Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. (Description from catalog.)

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher 'KC' Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. Unfolding like a gritty mystery, Yellow Bird traces Lissa's steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke's disappearance. (Description from NoveList.)

A biography of the first Native American doctor in U.S. history describes how she received her medical degree in 1889 and went home to doctor her tribe of over 1,200 people living across 850 square miles. (Description from NoveList)

Edward Curtis was dashing, charismatic, a passionate mountaineer, a famous photographer--the Annie Liebowitz of his time. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his great idea: He would try to capture on film the Native American nation before it disappeared. At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, Egan's book tells the remarkable untold story behind Curtis's iconic photographs, following him throughout Indian country from desert to rainforest as he struggled to document the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. (Description from catalog.)

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territoty, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history ... Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. (Description from catalog.)

An anthropologist's chronicle of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to the present traces the unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention of distinct tribe cultures that assimilated into mainstream life to preserve Native identity.
(Description from NoveList)

An analysis of America prior to 1492 describes how the research of archaeologists and anthropologists has transformed myths about the Americas, revealing that the cultures were far older and more advanced than previously known. (Description from NoveList.)

An examination of the pervasive effects of the Cherokee nation's forced relocation considers the tribe's inability to acclimate to white culture and explores key roles played by Andrew Jackson, Chief John Ross, and Elias Boudinot. (Description from NoveList.)

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. (Description from NoveList.)

This sweeping American epic reveals the story of the century-long blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States. Dramatic, far-reaching, and unforgettable, this book paints a portrait of these two inspirational leaders who worked together to lift their people to the height of culture and learning as the most civilized tribe in the nation, and then drop them to the depths of ruin and despair as they turned against each other. (Description from catalog.)

Presents a true account of the early twentieth-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.
(Description from catalog)

The riveting story of the Shawnee brothers who led the last great pan-Indian confederacy against the United States. (Description from catalog.)

A Lakota historian and storyteller offers a portrait of Crazy Horse, the era in which he lived, and his legacy, drawing on his own culture's oral tradition and firsthand research to capture diverse aspects of Crazy Horse's life. (Description from catalog.)

One week after the June 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, when news of the defeat of Custer and his 7th Cavalry troops reached the American public, Lakota Chief Sitting Bull became the most wanted hostile Indian in America. He had resisted intrusions into Lakota land for years, refused to sign treaties, and had called for a gathering of tribes at Little Big Horn. He epitomized resistance. But there are other battles than those of war, and the conflict between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin was one of those battles. (Description from NoveList.)

A history of the struggle between white forces and Native Americans over the fate of the post-Civil War West details the deconstruction of tribal culture to establish the modern U.S., covering such topics as the conditions endured by frontier soldiers and the ethical quandaries of military officials who sympathized with Native adversaries.
(Description from NoveList)

Chronicles the epic clash between General Oliver Otis Howard, who took on a mission in the Pacific Northwest to force Native Americans onto reservations, and the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph, who refused to leave his ancestral land. (Description from catalog.)