Collection: Shop Indigenous

Explore the natural history, ecological contributions, and cultural significance of manoomin (wild rice), and savor complementary wild foods and local flavors with more than seventy-five inspired recipes, including favorites from over a dozen Indigenous cooks from various nations.

Manoomin, wild rice, also known as "the good berry," first drew the Anishinaabeg people to the Great Lakes region in search of the prophesied "food that grows on water." Honoring the sustenance they found in the place known as Mni Sota Makoce, The Good Berry Cookbook follows the Anishinaabeg through seasons and spaces to gather wild foods and contemplate connections among the people and their plant and animal relatives.

Ethnobotonist Tashia Hart takes us afield to marvel at the wonder of the northland's flora and to gather the bounty that translates in her kitchen--and yours--to inspired combinations like Bison and Sunchoke Quick Stew, Nutty Manoomin Patties with Ogaa (Walleye) Cheeks and Fiddlehead-Nettle Puree, and Sweet Potato Corn Pudding with Rose Sauce. Sweets are on the menu as well: Manoomin Chocolate Pie, Manoomin Smoothies, and Toasted Manoomin and Bagaan (Hazelnut) Butter Chocolate Cups.

These dishes are only the beginning: Hart shares foraging tips and basic preparations that equip home cooks to expand their repertoire. She invites other talented Native cooks and chefs to share favorite recipes. Through storytelling and science, she emphasizes food as medicine: good choices for our environment and good choices for our plate unite as we enjoy the benefits the good berry and its botanical neighbors have to offer.

PRESELECCIONADA PARA EL NATIONAL BOOKS AWARDS EN LA CATEORIA DE NO FICCIÓN 2023

Incluido en los libros de ficción notables del New York Times de 2023

Este libro es para celebrar el paso de Liliana Rivera Garza por la tierra y para decirle que, claro que sí, lo vamos a tirar. Al patriarcado lo vamos a tirar.

«El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue víctima de un feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 años, estudiante de arquitectura. Tenía años tratando de terminar su relación con un novio de la preparatoria que insistía en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tomó una decisión definitiva: en lo más crudo del invierno había descubierto que en ella, como bien lo había dicho Albert Camus, había un invencible verano. Lo dejaría atrás. Empezaría una nueva vida. Haría una maestría y después un doctorado; viajaría a Londres.

La decisión de él fue que ella no tendría una vida sin él. Hace apenas un año decidí abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atravesó el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en México, demandó justicia.

El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavación en la vida de una mujer brillante y audaz que careció, como nosotros mismos, como todos los demás, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y combatir la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales .

" Enorme! Ojalá millones lo lean!" -- Francisco Goldman, autor de Monkey Boy, finalista del Premio Pulitzer de Ficción 2022

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NONFICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

Listed as one of The New York Times' Notable Fiction Books of 2023

A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem).

Can you enjoy yourself while you are in pain? The question, which is not new, arises over and over again during that eternity that is mourning.

In the early hours of July 16, 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend. A life full of promise and hope, cut tragically short, Liliana's story instead became subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of domestic violence. With Liliana's case file abandoned by a corrupt criminal justice system, her family, including her older sister Cristina, was forced to process their grief and guilt in private, without any hope for justice.

In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. It traces the story of her childhood, her early romance with a handsome-but possessive and short-tempered-man, through the exhilarating weeks leading up to that fateful July morning, a summer when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.

Using her remarkable talents as a scholar, novelist, and poet, Cristina Rivera Garza returns to Mexico after decades of living in the United States to collect and curate evidence --handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, architectural blueprints-- in order to render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Tracing the full arc of their childhood and adolescence in central Mexico, through the painful and confusing years after Liliana's death, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister, and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.

Unlike most books that chronicle the history of Native peoples beginning with the arrival of Europeans in 1492, this book goes back to the Ice Age to give young readers a glimpse of what life was like pre-contact. The title, Turtle Island, refers to a Native myth that explains how North and Central America were formed on the back of a turtle. Based on archeological finds and scientific research, we now have a clearer picture of how the Indigenous people lived. Using that knowledge, the authors take the reader back as far as 14,000 years ago to imagine moments in time. A wide variety of topics are featured, from the animals that came and disappeared over time, to what people ate, how they expressed themselves through art, and how they adapted to their surroundings. The importance of story-telling among the Native peoples is always present to shed light on how they explained their world. The end of the book takes us to modern times when the story of the Native peoples is both tragic and hopeful.

A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world

The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.

In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"--beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.

Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly--even joyfully--maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From global art superstar Kent Monkman and his long-time collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers' understanding of the land called North America.

For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character--an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island is a genre-demolishing work of genius, the imagined history of a legendary figure through which profound truths emerge--a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities.

Volume One, which covers the period from the creation of the universe to the confederation of Canada, follows Miss Chief as she moves through time, from a complex lived experience of Cree cosmology to the arrival of European settlers, many of whom will be familiar to students of history. An open-hearted being, she tries to live among those settlers, and guide them to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings and the world itself. As their numbers grow, though, so does conflict, and Miss Chief begins to understand that the challenges posed by the hordes of newly arrived Europeans will mean ever greater danger for her, her people, and, by extension, all of the world she cherishes.

Blending history, fiction, and memoir in bold new ways, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle are unlike anything published before. And in their power to reshape our shared understanding, they promise to change the way we see everything that lies ahead.

Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.

Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic façade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the "house slaves," and those select few people of color who gain access. All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing.

With great compassion--because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing--Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.

WINNER, Lambda Literary Award

"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel.

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez," and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.

Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.

Selected speeches from Indigenous leaders around the world--necessary wisdom for our times, nourishment for our collective, and a path away from extinction toward a sustainable, interconnected future.

Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations. Editors Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez present 28 powerful excerpted passages from Indigenous leaders, including Mourning Dove, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Winona LaDuke, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. Accompanied by the editors' own analyses, each chapter reflects the wisdom of Indigenous worldview precepts like:

• Egalitarian rule versus hierarchical governance
• A fearless trust in the universe, instead of a fear-based culture
• The life-sustaining role of ceremony
• Emphasizing generosity and the greater good instead of pursuing selfish goals and for personal gain
• The laws of nature as the highest rules for living

The editors emphasize our deep need to move away from the dominant Western paradigm--one that dictates we live without strong social purpose, fails to honor the earth as sacred, leads with the head while ignoring the heart, and places individual "rights" over collective responsibility. Restoring the Kinship Worldview is rooted in an Indigenous vision and strong social purpose that sees all life forms as sacred and sentient--that honors the wisdom of the heart, and grants equal standing to rights and responsibilities. All author proceeds from Restoring the Kinship Worldview are donated to Indigenous non-profit organizations working on behalf of Indigenous Peoples.

Inviting readers into a world-sense that expands beyond perceiving and conceiving to experiencing and being, Restoring the Kinship Worldview is a salve for our times, a nourishment for our collective, and a holistic orientation that will lead us away from extinction toward an integrated, sustainable future.

Nothing ever happens on the Otter Lake reservation. But when 16-year-old Tiffany discovers her father is renting out her room, she's deeply upset. Sure, their guest is polite and keeps to himself, but he's also a little creepy. Little do Tiffany, her father, or even her astute Granny Ruth suspect the truth. The mysterious Pierre L'Errant is actually a vampire, returning to his tribal home after centuries spent in Europe. But Tiffany has other things on her mind: her new boyfriend is acting weird, disputes with her father are escalating, and her estranged mother is starting a new life with somebody else. Fed up and heartsick, Tiffany threatens drastic measures and flees into the bush. There, in the midnight woods, a chilling encounter with L'Errant changes everything ... for both of them. A mesmerizing blend of Gothic thriller and modern coming-of-age novel, The Night Wanderer is unlike any other vampire story.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry

WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.

--from "WHEREAS Statements"

WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation--and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Learn about the incredible legacy of the first Native American athlete and Olympian to earn a gold medal for the United States in this exciting addition to the #1 New York Times Best-Selling series.

While most athletes excel in just one sport, Jim Thorpe was different. Born in Oklahoma in 1887, he played both professional football and baseball, and ran track and field. Jim was not only a sports icon but also a trailblazer. Raised as part of the Sac and Fox tribal nation, he was the first Native American person to win an Olympic gold medal for the United States.

And although his personal life was not always as successful as his career, Jim remains one of the greatest athletes in American history.

In the Remixed Classics series, authors from marginalized backgrounds reinterpret classic works through their own cultural lens to subvert the overwhelming cishet, white, and male canon. This queer YA reimagining of The Secret Garden subverts the cishet and white status quo of the original in a tale of family secrets wonderful and horrifying.

Mary Lennox didn't think about death until the day it knocked politely on her bedroom door and invited itself in. When a terrible accident leaves her orphaned at fifteen, she is sent to the wilderness of the Georgian Bay to live with an uncle she's never met.

At first the impassive, calculating girl believes this new manor will be just like the one she left in Toronto: cold, isolating, and anything but cheerful, where staff is treated as staff and never like family. But as she slowly allows her heart to open like the first blooms of spring, Mary comes to find that this strange place and its strange people--most of whom are Indigenous--may be what she can finally call home.

Then one night Mary discovers Olive, her cousin who has been hidden away in an attic room for years due to a "nervous condition." The girls become fast friends, and Mary wonders why this big-hearted girl is being kept out of sight and fed medicine that only makes her feel sicker. When Olive's domineering stepmother returns to the manor, it soon becomes clear that something sinister is going on.

With the help of a charming, intoxicatingly vivacious Metis girl named Sophie, Mary begins digging further into family secrets both wonderful and horrifying to figure out how to free Olive. And some of the answers may lie within the walls of a hidden, overgrown and long-forgotten garden the girls stumble upon while wandering the wilds...

The Remixed Classics Series
A Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix by C.B. Lee
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix by Bethany C. Morrow
Travelers Along the Way: A Robin Hood Remix by Aminah Mae Safi
What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remix by Tasha Suri
Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore
My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron
Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix by Caleb Roehrig
Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix by Cherie Dimaline
Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remix by Gabe Cole Novoa

One Book, One Minnesota Selection for Summer 2021

Introducing Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman whose visions and grit help solve a brutal murder in this award-winning debut.

1970s, Red River Valley between North Dakota and Minnesota: Renee "Cash" Blackbear is 19 years old and tough as nails. She lives in Fargo, North Dakota, where she drives truck for local farmers, drinks beer, plays pool, and helps solve criminal investigations through the power of her visions. She has one friend, Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, who helped her out of the broken foster care system.

One Saturday morning, Sheriff Wheaton is called to investigate a pile of rags in a field and finds the body of an Indian man. When Cash dreams about the dead man's weathered house on the Red Lake Reservation, she knows that's the place to start looking for answers. Together, Cash and Wheaton work to solve a murder that stretches across cultures in a rural community traumatized by racism, genocide, and oppression.

A 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Science & Technology

An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why western conservationism isn't working--and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, personal stories, and family histories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors.

Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is nowhere to be found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse. And while holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as "soft"--the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.

Here, Jessica Hernandez--Maya Ch'orti' and Zapotec environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Piña Soul--introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces, that generates rather than destroys. She breaks down the failures of western-defined conservatism and shares alternatives, citing the restoration work of urban Indigenous people in Seattle; her family's fight against ecoterrorism in Latin America; and holistic land management approaches of Indigenous groups across the continent.

Through case studies, historical overviews, and stories that center the voices and lived experiences of Indigenous Latin American women and land protectors, Hernandez makes the case that if we're to recover the health of our planet--for everyone--we need to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands and restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect.

Anishinaabe culture and storytelling meet Alice in Wonderland in this coming-of-age graphic novel that explores Indigenous and gender issues through a fresh yet familiar looking glass.

Aimée, a non-binary Anishinaabe middle-schooler, is on a class trip to offer gifts to Paayehnsag, the water spirits known to protect the land. While stories are told about the water spirits and the threat of the land being taken over for development, Aimée zones out, distracting themselves from the bullying and isolation they've experienced since expressing their non-binary identity. When Aimée accidentally wanders off, they are transported to an alternate dimension populated by traditional Anishinaabe figures in a story inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

To gain the way back home, Aimée is called on to help Trickster by hunting down dark water spirits with guidance from Paayehnsag. On their journey, Aimée faces off with the land-grabbing Queen and her robotic guards and fights the dark water spirits against increasingly stacked odds. Illustrated by KC Oster with a modern take on their own Ojibwe style and cultural representation, Rabbit Chase is a story of self-discovery, community, and finding one's place in the world.

Newbery Honor Winner
National Indie Bestseller
National Book Award Longlist
Minneapolis Star Tribune Best of the Year
Publishers Weekly Best of the Year
Kirkus Best the Year
Apple Best of the Year
Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best
New York Public Library's Best of the Year
Autostraddle's Best Queer Books of the Year

"A spellbinding tale."--Texas Monthly

"Genre-bending."--TIME

"Undeniably charming."--Tor.com

★ "Evokes the timeless feeling of listening to traditional oral storytelling."--Kirkus (starred)

★ "Fun, imaginative, and deeply immersive, this story will be long in the minds of readers."--Publishers Weekly (starred)

★ "Magical, stunning, and wholly original."--Booklist (starred)

"A highly descriptive story which absorbs the audience into its world, readers will become invested in reading until the very end."--School Library Connection

A Snake Falls to Earth is a breathtaking work of Indigenous futurism. Darcie Little Badger draws on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure to weave another unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. It is not to be missed.

Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories.

Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake.

Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries.

And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.