Three Books to Read During Native American Heritage Month

Birchbark Books in Minneapolis is one of the most beautiful and well-curated bookstores I have ever visited. Owned by author and Native American Louise Erdrich, the bookstore is distinctively Indigenous in everything from adult and children’s books to gift items.

Looking ahead to writing this round-up for Native American Heritage Month, I asked the bookseller to point me in the direction of books written from an Indigenous perspective that would teach our readers about Native culture and life but would be suitable for our most sensitive readers. The bookseller placed several books in my hands, including Looking for Smoke, a young-adult novel by first-time novelist K.A. Cobell that was flying off the shelves.

By the time I had read just a few chapters, I knew I would include it in this roundup. I loved reading the note at the back from Cynthia Leitich Smith, author and curator of Heartdrum, a publishing imprint of Harper Collins.

“To those who are non-native readers, I hope you have gained a heightened awareness and understanding of our strength, humanity, and challenges faced by our young people,” she wrote.

“Only about 7 percent of the population within the United States and Canada is Indigenous. The solidarity of friends like you is key to building a better, safer future for us all.”

By reading diverse books, we can gain riches of understanding and hopefully increased awareness and compassion for our fellow image-bearers. Maybe we can even stand in solidarity with them, with reading being our first step.

The Birchbark House 

By Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich wanted her children and other young readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to gain a more well-rounded view of Native Americans than was portrayed in books such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House on the Prairie series. The same swath of history portrayed in those books is sketched here through the eyes of a little 7-year-old Ojibwa girl named Omakayas, or Little Frog.

Loving Wilder’s books as I do, but struggling with some of the dehumanizing depictions of Native Americans in those books, I was eager to delve into Little Frog’s story.

At first, I was a bit overwhelmed by all the details of food preparation and other aspects of Ojibwa life on Lake Superior’s Madeline Island. (Even as I thought about all the details of pioneer life in Wilder’s books!). The book follows the main characters through four seasons of life in 1847. Each season has its pleasures, hardships, and different ways of surviving and possibly thriving. One season includes rice gathering and another maple sugar collection. The plot starts moving faster when a stranger comes to Omakayas’s community, spreading smallpox and devastation to her close-knit family. In the aftermath of this crisis, and a terrible loss, the strong girl finds a new calling in life as she learns to be a healer among her people.

With rich themes of adoption, grief, resourcefulness, survival, community, and culture, The Birchbark House, a National Book Award Finalist, provides a needed Native perspective on this epoch in history. Erdrich is a masterful writer, and as 25 years have passed since she wrote this in 1999, the first in a nine-book series for young readers, I’m calling it a modern classic.

Looking for Smoke

By K.A. Cobell

Mara Racette might be new to the Blackfeet reservation, but she has more to cope with than the usual social misfit who is excluded and bullied for being different.

Soon after moving from the city of Bozeman, Mont., Mara is surprisingly asked to take part in a traditional Giveaway by Loren, a popular girl whose sister is missing. Does this mean Mara might actually start to belong on the rez?

On the night of the Giveaway (a ceremonial tradition where gifts of blankets and beadwork are given to special guests of the Blackfeet), a mean girl from school, Samantha White Tail, is found murdered. Joining Mara and Loren in being the last to see Samantha are two boys from school, the brash class clown, Brody, and the mysterious Eli First Kill, who seems cold and hardened but is also the primary caregiver of his little sister.

The four teens all carry burdens of loss and complicated family lives, and they all have reasons to mistrust each other. However, when tribal police and the FBI seem all too eager to pin the murder on one of them, they must work together to find out who killed Samantha.

Readers learn about life on the rez, with its hardships but also its joys of community and culture. The book packs an emotional punch as it peers into the anxious and grieving souls of Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli, even as it reveals the harrowing reality of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis. As a parent of a teen girl, it made me realize how terrifying it is for Indigenous parents and their daughters to be immersed in this traumatic actuality.

Picked by Reece Witherspoon for her YA Book Club, Looking for Smoke is that rare combination of thrilling page-turner and sensitive, character-driven story. I loved it. Content-wise, there are a couple of instances of mild profanity and no sexual scenes, although descriptions of the missing and murdered girls are disturbing and there is graphic violence at the end. Recommended for 15 and older. (Heartdrum)

The Berry Pickers

By Amanda Peters

In the early 1960s, a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia is in Maine for their annual summer berry picking when their 4-year-old daughter vanishes without a trace. Normally, I would stop right there and not read the book because I find it difficult to read about any kind of violence toward children. But that’s not where The Berry Pickers goes, as the reader soon discerns.

Instead, the mystery of Ruthie’s disappearance haunts her family for 50 years, especially her brother Joe who, at 6 years old when she disappeared, is burdened with paralyzing guilt because he had been the last one to see her. As we follow Joe’s life through the years, we also follow the life of Norma, the only child of a judge and his deeply anxious wife. How are their lives intertwined? It doesn’t take long to figure out, but the reader does want to know how the characters will find one another again.

This is a novel about the damaging effect of secrets and the lingering presence of trauma throughout one’s whole life. It’s also a valuable peek into the lives of Indigenous peoples and how much has been stolen from them. A stirring portrait of forgiveness and identity, The Berry Pickers is riveting and insightful. Some strong language. (Catapult)