Book picks similar to
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Roofwalker
Susan Power - 2002
Many of the "histories" repeat subjects and themes found in the "stories," making Roofwalker a book that in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The first seven pieces in the book are "stories," fictional accounts primarily of girls and women. In the title story, a young girl believes in the power of the "roofwalker" spirit to make her dreams come true. In "Beaded Souls," a woman is cursed by the sin of her great-grandfather, an Indian policeman who arrested Sitting Bull. "First Fruits" follows a native girl’s first-year at Harvard. The nonfiction pieces include Power’s imaginary account of the meeting of her Phi Beta Kappa father and Sioux mother, a piece about the letters of an Irish ancestor and another in which Power and her mother visit the Field Museum in Chicago, where a native ancestor’s dress is on display.
The Storyteller Trilogy: Song of the River, Cry of the Wind, and Call Down the Stars
Sue Harrison - 2013
In Song of the River, eighty centuries ago, in the frozen land that is now Alaska, a clubfooted male child had been left to die, when a woman named K’os rescued him. Twenty years later and no longer a child, Chakliux occupies the revered role as his tribe’s storyteller. In the neighboring village of the Near River people, where Chakliux will attempt to make peace by wedding the shaman’s daughter, a double murder occurs that sends him on a harsh, enthralling journey in search of the truth about the tragic losses his people have suffered, and into the arms of a woman he was never meant to love.
In Cry of the Wind, Chakliux has one weakness: the beautiful Aqamdax, who has been promised to a cruel tribesman she does not love. But there can be no future for Chakliux and Aqamdax until a curse upon their peoples has been lifted. As they travel a dangerous path, they encounter greater challenges than the harsh terrain and the long season of ice. K’os, the woman who saved Chakliux’s life when he was an infant, is now enslaved by the leader of the enemy tribe against whom she has sworn vengeance. To carry out her justice she will destroy anyone who gets in her way, even the storyteller she raised as her own son.
And in Call Down the Stars, a handsome young tribal warrior and sage, Yikaas has traveled across the sea to hear stories of the Whale Hunter and the Sea Hunter peoples. Around the fire, Qumalix, a beguiling and beautiful storyteller, barely old enough to be a wife, catches the eye of Yikaas, and so begins their flirtation through storytelling, which brings to vivid life tales of the Near River and Cousin River tribes. The fates of lovers Chakliux and Aqamdax, and their wicked nemesis K’os, are revealed as Yikaas and Qumalix weave together tales from their ancestors’ past—and tales from their own lives.
A Yellowstone Season of Giving
Peggy L. Henderson - 2014
It’s a time to reflect on the year’s good fortunes, and to reminisce about days gone by. Join them around the hearth for the holiday, as memories are shared, and a story is retold of how one young hunter won favor with the woman of his heart during a past season of giving. Other titles in the Yellowstone Romance Series (in recommended reading order Yellowstone Heart Song A Yellowstone Christmas (novella) Yellowstone Redemption Yellowstone Awakening Yellowstone Dawn Yellowstone Deception A Yellowstone Promise (novella) A Yellowstone Season of Giving (short story)
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women
Barbara Ehrenreich - 1976
Authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have never lost faith in science itself, but insist that we hold those who interpret it to higher standards. Women are entering the medical and scientific professions in greater numbers but as recent research shows, experts continue to use pseudoscience to tell women how to live. This edition of For Her Own Good provides today's readers with an indispensable dose of informed skepticism.
Beyond the Sea of Ice
William Sarabande - 1987
. . The First Americans. When humans first walked the world, when nature ruled the earth and sky, a proud tribe is threatened by a series of natural disasters. A bold young hunter named Torka, who lost his wife and child to a killer mammoth, leads the survivors over the glacial tundra on a desperate eastward odyssey to the save their clan. Through attacks of savage animals and encounters with strangers not unlike themselves, they must brave the hardships of a foreign landscape and learn to live in an exotic new world of mystery and danger. They must travel toward the land where the sun rises for a new day for their clan--and an awesome future for the American.
Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's
Tiffany Midge - 2019
There are presumably more important concerns in Indian Country. More important than humor? Among the Diné/Navajo, a ceremony is held in honor of a baby’s first laugh. While the context is different, it nonetheless reminds us that laughter is precious, even sacred.Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, stand-alone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she does not like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege. Midge goes on to ponder Standing Rock, feminism, and a tweeting president, all while exploring her own complex identity and the loss of her mother. Employing humor as an act of resistance, these slices of life and matchless takes on urban-Indigenous identity disrupt the colonial narrative and provide commentary on popular culture, media, feminism, and the complications of identity, race, and politics.
The Visitant
Kathleen O'Neal Gear - 1999
Maureen Coles finds herself excavating a mass grave in New Mexico filled with the brutalized bodies of women and children.From the internationally bestselling authors of People of the Masks comes a novel of terrifying power about madness and murder eight hundred years ago.
Hillerman Country: A Journey Through the Southwest with Tony Hillerman
Tony Hillerman - 1991
With eloquent prose by bestselling author Hillerman and over full-color photographs by his brother Barney, this is a powerfully personal, visual, and literary look at the land that is central to Hillerman's bestselling novels.
American Indian Myths and Legends
Richard Erdoes - 1984
From all across the continent come tales of creation and love, of heroes and war, of animals, tricksters, and the end of the world. Alfonso Ortiz, an eminent anthropologist, and Richard Erdoes, an artist and master storyteller, Indian voices in the best folkloric sources of the nineteenth century to make this the most comprehensive and authentic volume of American Indian myths available anywhere.With black-and-white drawings throughoutPart of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library
The Trap
John E. Smelcer - 2006
Johnny pulled the fur-lined hood of his parka over his head and walked towards his own cabin with the sound of snow crunching beneath his boots."He should be back tomorrow," he thought, as a star raced across the sky just below the North Star. "He should be back tomorrow for sure."Seventeen-year-old Johnny Least-Weasel knows that his grandfather Albert is a stubborn old man and won't stop checking his own traplines even though other men his age stopped doing so years ago. But Albert Least-Weasel has been running traplines in the Alaskan wilderness alone for the past sixty years. Nothing has ever gone wrong on the trail he knows so well.When Albert doesn't come back from checking his traps, with the temperature steadily plummeting, Johnny must decide quickly whether to trust his grandfather or his own instincts.Written in alternating chapters that relate the parallel stories of Johnny and his grandfather, this novel poignantly addresses the hardships of life in the far north, suggesting that the most dangerous traps need not be made of steel.
A Lily in the Light
Kristin Fields - 2019
People Esme has known her whole life suddenly become suspects, each new one hitting closer to home than the last.Unable to cope, Esme escapes the nightmare that is her new reality when she receives an invitation to join an elite ballet academy in San Francisco. Desperate to leave behind her chaotic, broken family and the mystery surrounding Lily’s disappearance, Esme accepts.Eight years later, Esme is up for her big break: her first principal role in Paris. But a call from her older sister shatters the protective world she has built for herself, forcing her to revisit the tragedy she’s run from for so long. Will her family finally have the answers they’ve been waiting for? And can Esme confront the pain that shaped her childhood, or will the darkness follow her into the spotlight?
Monkey Beach
Eden Robinson - 2000
Growing up a tough, wild tomboy, swimming, fighting, and fishing in a remote village where the land slips into the green ocean on the edge of the world, Lisamarie has always been different. Visited by ghosts and shapeshifters, tormented by premonitions, she can't escape the sense that something terrible is waiting for her. She recounts her enchanted yet scarred life as she journeys in her speedboat up the frigid waters of the Douglas Channel. She is searching for her brother, dead by drowning, and in her own way running as fast as she can toward danger. Circling her brother's tragic death are the remarkable characters that make up her family: Lisamarie's parents, struggling to join their Haisla heritage with Western ways; Uncle Mick, a Native rights activist and devoted Elvis fan; and the headstrong Ma-ma-oo (Haisla for "grandmother"), a guardian of tradition. Haunting, funny, and vividly poignant, Monkey Beach gives full scope to Robinson's startling ability to make bedfellows of comedy and the dark underside of life. Informed as much by its lush living wilderness as by the humanity of its colorful characters, Monkey Beach is a profoundly moving story about childhood and the pain of growing older--a multilayered tale of family grief and redemption.
Yellow Hair
Andrew Joyce - 2016
It is losing its identity, its lands, and its dignity. He not only adapts, he perseveres and, over time, becomes a leader—and on occasion, the hand of vengeance against those who would destroy his adopted people.Yellow Hair documents the injustices done to the Sioux Nation from their first treaty with the United States in 1805 through Wounded Knee in 1890. Every death, murder, battle, and outrage written about actually took place. The historical figures that play a role in this fact-based tale of fiction were real people and the author uses their real names. Yellow Hair is an epic tale of adventure, family, love, and hate that spans most of the 19th century. This is American history.Awarded Book of the Year by Just Reviews.Awarded Best Historical Fiction of 2016 by Colleen's ReviewsAndrew Joyce is the recipient of the 2013 Editor’s Choice Award for Best Western for his novel, Redemption: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
People of the Whale
Linda Hogan - 2008
But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences, only to see tragedy befall the son he left behind.Linda Hogan, called our most provocative Native American writer, with "her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic" (Barbara Kingsolver), has written a compassionate novel about the beauty of the natural world and the painful moral choices humans make in it. With a keen sense of the environment, spirituality, and the trauma of war, People of the Whale is a powerful novel for our times.
The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction
Atef Abu Saif - 2014
Together, these stories will enable English-speaking readers to go beyond the global media coverage and enter into the daily life of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what is effectively the world’s largest prison. The authors range from highly acclaimed writers to exciting new voices in Arabic literature, including the “Father of the Palestinian” short story, Zaki Al Ela, and a new generation of young women bloggers and activists, such as Mona Abu Sharikhm, Dawlat Al Masri, and Najla Attalah.