Celebrating Indigenous Nonfiction

We all live on Native land, even on Martha’s Vineyard. Aquinnah Wampanoag journalist Joseph Lee has had to watch as his people increasingly struggle to afford living in their ancestral homeland. In Nothing More of This Land, Lee parallels his people’s experience with discussions about what it means to be Indigenous for Native Peoples in the 21st century.

Julian Brave NoiseCat grew up with a Secwépemc and St’at’imc father and a non-Native mother. But when his father disappeared, NoiseCat threw himself into studying Native history. In We Survived the Night, NoiseCat presents the history of First Peoples across the centuries as they face ongoing colonization and press forward toward a better future.

In Girl Warrior, former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo speaks directly to Native girls as they come of age. She encourages them to use artistic expression as a way to heal from the difficult things they experience in their lives. She emphasizes that art is a tool for encouraging empathy and self-expression.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, examines ideas around being Native “enough,” Native sovereignty, and the politics of tribal enrollment. Schuettpelz gets to the heart of Indigenous peoples’ need for belonging in a society ruled by ongoing colonial violence.

In By the Fire We Carry, Cherokee writer Rebecca Nagle delves into the history of a Muscogee reservation in Oklahoma that the American government decided no longer existed. The results of the Supreme Court decision had a significant impact on the Muscogee and other Native American nations.