Seven Books by Native Women to Read During National Native American Heritage Month

November is National Native American Heritage Month in the US, and also the month in which a lot of Americans wheel out a disturbing revision of history related to Native communities on one of the culture’s biggest holidays, so I thought it would be a good time to highlight work from the women of those communities. This has been an interesting list to put together for me, because I have admittedly not made much of an effort to seek out work from Native women before.

It’s been an important step forward in relearning the history of the country I’m from, and in some ways, a little more about who I am and my own broken ancestral lines. My family tree is a mess of snapped and undocumented branches, but one theme I have been able to trace consistently is that of Native women ancestors who married white men, and who, thereafter, had their own ancestral ties swallowed up whole and assimilated into white American culture.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the books on this list deal with that kind of subject matter — on maternal lines, on daughterhood, on motherhood, on in-betweenness and systematic erasure, and how womanhood and nativeness can often intersect to subsume the individual, and thereby the culture the individual is from.

In short, it has been a delight, a sorrowful endeavor, an eye-opening experience, making my way through this list, and I hope it can be the same for some of you.