his own past.
Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo: Recreates the life and legend of the Shoshoni Indian as she struggles to survive among hostile tribes, is forced to become the wife of a French trader and plays a pivotal role in the journeys of Lewis and Clark.
She Who Remembers by Linda Lay Shuler: When the Anasazi believe Kwani to be a witch in the 13th century, they exile her, and Kokopelli rescues her and takes her to his village before she rises to the position of She Who Remembers, the woman who reveals tribal traditions.
Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier: From the age of twelve, when he is sent alone into the wilderness to run an Indian trading post, Will’s life becomes intertwined with the destiny of the Cherokee Indians, as he falls in love with a girl named Claire and builds a friendship with a chief named Bear.
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger: Fleeing the Depression-era school for Native American children who have been taken from their parents, four orphans share a summer marked by struggling farmers, faith healers and lost souls.
Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry: Jane Whitefield helps people disappear by giving them a new identity—new appearance, new social security card—and her clientele ranges from bankrupt businessmen to fleeing wives. On this occasion, things backfire, and she must resort to her Native American talents to track a dangerous customer she helped disappear.
Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon: Set on Overland Trail in 1853, a young widow sets off with her family for a life out Wes—a journey fraught with hardship, fear, death, and terrible sacrifice that leads her into the arms of a half-Pawnee man straddling two worlds. Were the Lost Wander
Honorable Mentions
Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich
Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford
Daughters of the Deer by Danielle Daniel
Even as We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
Flight by Sherman Alexie
Fools Crow by James Welch
Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko
The Grass Dancer by Susan Power
If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth
In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton
The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Magpie Earling
Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan
Murder on the Red River by Marcie R. Rendon
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
Panther in the Sky by James Alexander Thom
People of the Whale by Linda Hogan
Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling
Shutter by Ramona Emerson
Solar Storms by Linda Hogan
Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land by Noe Alvarez
Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich
A Thousand Voices (Lisa Wingate)
When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky by Margaret Verble
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Winter in the Blood by James Welch