Celebrate Native American Heritage Month the bookworm way with this collection of 2023 fiction and nonfiction books by Indigenous Americans and First Nations authors. The titles collected below are a cross-genre sampling of new books (for adults) published this year. I have tried to be as comprehensive of all relevant 2023 books as possible.
Fiction
Bad Cree
Jessica Johns
In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Genre: Horror
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Better the Blood
Michael Bennett
An absorbing, clever debut thriller that speaks to the longstanding injustices faced by New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, by an acclaimed Māori screenwriter and director. A tenacious Māori detective, Hana Westerman juggles single motherhood, endemic prejudice, and the pressures of her career in Auckland CIB. Led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man ritualistically hanging in a secret room and a puzzling inward-curving inscription. Delving into the investigation after a second, apparently unrelated, death, she uncovers a chilling connection to an historic crime: 160 years before, during the brutal and bloody British colonization of New Zealand, a troop of colonial soldiers unjustly executed a Māori Chief.
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
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Don’t Fear the Reaper
Stephen Graham Jones
December 12th, 2019: Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.
Publication Date: February 7, 2023
Genre: Horror, Mystery/Thriller
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VenCo
Cherie Dimaline
For fans of The Once and Future Witches and Practical Magic, comes an incredibly imaginative, highly anticipated new novel featuring witches, magic, and a road trip across America–from Cherie Dimaline, the critically acclaimed author of Empire of Wild. A wildly imaginative and compulsively readable fantasia of adventure, history, Americana, feminism, and magic, VenCo is a novel only the supremely gifted Cherie Dimaline could write.
Publication Date: February 7, 2023
Genre: Magical Realism
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Stealing
Margaret Verble
A gripping, gut-punch of a novel about a Cherokee child removed from her family and sent to a Christian boarding school in the 1950s–an ambitious, eye-opening reckoning of history and small-town prejudices from Pulitzer Prize finalist Margaret Verble. In swift, sharp, and stunning prose, Margaret Verble spins a powerful coming-of-age tale and reaffirms her place as an indelible storyteller and chronicler of history.
Publication Date: February 7, 2023
Genre: Historical Fiction
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On the Savage Side
Tiffany McDaniel
Six women–mothers, daughters, sisters–gone missing. Inspired by the unsolved murders of the Chillicothe Six, this harrowing novel tells the story of two sisters, both of whom could be the next victims, from the internationally best-selling author of Betty.
Publication Date: February 14, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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The Half-White Album
Cynthia J. Sylvester
This powerful debut collection explores lives lived between worlds. Sylvester masterfully weaves together fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to give readers a poignant though fractured view of her characters’ lives, their loves, and their struggles. Told from the perspective of an urban Native, the work details a journey led by the nomadic band, the Covers. At its heart, The Half-White Album is a healing ceremony of the author’s own creation, a process grounded in music that celebrates what it is to be human and imperfect and to love imperfectly.
Publication Date: April 1, 2023
Genre: Short Stories
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Sisters of the Lost Nation
Nick Medina
A young Native girl’s hunt for answers about the women mysteriously disappearing from her tribe’s reservation leads her to delve into the myths and stories of her people, all while being haunted herself, in this atmospheric and stunningly poignant debut.
Publication Date: April 18, 2023
Genre: Horror, Thriller
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To Shape a Dragon’s Breath
Moniquill Blackgoose
A young Indigenous woman enters a colonizer-run dragon academy—and quickly finds herself at odds with the “approved” way of doing things—in the first book of this brilliant new fantasy series.
Publication Date: April 18, 2023
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
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Lizards Hold the Sun
Dani Trujillo
Archaeology has historically been a field for white men only. Not anymore. Xiomara Chavez has dedicated her life to the preservation of her Mexican homeland. Out of hundreds of applications, she alone was selected to lead the creation of the Bunchberry Tribal Museum. Faced with her most remote project ever, Xiomara must rely on the help of Calehan, the aloof museum architect. Sparks fly in the archives as Xiomara struggles to refrain from dating in the workplace.
Publication Date: May 23, 2023
Genre: Contemporary Romance
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The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Debra Magpie Earling
From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.
Publication Date: May 23, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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Warrior Girl Unearthed
Angeline Boulley
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper’s Daughter Angeline Boulley takes us back to Sugar Island in this high-stakes thriller about the power of discovering your stolen history.
Publication Date: May 2, 2023
Genre: Young Adult, Thriller
Review | Amazon | Bookshop.org
A Game of Gods
Scarlett St. Clair
Told in multiple POVs, A Game of Gods is the final installment in the Hades Saga by USA Today Bestselling author Scarlett St. Clair. Hades, God of the Dead, has finally made Persephone his in every way possible. With their wedding on the horizon, the couple should be ecstatic. But Demeter is wreaking havoc on their bliss by battering the whole of New Greece with erratic and dangerous weather. At the same time, Theseus continues with his agenda against the Gods, allying with the hate-group Triad in an effort to bring down all of Olympus.
Publication Date: July 25, 2023
Genre: Romance, Fantasy
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A Council of Dolls
Mona Susan Power
The long-awaited, profoundly moving, and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award–winning Native American author Mona Susan Power, spanning three generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day. A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage wrought by Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people. With stunning prose, Mona Susan Power weaves a spell of love and healing that comes alive on the page.
Publication Date: August 8, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism
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Swim Home to the Vanished
Brendan Shay Basham
After the death of his brother, a grief-stricken young man seeks refuge and oblivion in a secluded fishing village dominated by a family of brujas in this haunting debut novel, inspired, in part, by the ramifications of Diné history and thought–a mesmerizing, original tale in the tradition of works by Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel García Márquez.
Publication Date: August 22, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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The Missing Morningstar: And Other Stories
Stacie Shannon Denetsosie
In The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, Stacie Shannon Denetsosie confronts long-reaching effects of settler-colonialism on Native lives in a series of gritty, wildly imaginative stories. A young Navajo man catches a ride home alongside a casket he’s sure contains his dead grandfather. A gas station clerk witnesses the kidnapping of the newly crowned Miss Northwestern Arizona. A young couple’s search for a sperm donor raises questions of blood quantum. This debut collection grapples with a complex and painful history alongside an inheritance of beauty, ceremony, and storytelling.
Publication Date: September 12, 2023
Genre: Short Stories
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Never Whistle at Night
Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst
These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
Publication Date: September 19, 2023
Genre: Short Story Anthology, Horror
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And Then She Fell
Alicia Elliott
A mind-bending, razor-sharp look at motherhood and mental health that follows a young Indigenous woman who discovers the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences.
Publication Date: September 26, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction, Horror
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Let Us Descend
Jesmyn Ward
Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
Publication Date: October 24, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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The Berry Pickers
Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years. For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.
Publication Date: October 31, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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Blood Sisters
Vanessa Lillie
A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist, Syd, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister. The deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd.
Publication Date: October 31, 2023
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Review | Amazon | Bookshop.org
An Ordinary Violence
Adriana Chartrand
Dawn hasn’t spoken to her brother, Cody, since he was sent to prison for a violent crime seven years ago. But when Dawn’s seemingly perfect life in the big city implodes, she is forced to return to her childhood home and the prairie city that still holds so much pain for her and her fractured family. Cody is released from prison with a mysterious new friend by his side, and Dawn must follow increasingly sinister leads to uncover their nefarious plans to access a dangerous supernatural network.
Publication Date: October 31, 2023
Genre: Horror, Literary Fiction
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A Grandmother Begins The Story
Michelle Porter
Award-winning author Michelle Porter makes her fiction debut with an enchanting and original story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Métis women and the land and bison that surround them. This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters—including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land—heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction.
Publication Date: November 7, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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A Song over Miskwaa Rapids
Michelle Porter
Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget.
Publication Date: November 7, 2023
Genre: Literary Fiction
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Nonfiction
Native Agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Valerie Lambert
What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them? The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and Alaska Natives took over and now run the agency. Choctaw anthropologist Valerie Lambert argues that, instead of fulfilling settler-colonial goals, the Indians in the BIA have been leveraging federal power to fight settler colonialism, battle white supremacy, and serve the interests of their people.
Publication Date: January 3, 2023
Genre: Cultural Anthropology
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Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality: Stories of American Indian Relocation & Reclamation
Michelle R. Jacobs
In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, Jacobs focuses on how some individuals are invested in reclaiming Indigenous identities whereas others are more invested in relocating their sense of self to the urban environment. Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality offers a complicated portrait of who can rightfully claim and enact American Indian identities and what that tells us about how race is “made” today.
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Genre: Sociology, Demographic Studies
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Warrior Princesses Strike Back: How Lakota Twins Fight Oppression and Heal through Connectedness
Sarah Eagle Heart & Emma Eagle Heart-White
Interspersing personal memoir with radical notions of self-help and collective recovery, Warrior Princesses Strike Back focuses how Indigenous activist strategies can be a crucial roadmap for contemporary truth and healing. The Eagle Hearts explore the possibility of healing intergenerational and personal trauma by focusing on traditional strategies of reciprocity, acknowledgment, and collectivism.
Publication Date: January 17, 2023
Genre: Memoir, Social Justice
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Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother
Norma Dunning
From the winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Award for literature, a revelatory look into an obscured piece of Canadian history: what was then called the Eskimo Identification Tag System. A necessary and timely offering, Kinauvit? provides a critical record and response to a significant piece of Canadian history, collecting years of research, interviews and personal stories from an important voice in Canadian literature.
Publication Date: April 4, 2023
Genre: History
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples & the Unmaking of U.S. History
Ned Blackhawk
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
Publication Date: April 25, 2023
Genre: History
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Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America
Matika Wilbur
In 2012, social documentarian Wilbur set out to visit with and photograph people from each of the then 562 federally recognized Native American tribal nations (there are 574 today). In this book, Wilbur captures creates a photographic and narrative celebration of contemporary Native American life and cultures, alongside an in-depth examination of issues that Native people face, by celebrated photographer and storyteller Matika Wilbur of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes.
Publication Date: April 25, 2023
Genre: Photography,
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Searching for Savanna
Mona Gable
A gripping and illuminating investigation into the disappearance of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind when she was eight months pregnant, highlighting the shocking epidemic of violence against Native American women in America and the societal ramifications of government inaction.
Publication Date: April 25, 2023
Genre: True Crime
Review | Amazon | Bookshop.org
Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity & Cultural Belonging
Diane Glancy & Linda Rodriguez
Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. With essays by Trevino Brings Plenty, Deborah Miranda, Steve Russell, and Kimberly Wieser, among others, Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”—non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits—and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states.
Publication Date: May 1, 2023
Genre: Demography Studies
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Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, & Identity
Leah Myers
A vibrant new voice blends Native folklore and the search for identity in a fierce debut work of personal history. Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Crisp and powerful, Thinning Blood is at once a bold reclamation of one woman’s identity and a searingly honest meditation on heritage, family, and what it means to belong.
Publication Date: May 16, 2023
Genre: Memoir
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Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, & Justice for Indigenous Women & Girls
Angela Sterritt
As a Gitxsan teenager navigating life on the streets, Angela Sterritt wrote in her journal to help her survive and find her place in the world. Now an acclaimed journalist, she writes for major news outlets to push for justice for Indigenous women and girls. In her brilliant debut, Sterritt shares her memoir alongside investigative reporting into cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, showing how colonialism and racism led to a society where Sterritt struggled to survive as a young person, and where the lives of Indigenous women and girls are ignored and devalued.
Publication Date: May 30, 2023
Genre: Memoir, Investigative Journalism
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Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir
Thomas C. Gannon
Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. An acerbic observer—of birds, the environment, the aftershocks of history, and human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity.
Publication Date: June 27, 2023
Genre: Memoir
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My Side of the River: An Alaska Native Story
Elias Kelly
In My Side of the River, agricultural specialist Elias Kelly (Yup’ik) relates how traditional Native subsistence hunting is often unrecognized by government regulations, effectively criminalizing those who practice it. Kelly alternates between personal stories of friends, family, and community and legal attempts to assimilate Native Alaskans into white U.S. fishing and hunting culture. He also covers landownership, incorporation of Alaska residents, legal erasure of Native identity, and poverty rates among Native Alaskans. In this memoir of personal and public history, Kelly illuminates the impact of government regulations on traditional life and resource conservation.
Publication Date: July 1, 2023
Genre: Biography, History
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Doom Guy: Life in First Person
John Romero
Pioneering video game designer Romero (Doom, Quake, and many more) recounts how the poverty and violence he experienced in childhood propelled his escape to the gaming world, from his early days as a computer programmer to his success as a game developer. He also discusses his Cherokee, Yaqui, and Mexican heritage and his work to help those from marginalized communities get into game design.
Publication Date: July 18, 2023
Genre: Autobiography, Gaming
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Walking the Ojibwe Path: A Memoir in Letters to Joshua
Richard Wagamese
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In an intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people. At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, Walking the Ojibwe Path is an unforgettable journey.
Publication Date: July 18, 2023
Genre: Memoir
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It’s All about the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence
Taiaiake Alfred
Illuminating the First Nations struggles against the Canadian state, It’s All about the Land exposes how racism underpins and shapes Indigenous-settler relationships. Renowned Kahnawà:ke Mohawk activist and scholar Taiaiake Alfred explains how the Canadian government’s reconciliation agenda is a new form of colonization that is guaranteed to fail.
Publication Date: September 12, 2023
Genre: Indigenous Studies
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Indigiqueerness: A Conversation about Storytelling
Joshua Whitehead with Angie Abdou
Evolving from a conversation between author Joshua Whitehead and Angie Abdou, Indigiqueerness is part dialogue, part collage, and part memoir. Beginning with memories of his childhood poetry and prose and traveling through the library of his life, Whitehead contemplates the role of theory, Indigenous language, queerness, and fantastical worlds in all his artistic pursuits. Indigiqueerness is imbued with Whitehead’s energy and celebrates Indigenous writers and creators who defy expectations and transcend genres.
Publication Date: November 16, 2023
Genre: Memoir
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