Honoring Indigenous Peoples: 20 Recommended Reads

By Jason Baumann
October 9, 2020
Collage of 12 book covers against a dark green background.

For Nation American Heritage Month, The New York Public Library’s librarians and curators have selected 20 books that might serve as an introduction to a rich and diverse heritage of fiction, nonfiction, history, poetry, memoir, and more by and about Indigenous people in the United States. The list includes established writers such as Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and Joy Harjo as well as newer writers such as Tommy Orange, Stephen Graham Jones, and Jake Skeets.

For more than 125 years, the Library has collected, preserved, and made accessible to the public books, collections, and other materials that not only entertain and educate but offer readers a range of diverse perspectives on the world. This often means amplifying voices that have in the past been omitted, dismissed, suppressed, or forgotten by history, and ensuring that those voices are heard.

Inevitably, this list is just a starting point: there is so much more to explore. At the Library, this includes two databases that are accessible from home with a library card:

  • Indigenous Peoples of North America (Gale Primary Sources): Over 50 digitized archival collections documenting the Indigenous experience from institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Association on American Indian Archives, and the U.S. National Archives. These digitized primary sources include manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, and photographs.

  • Ethnic NewsWatch (1959-present), Proquest: A collection of ethnic, minority, and Indigenous newspapers, magazines, and journals published in America. Includes the full text of over 50 newspapers and magazines, including Akwesasne Notes, American Indian Quarterly, and many more.

Some of the titles on this list are available as e-books or e-audiobooks, in languages other than English, or through the Library's free e-reader app, SimplyE