By Katie Coldiron

An Introduction

It is impossible to think about Latin America without considering the lasting impact and contributions by those of Arab descent living in the region. Beginning in the latter nineteenth century and peaking in the first 3 decades of the twentieth century, immigrants from Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and others were migrating to the Western Hemisphere for a mix of political, cultural, religious, and economic reasons. From there, many of these individuals and their descendants became leaders in business, politics, and Arab cultural organizations. Their presence varies within different Latin American countries. Notable contemporary Latin American figures of Arab descent include, but are not limited to, the following: Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, Colombian singer Shakira, Mexican actress Salma Hayek, former President of Brazil Michel Temer, and current President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele.

This blog post seeks to highlight materials about the Arab diaspora in Latin America available digitally via UT Libraries and Open Access resources. These materials include ebooks and primary-source web resources from some of Latin America’s Arab-descent communities. The materials are organized into the following categories: economic and political influence of the Arab diaspora in Latin America, religion among the Arab diaspora in Latin America, migration of Arabs to Latin America, and Arab Latin American publications.

Economic and Political Influence of the Arab Diaspora in Latin America

1. Another arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese ethnicity in neoliberal Brazil by John Tofik Karam
   • This book is an exploration of how Brazilians of Syrian-Lebanese heritage have gained a footing in Brazil’s increasingly globalized economy, particularly with regard to transactions with nations of the Arab Gulf.
   • Temporarily available for checkout via HathiTrust.
2. Carlos Slim: retrato inédito by José Martínez
   • This is a biography of the world’s once-richest man, the Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim. The first chapter contextualizes Slim’s success within his family’s history in Mexico as immigrants from Lebanon.
   • Temporarily available for checkout via HathiTrust.
3. El harén: Menem, Zulema, Seineldín: los árabes y el poder político en la Argentina by Norma Morandini
   • This book, written by an Argentine of Arab descent, paints a picture of three Peronist Argentine politicians fraught with controversy. It seeks to go beyond negative stereotypes of Arabs in Argentina and explore how these individual figures came to their positions of power and ideology.
   • Temporarily available for checkout via HathiTrust.

Religion Among the Arab Diaspora in Latin America

1. The Jews of Latin America by Judith Laikin Elkin
   • This is a comprehensive history of the Jewish presence in Latin America from migration onwards. The establishments of synagogues in different areas throughout the region are featured.
   • Temporarily available for checkout via HathiTrust.

Migration of Arabs to Latin America

1. 1. Los libaneses en México: asimilación de un grupo étnico by Carmen Mercedes Paéz Oropeza
      • This book offers an extensive history of the Lebanese presence in Mexico, beginning from push factors for immigrants and expanding into which parts of Mexico received the most Lebanese immigrants.
      • Temporarily available for checkout via HathiTrust.
   2. Los “turcos” de Lorica : presencia de los árabes en el caribe colombiano 1880-1960 by Joaquín Viloria de la Hoz

• This is a history of the arrival of Arabs to a colonial city in the Colombian Caribbean. While it is not as large as Cartagena or Barranquilla, this resource shows the importance that Lorica, a city once known for extensive trade and merchant activity, had for arriving Arabs to Colombia. Furthermore, it shows the lasting impacts that Arabs themselves had on the city, particularly in regard to architectural styles, social clubs, and commercial activity.
• Temporarily available for checkout via HathiTrust.

1. Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo: Acervo Digital
   • This is an online digital archive of materials from the Immigration Museum of the State of São Paulo in Brazil. Photos, immigration records, and other resources are freely available. The photo below comes from this collection, and is the storefront of an establishment in São Paulo owned by Brazilians of Syrian descent.

Arab Latin American Publications

1. Diario Sirio Libanés
   • This is a magazine of the Syrian-Lebanese community in Argentina. It includes resources related to this community, as well as events and news of interest from other parts of the world.
2. Diario Armenia
   • This resource is a publication of Argentina’s Armenian community. It includes news of interest to Armenians both inside and outside of Argentina.
3. Revista Al Damir
   • This magazine is a publication of the Palestinian community in Chile. Its name comes from the Arabic word for “awareness.” It covers a variety of topics of interest to this community, such as interviews and regular columnists.

This post is based on an exhibit planned for the PCL third floor display shelf. Due to extenuating circumstances regarding the coronavirus, the exhibit will hopefully go up at a later date.

For more information on resources made available by UT Libraries, check out this research guide about Arabs in Latin America.

Written by Katie Coldiron, M.A. in Latin American Studies and MSIS candidate, UT Austin School of Information. She is the current GRA for Global Studies Digital Projects at UT Libraries.

For Black History Month 2020, we’re using N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ‘til Black Future Month as a jumping off point to explore black futures in the library collection. Visit the display on the 3^rd floor of PCL throughout the month of February to check out these items.

“But this is no awkward dystopia, where all are forced to conform.” ~ N.K. Jemisin, How Long ’til Black Future Month?

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” ~ Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Short Stories & Essays

1. How long ’til black future month? by N. K. Jemisin
   •  In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination.
2. Conversations with Octavia Butler by Octavia Butler
   • In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006, Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of herself as the “rare bird” of science fiction even as she shows frustration with the constant question,”How does it feel to be the only one?”
3. Octavia’s brood: Science fiction stories from social justice movements by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown
   • Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.
4. Stories for Chip: A tribute to Samuel R. Delaney by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell
   • From surrealistic visions of bucolic road trips to erotic transgressions to mind-expanding analyses of Delany’s influence on the genre—as an out gay man, an African American, and possessor of a startlingly acute intellect—this book conveys the scope of the subject’s sometimes troubling, always rewarding genius.
5. So long been dreaming: Postcolonial science fiction & fantasy by Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan, eds.
   • The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures.
6. Dark matter: A century of speculative fiction from the African diaspora by Sheree R. Thomas
   • This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers.
7. Flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture by Mark Dery
   •  As the essays in this book confirm, there is more to fringe computer culture than cyberspace. Within these pages, readers will encounter flame warriors; new age mutant ninja hackers; technopagans for whom the computer is an occult engine. The term “afrofuturism” was coined in the essay “Black to the Future” in this collection.

Fiction

1. The inheritance trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
   • Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle.
2. The fifth season by N. K. Jemisin
   • Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world’s sole continent, a great red rift has been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries
3. The obelisk gate by N. K. Jemisin
   • The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring — madman, world-crusher, savior — has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever. It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy. It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last. The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.
4. The stone sky by N. K. Jemisin
   • Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.
5. Parable of the sower by Octavia Butler
   • The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of “hyperempathy”—which causes her to feel others’ pain as her own—sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.
6. Parable of the talents by Octavia Butler
   • Parable of the Talents is told in the voice of Lauren Olamina’s daughter—from whom she has been separated for most of the girl’s life—with sections in the form of Lauren’s journal. Against a background of a war-torn continent, and with a far-right religious crusader in the office of the U.S. presidency, this is a book about a society whose very fabric has been torn asunder, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet.
7. Patternmaster by Octavia Butler
   • The Patternist is a telepathic race, commanded by the Patternmaster, whose thoughts can destroy, heal, rule. Coransee, son of the ruling Patternmaster, wants the throne and will stop at nothing to get it, including venture into the wild mutant-infested hills to destroy a young apprentice—his equal and his brother.
8. Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney
   • Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy’s deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack.
9. Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney
   • Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Into this disaster zone comes a young man–poet, lover, and adventurer–known only as the Kid.
10. Everfair by Nisi Shawl
    • Fabian Socialists from Great Britain join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.
11. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
    • Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.
12. Who fears death by Nnedi Okorafor
    • Born into post-apocalyptic Africa to a mother who was raped after the slaughter of her entire tribe, Onyesonwu is tutored by a shaman and discovers that her magical destiny is to end the genocide of her people.
13. An unkindness of ghosts by Rivers Solomon
    •  Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot–if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
14. The deep by Rivers Solomon
    • Yetu holds the memories for her people — water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners — who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one — the historian.
15. Black Panther: World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay
    • You know them now as the Midnight Angels, but in this story they are just Ayo and Aneka, young women recruited to become Dora Milaje, an elite task force trained to protect the crown of Wakanda at all costs. Their first assignment will be to protect Queen Shuri… but what happens when your nation needs your hearts and minds, but you already gave them to each other?
16. Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
    • Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewings narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstancesblues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self.
17. The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
    • Escaping from slavery in the 1850s Gilda’s longing for kinship and community grows over two hundred years. Her induction into a family of benevolent vampires takes her on an adventurous and dangerous journey full of loud laughter and subtle terror.
18. Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett
    • A computer program etched into the atmosphere has a story to tell, the story of two people, of a city lost to chaos, of survival and love. The program’s data, however, has been corrupted. As the novel’s characters struggle to survive apocalypse, they are sustained and challenged by the demands of love in a shattered world both haunted and dangerous.
19. The galaxy game by Karen Lord
    • On the verge of adulthood, Rafi attends the Lyceum, a school for the psionically gifted. Rafi possesses mental abilities that might benefit people or control them. Some wish to help Rafi wield his powers responsibly; others see him as a threat to be contained.
20. The prey of gods by Nicky Drayden
    • In South Africa, the future looks promising. Personal robots are making life easier for the working class. The government is harnessing renewable energy to provide infrastructure for the poor. And in the bustling coastal town of Port Elizabeth, the economy is booming thanks to the genetic engineering industry which has found a welcome home there. Yes, the days to come are looking very good for South Africans. That is, if they can survive the present challenges.
21. Escaping exodus by Nicky Drayden
    • Rash and unconventional, Seske Kaleigh should be preparing for her future role as clan leader, but her people have just culled their latest beast, and she’s eager to find the cause of the violent tremors plaguing their new home. Defying social barriers, Seske teams up with her best friend, a beast worker, and ventures into restricted areas, searching for answers. Instead, they discover grim truths about the price of life in the void.

Youth

1. Children of blood and bone by Tomi Adeyemi
   • Seventeen-year-old Zélie, her older brother Tzain, and rogue princess Amari fight to restore magic to the land and activate a new generation of magi, but they are ruthlessly pursued by the crown prince, who believes the return of magic will mean the end of the monarchy.
2. Akata witch by Nnedi Okorafor
   • Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, moves with her family back to Nigeria, where she learns that she has latent magical powers which she and three similarly gifted friends use to catch a serial killer.
3. Akata warrior by Nnedi Okorafor
   • Now stronger, feistier, and a bit older, Sunny Nwazue, along with her friends from the the Leopard Society, travel through worlds, both visible and invisible, to the mysterious town of Osisi, where they fight in a climactic battle to save humanity.
4. Dread nation by Justina Ireland
   • When families go missing in Baltimore County, Jane McKeene, who is studying to become an Attendant, finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that has her fighting for her life against powerful enemies.

eBooks

1. Afrofuturism 2.0: The rise of astro-blackness by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones
   • This collection examines the applicability of contemporary expressions of Afrofuturism to the fields of Africana studies, cultural studies, and other areas of academic inquiry. The essays within this book identify the twenty-first-century expressions of Afrofuturism emerging in the areas of metaphysics such as speculative philosophy, religion, visual studies, performance, art, and the philosophy of science and technology.
2. Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies Culture, Technology, and Things to Come by Erik Steinskog
   •  In highlighting the place of music within the lived experiences of African Americans, the author analyses how the perspectives of Black Sound Studies complement and overlap with the discussion of sonic Afrofuturism. Focusing upon blackness, technology, and sound, this unique text offers key insights in how music partakes in imagining and constructing the future.
3. Speculative Blackness by André M. Carrington
   • André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures—to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
4. Afrofuturism: The world of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha Womack
   • This book introduces readers to the burgeoning artists creating Afrofuturist works, the history of innovators in the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and NK Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, topics range from the “alien” experience of blacks in America to the “wake up” cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism.
5. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis
   •  In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities.
6. Black Madness : : Mad Blackness by Therí Alyce Pickens
   • Therí Alyce Pickens examines the speculative and science fiction of Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due to rethink the relationship between race and disability, thereby unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive

DVDs and CDs

1. Black Panther [DVD]
   • King T’Challa returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation of Wakanda to serve as new leader. However, T’Challa soon finds that he is challenged for the throne from divisions within his own country. When two enemies conspire to destroy Wakanda, the hero known as Black Panther must join forces with C.I.A. agent Everett K. Ross and members of the Wakandan Special Forces, to prevent Wakanda from being drawn into a world war.
2. A Seat at the Table by Solange [CD]
   • Calmly cathartic and considerably at odds with mainstream R&B, the progressive set promoted healing and empowerment in response to racial oppression. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Standout single “Cranes in the Sky” (number 74 pop, number 28 R&B/hip-hop) won that year’s Grammy award for Best R&B Performance.
3. The archandroid by Janelle Monáe [CD]
   • An “emotion picture” brought to you by Janelle Monáe and the Mad Minds of the Wondaland Arts Society. The star-studded featured cast includes the legendary Big Boi of OutKast, renowned poet Saul Williams, psychedelic dance-punk troupe Of Montreal, punk prophets Deep Cotton, and the Wondaland Arch Orchestra.
4. Parliament’s greatest hits by Parliament [CD]
   • Parliament engaged in a funk free-for-all, blending influences from the godfathers with freaky costumes and themes inspired by ’60s acid culture and science fiction. Parliament hit the R&B Top Ten with funk classics such as “Up for the Down Stroke,” “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk),” “Flast Light,” and “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop).”
5. Blade [DVD]
   • When the bloodthirsty Immortals’ lord, Deacon Frost, declares war on the human race, Blade is humanity’s last hope for survival.

Streaming Film

1. The Wiz
   • A young kindergarten teacher finds herself in the Land of Oz, where she is greeted by Munchkins. She journeys down the Yellow Brick Road in search of the Wiz, and encounters a scarecrow, a tin man and a cowardly lion.

Streaming Music

1. Space is the place by Sun Ra
   • This is the music that was recorded by Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra for the film Space is the Place. Most of the music on this album is not heard in the film except in short excerpts, and there’s music in the film which is not on this album.

Twitter Handles

1. Nnedi Okorafor
2. N. K. Jemisin
3. Tomi Adeyemi
4. Janelle Monáe

by Andres Ramirez

*This post may use some terms and vocabulary that some readers feel are out of date or inaccurate. We recognize the sensitivity of and inherent problems with referring to various indigenous peoples with monolithic and colonizer-imposed terms. For this post, we have made the decision to use the vocabulary of the sources from which information was pulled within its historical and cultural context.

This month, we’re celebrating Native American Heritage Month by highlighting library materials that celebrate Native American lives, accomplishments, and voices. For more information and additional resources, come visit our display on the third floor of PCL!

While this month’s designation has also been referred to under other variants of the name, including “National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month,” the current designation reflects growing recognition of the continued presence of Native Peoples, far predating European exploration and colonization. The trend toward the term “Native American” also reflects the misnomer of the term “Indian” as European colonial explorers incorrectly assumed they had found a western passage to India/ East Asia. The term Native American was proposed by the U.S. government. This is an ongoing, evolving term in how Native Peoples identify and describe themselves, as well as how they are identified by others. As Native Peoples are far from being a monolithic identity, some identify as native, indigenous, Indian, First Nations, or specifically to their tribal identity(ies). This can be more complex for individuals with multiple heritage backgrounds.

Native Peoples have served as an inspiration throughout U.S. history, with colonial settlers appropriating aspects of tribal cultures dating from the first act of disobedience by New England colonial people dressing as “Indians” during the Boston Tea Party to protest taxation, through the inspiration of our governmental model taken from the Iroquois confederacy. Even the name of Texas derives from the Caddo language word taysha meaning “friend” or “ally,” which in Spanish was spelled as tejas.

Nearly from the beginning, Native Peoples became stereotyped as “noble savages,” both in need of a civilizing influence and paradoxically idealized as inherently innocent and paragons of ecological responsibility. This tension continues through the ongoing struggles for native civil rights and sovereignty, and as the figures at the forefront of environmental justice movements for sustainable policies like the recent protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline at North Dakota Standing Rock Reservation.

The collective breadth of Native People’s experience calls into question national myths and popular narratives of “manifest destiny” and American exceptionalism. Furthermore, indigenous concepts of tribal governance, land stewardship, alternative cosmologies and deeper relations to the natural world are powerful and timely models for roads forward into future equitable and sustainable societies.

As David Treuer (Ojibwe) explains in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: “If you want to know America—if you want to see it for what it was and what it is—you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present. If you do, if we all do, we will see that all the issues posed at the founding of the country have persisted. How do the rights of the many relate to the rights of the few? What is or should be the furthest extent of federal power? How has the relationship between the government and the individual evolved? What are the limits of the executive to execute policy, and to what extent does that matter to us as we go about our daily lives? How do we reconcile the stated ideals of America as a country given to violent acts against communities and individuals? To what degree do we privilege enterprise over people? To what extent does the judiciary shape our understanding of our place as citizens in this country? To what extent should it? What are the limits to the state’s power over the people living within its borders? To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works.”

This month, and every month, we encourage others to explore the rich traditions of the vast spectrum of native tribes and sovereign nations. Here we highlight some books and resources by native authors from this rich and varied tradition.

Collection Highlights

Digital exhibits and resources

• • National Archives
  • Native American Heritage Month from the Library of Congress
  • Native American Rights Fund (NARF)
  • National Congress of American Indians

Nonfiction

The heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the present by David Treuer (Ojibwe)

The received idea of Native American history–as promulgated by books like Dee Brown’s mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee–has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative.

Shapes of Native nonfiction: Collected essays by contemporary writers edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton

While exploring familiar legacies of personal and collective trauma and violence, these writers push, pull and break the conventional essay structure to overhaul the dominant cultural narrative that romanticize Native lives, yet deny Native emotional response.

Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing.

Memoir

Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo (Muscogee)

A memoir from the Native American poet describes her youth with an abusive stepfather, becoming a single teen mom, and how she struggled to finally find inner peace and her creative voice.

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.

Popular Fiction

There, There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne – Arapaho)

“We all came to the powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid–tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here. There will be death and playing dead, there will be screams and unbearable silences, forever-silences, and a kind of time-travel, at the moment the gunshots start, when we look around and see ourselves as we are, in our regalia, and something in our blood will recoil then boil hot enough to burn through time and place and memory. We’ll go back to where we came from, when we were people running from bullets at the end of that old world. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, that we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.”

Books and islands in Ojibwe country by Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe-Chippewa)

Erdrich compellingly writes about the Ojibwe spirits and songs, language, and sorrows that have passed down through generations. Erdrich later travels to Rainy Lake, to an island of real books, the world of an exuberant eccentric and close friend to the Ojibwe, who established an extraordinary library there a hundred years ago.

Genre Fiction

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo)

While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters. Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine.

Walking the clouds: An anthology of indigenous science fiction edited by Grace L. Dillon

In this first-ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction Grace Dillon collects some of the finest examples of the craft with contributions by Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors.

Poetry

Native voices: Indigenous American poetry, craft and conversations edited by CMarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader

In this groundbreaking anthology of Indigenous poetry and prose, Native poems, stories, and essays are informed with a knowledge of both what has been lost and what is being restored. It presents a diverse collection of stories told by Indigenous writers about themselves, their histories, and their present. It is a celebration of culture and the possibilities of language, in conversation with those poets and storytellers who have paved the way.

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota)

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.

When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams.

Bone Dance: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1992 by Wendy Rose

A prolific voice in Native American writing for more than twenty years, Rose has been widely anthologized, and is the author of eight volumes of poetry. Bone Dance is a major anthology of her work, comprising selections from her previous collections along with new poems. The 56 selections move from observation of the earth to a search for one’s place and identity on it. In an introduction written for this anthology, Rose comments on the place each past collection had in her development as a poet.

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

Nature Poem follows Teebs–a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet–who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky.

IRL by Tommy Pico

IRL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one’s 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English.