Book picks similar to
What Moon Drove Me to This? by Joy Harjo


poetry
spiritual
women
women-reading-great-books

108 Paths to Peace: Ramblings of a Contemplative Life


Michael Hetherington - 2015
     Quotes about: - love - meditation - inspiration - creativity - relaxation - joy - and much more Inspired over many years of practice and study in yoga, Buddhist meditation, Chinese medicine and the fine art of staring out of a window.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls


Jessica McDiarmid - 2019
    The highway is known as the 'Highway of Tears', and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.Journalist, Jessica McDiarmid, investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims--mothers and fathers, siblings and friends--McDiarmid offers an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and relentless fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada--now estimated to number up to 4,000--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in this country.Highway of Tears is a powerful story about our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing, and murdered, Indigenous women, and a testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.

A Coyote Solstice Tale


Thomas King - 2009
    She leads the party-goers through the snowy woods to a shopping mall -- a place they have never seen before.Coyote gleefully shops with abandon, only to discover that filling your shopping cart with goodies is not quite the same thing as actually paying for them. The trickster is tricked and goes back to his cabin in the woods -- somewhat subdued -- though nothing can keep Coyote down for long.

The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen


Sean Sherman - 2017
    Locally sourced, seasonal, “clean” ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy. Sherman dispels outdated notions of Native American fare—no fry bread or Indian tacos here—and no European staples such as wheat flour, dairy products, sugar, and domestic pork and beef. The Sioux Chef’s healthful plates embrace venison and rabbit, river and lake trout, duck and quail, wild turkey, blueberries, sage, sumac, timpsula or wild turnip, plums, purslane, and abundant wildflowers. Contemporary and authentic, his dishes feature cedar braised bison, griddled wild rice cakes, amaranth crackers with smoked white bean paste, three sisters salad, deviled duck eggs, smoked turkey soup, dried meats, roasted corn sorbet, and hazelnut–maple bites.The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen is a rich education and a delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with a vision and approach to food that travels well beyond those borders.

Blood Lyrics: Poems


Katie Ford - 2014
    Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."

Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today


Alison Whittaker - 2020
    Curated and introduced by Alison Whittaker, Fire Front is a ground-breaking anthology of First Nations poetry showcasing some of the brightest new stars, as well as leading Aboriginal writers and poets including Bruce Pascoe, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Tony Birch.

The Road Back to Sweetgrass


Linda LeGarde Grover - 2014
    As young women, all three leave their homes. Margie and Theresa go to Duluth for college and work; there Theresa gets to know a handsome Indian boy, Michael Washington, who invites her home to the Sweetgrass land allotment to meet his father, Zho Wash, who lives in the original allotment cabin. When Margie accompanies her, complicated relationships are set into motion, and tensions over “real Indian-ness” emerge.Dale Ann, Margie, and Theresa find themselves pulled back again and again to the Sweetgrass allotment, a silent but ever-present entity in the book; sweetgrass itself is a plant used in the Ojibwe ceremonial odissimaa bag, containing a newborn baby’s umbilical cord. In a powerful final chapter, Zho Wash tells the story of the first days of the allotment, when the Wazhushkag, or Muskrat, family became transformed into the Washingtons by the pen of a federal Indian agent. This sense of place and home is both tangible and spiritual, and Linda LeGarde Grover skillfully connects it with the experience of Native women who came of age during the days of the federal termination policy and the struggle for tribal self-determination.The Road Back to Sweetgrass is a novel that that moves between past and present, the Native and the non-Native, history and myth, and tradition and survival, as the people of Mozhay Point navigate traumatic historical events and federal Indian policies while looking ahead to future generations and the continuation of the Anishinaabe people.

Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders


Steve Wall - 1990
    With magnificent photographs and powerful words, the Wisdomkeepers share their innermost thoughts and feelings, their dreams and visions, their jokes and laughter, their healing remedies and apocalyptic prophecies and -- above all -- their humanity, which shines through every page of Wisdomkeepers. This is their book. They are the Elders, the Old Ones, the fragile repositories of sacred ways and natural wisdom going back millennia -- yet never more relevant than today.

Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World


Jack Weatherford - 1988
    He traces the crucial contributions made by the Indians to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history.

The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior


Alberto Villoldo - 2018
    Villoldo shares some of their time-honored teachings that emphasize the sacred dream: an ephemeral, yet powerful vision that has the potential to guide us to our purpose and show us our place in the universe.The practices in this book will help you forge a sacred dream for yourself. They will help you craft a destiny infused with courage, and driven by vision. You’ll be invited to follow the footsteps of the luminous warrior and learn how to break out of the three nightmares surrounding love, death, and safety that have held you captive, and transform them into the experience of timeless freedom, known as the Primordial Light. This creative power exercised by shamans will lead you to create beauty and healing, and dream a new world into being.When you transform these dreams and accept that life is ever changing, that your mortality is a given and that no one except you can free you from fear —the chaos in your life turns to order, and beauty prevails.“Wake up from the slumber you are living in, and dream with your eyes open so that all the possibilities of the future are available to you.”

Wilderness Skills for Women: How to Survive Heartbreak and Other Full-Blown Meltdowns


Marian Jordan - 2008
    Whether it’s relationship drama, the constant pull of our sinful nature, a health issue, or any variety of unmet dreams, Jordan turns readers to God’s Word as the ultimate wilderness survival guide.Conversational and self-deprecatingly confessional in her delivery, this young writer finds ways to have fun with delicate subject matters, using wilderness analogies to great effect in chapters titled "Drink Plenty of Water," "Seek Shelter," and "Don’t Eat the Red Berries."

This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving


David J. Silverman - 2019
    Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the “First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags' ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day.This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving.

Healing Secrets of the Native Americans: Herbs, Remedies, and Practices That Restore the Body, Refresh the Mind, and Rebuild the Spirit


Porter Shimer - 2004
    Discover how the Native-American tradition uses plants and herbs, heat, movement and sound, visualization, and spirituality to heal dozens of everyday ailments and illnesses -- from back pain to insect bites to flu and sore throat and much more and apply it to your life to improve your health and your mind. Broken into sections, the book covers such topics as "The Healing Spirit" (including dream therapy, spirituality, and prayer), "The Native American Spa" (healing with heat, massage, sound and movement, and nutrition), "The Native American Pharmacy" (including more than 40 herbs and plants, how to obtain them, and how to use them), plus remedies for more than 40 ailments from acne to wrinkles.

A Rustic Mind


Manali Manan Desai - 2018
    Through ‘A Rustic Mind’ I aim to provide a thoughtful take on such actions and incidents. Poetic in its expression, these words will strike a chord which is not only deep but relatable on many levels.

On the Rez


Ian Frazier - 2000
    Crazy Horse, perhaps the greatest Indian war leader of the 1800s, and Black Elk, the holy man whose teachings achieved worldwide renown, were Oglala; in these typically perceptive pages, Frazier seeks out their descendants on Pine Ridge--a/k/a the rez--which is one of the poorest places in America today.Along with his longtime friend Le War Lance (whom he first wrote about in his 1989 bestseller, Great Plains) and other Oglala companions, Frazier fully explores the rez as they visit friends and relatives, go to pow-wows and rodeos and package stores, and tinker with a variety of falling-apart cars. He takes us inside the world of the Sioux as few writers ever have, writing with much wit, compassion, and imagination. In the career of SuAnne Big Crow, for example, the most admired Oglala basketball player of all time, who died in a car accident in 1992, Frazier finds a contemporary reemergence of the death-defying, public-spirited Sioux hero who fights with grace and glory to save her followers.On the Rez vividly portrays the survival, through toughness and humor, of a great people whose culture has helped to shape the American identity.