16 Best Native American Books

Tommy Orange brings together intersecting lives from urban Native communities as a gathering in Oakland approaches. Family separation, grief, recovery, and cultural inheritance shape the characters' journeys to the powwow, where their stories converge on one day.

Kimmerer braids personal stories, botany, and Potawatomi teachings into essays about what plants can teach us about reciprocity, gratitude, and care. It asks readers to see the living world as kin, not backdrop.

After his mother is brutally attacked on the reservation, thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts sets out to find the perpetrator when the legal system fails her. A gripping coming-of-age story and a legal thriller that exposes the tangled jurisdiction of tribal law.

Returning to Laguna Pueblo after World War II, mixed-ancestry veteran Tayo struggles with traumatic memories and a fractured sense of belonging. His path toward healing reconnects him with Indigenous stories, ceremonial practices, and the relationships between his community and its land.

The novel that launched Erdrich’s career, weaving together the lives of the Kashpaw and Lamartine families on a North Dakota reservation. Through a series of fractured, powerful narratives, it explores the bonds of blood, the scars of history, and the enduring pull of home.

Based on the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, this Pulitzer Prize winner follows a tribal chairman in the 1950s fighting a congressional bill that threatens to terminate his tribe’s rights. Alongside his political battle, the novel traces the journey of a young woman searching for her missing sister in the city.

David Treuer combines history, reporting, and memoir to examine Native American life after the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. He challenges narratives of disappearance, exploring cultural preservation, political resistance, urban migration, and the resourcefulness of communities confronting forced assimilation.

Biracial teenager Daunis Fontaine puts her plans on hold after family tragedy, then witnesses a murder that draws her into an undercover investigation. As deception surrounds her, protecting her Ojibwe community becomes inseparable from questions of identity and belonging.

Abel returns from war to his tribal home, carrying experiences that have left him estranged from the world around him. N. Scott Momaday follows his struggle between Indigenous traditions and modern American life in a novel about displacement and identity.

Pidgin heads across New Mexico to bury his father, then has to chase the stolen corpse through a surreal, half-mythic West. It is wild, funny, and dangerous from the first page.

Four Blackfeet men are hunted by the consequences of an elk hunt that should never have happened. Jones turns guilt, friendship, and community into a relentless supernatural revenge story.

Terese Marie Mailhot writes about family, trauma, mental illness, and the difficulty of love in this memoir. Memories of her mother and abusive father become part of an effort to reclaim her story and renew her connection to her people and place.

Jade Daniels, a slasher-obsessed teenager in Proofrock, Idaho, spots the signs of a real killing spree before anyone else does. Her movie logic may be the town's best chance of surviving.

Fifteen years after Ray-Ray Echota dies in a police shooting, his Cherokee family remains divided by grief. As an annual remembrance approaches, his mother tries to reunite them, while illness, addiction, and unexpected spiritual connections reveal how personal loss intertwines with ancestral history.

Widowed Rosalie Iron Wing returns to her childhood home after years away, reconnecting with her Dakota heritage. Through the lives of women across generations, Diane Wilson explores family, displacement, farming, and the preservation of seeds as a form of cultural survival.

Virgil Wounded Horse delivers unofficial justice on South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation when authorities fail to act. After heroin threatens his nephew, he joins his former girlfriend to trace the supply, uncovering dangerous criminal alliances while reconsidering his relationship with Lakota traditions.