Books by Indigenous authors have gained prominence in recent years, inviting readers into narratives that haven’t always been well represented on bookstore shelves or at industry awards ceremonies. But getting those stories out in the world remains a complicated task.
Native writers are often encouraged to filter their narratives “through a socially sanctioned, mainstream lens” to meet perceived market demands, says Deborah Jackson Taffa, a citizen of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo and author of the memoir Whiskey Tender, a 2024 National Book Award finalist. She says it’s commonplace “for Indigenous authors to be pressured into seeing their histories and beliefs as magical realism or as too specific for universal understanding.”
As a corrective, Taffa, who directs the creative writing MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.Mex., advises emerging Indigenous writers to “know your story, and never let anyone tell you it doesn’t fit common stereotypes or tropes.” PW spoke with authors whose forthcoming works of fiction and nonfiction illustrate what it can look like to follow that directive.
Haunted by History
Passing Through a Prairie Country (Counterpoint, Mar.), the second novel by Ojibwe writer Dennis E. Staples, is a work of horror centered on spectral presences that get stuck in and around a reservation casino. Staples, who has worked in casino vaults, drew on rumors of docile ghosts that hitch rides on his Leech Lake reservation. “There are some parts of the reservation that we know have this more powerful spiritual component,” he says, and though he doesn’t think of them as dangerous, they “have this older connection. You may end up at a crossroads of spirits.” Prairie Country depicts the familiar veneer of the casino “and the roughness around the edges that maybe you don’t normally see,” providing a “commentary on modern Native life.”
Aaron John Curtis, a member of the Akwesasne Kanien’keha:ka (Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe), is a longtime bookseller who’s known as quartermaster at Books & Books in Miami. His debut, Old School Indian (Hillman Grad, May), began as autofiction: main character Abe is a bookseller who experiences a health scare and turns to Mohawk healing when modern medicine lets him down.
As Curtis developed Abe’s voice, he decided to alternate Abe’s hostile attitude with the perspective of Dominick, a keen observer of Abe’s travails. Dominick implies that “Abe doesn’t really know himself so well,” Curtis says, and Dominick’s humor undercuts Abe’s anger. Mohawk phrases punctuate the novel. “Anytime I write a Mohawk story, it always ends up being about language,” Curtis adds. He ties this to a memory: “When I was a kid, we were driving around the rez once; I was in the back seat, my mom driving.” He was shocked when “she rolled down the window and started talking to a guy” not in English but in Kanien’kéha.
Curtis regrets that his mother usually did not speak her ancestral language: “It was taken from her violently. A lot of people are trying to reckon with what it means to be Native now,” and authors have an opportunity to redeem that cultural loss.
Legendary Characters
Beyond fiction, forthcoming titles include memoirs that situate experience and language within Indigenous history writ large.
In We Survived the Night (Knopf, Oct.), documentarian and debut author Julian Brave NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, repairs fractured family ties and provides accounts of contemporary Indigenous political action. He frames his narratives with stories of the charismatic, destructive, and comical Coyote. NoiseCat says preserving such trickster tales is central to how he honors his ancestors.
“What would it be like to bring this nearly dead tradition [of Coyote stories] back to life through the written word in a way that’s in conversation with oral histories?” NoiseCat asks. He infuses his reportage and family stories with Coyote wisdom, “to bring back something that has been very nearly destroyed and has something important to say to the humanities and to broader questions of truth in this world.”
Chyana Marie Sage, who is Cree and Métis, wrote Soft as Bones (House of Anansi, May) as her MFA project at Columbia University. Relying on family photos, interviews, and a journal she’s kept since age eight, she recounts growing up with a dangerous father whose addiction, incarceration, and sexual abuse could be traced to his youth in a Canadian residential school. Sage incorporates Cree words and lore, and references a cannibalistic monster, the Witiko, as “a device for exploring the trauma within my lineage.”
Soft as Bones is “all about braiding the personal with the cultural,” Sage says, “and being cognizant of the fact that my family’s story is one small piece of the mosaic that makes up the histories of Turtle Island.”
Restorative Justice
Where Sage describes her family as a microcosm of Indigenous history, other authors’ work demonstrates how their upbringings shaped their journalistic projects.
Red Cliff Ojibwe author Mary Annette Pembe laid the groundwork for Medicine River (Pantheon, Apr.) over 20 years of research, while doing investigative journalism on historical trauma and appropriation of Native lands. Writing the book, which pins memories of her late mother’s bewildering trauma symptoms to the violence of residential schools, “was very organic,” Pember says. “It emerged as I had children myself and gained perspective on my own recovery” from alcoholism. Her mother never knew about the book, “and it would be really hard if she were alive today. One wonders what would have been the benefit of confronting her. I think it would have caused unnecessary pain.”
Pember’s editor at Pantheon, David Treuer, has known her for decades. “She’s from the same tribe I am,” he says, “and we’ve overlapped in social and ceremonial contexts. I knew she wanted to tell a big story.” Though he came on board at Pantheon, he says, “to acquire groundbreaking fiction and nonfiction generally, I have a particular interest in Native lit”; he also acquired Small Ceremonies (Apr.) by Kyle Edwards of the Lake Manitoba First Nation, a debut coming-of-age novel about Native high school students in Winnipeg.
Pember’s book concerns “one family’s struggles with residential schools that opens out into a huge history that most Americans don’t know,” Treuer says. He believes “part of the problem that’s affected Native literature generally is we’ve been siloed—not ghettoized exactly, but constrained and set aside as a piece of the multicultural pie.”
Journalist Joseph Lee grew up Wampanoag on Martha’s Vineyard and felt a tension between his identity and his East Coast environs. At school, he’d learned that his people “greeted the pilgrims,” he says. “There was a big gap between that and me going to tribal summer camp.” As he discovered more about his people’s history, he began attending tribal meetings and learning what happened after U.S. federal recognition, a settlement agreement, and the formation of the Wampanoag tribal government.
Lee’s findings led him to write Nothing More of This Land (One Signal, July), which questions how the meaning of community must evolve when tribal people are scattered from their home regions. “I wanted to tackle questions of sovereignty and belonging, first with my tribe specifically and then more broadly,” he says. “A lot of these things aren’t taught. Even growing up in the tribe, I wasn’t aware how legal battles and lack of enforcement shaped what I was seeing.”
He believes the more informed Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can be, the better their mutual understandings. “Unfortunately, in the U.S., we don’t have a great track record of knowing shared histories.” Nothing More of This Land and the works of other Indigenous authors aim to fill some of those gaps.
Read more from our Indigenous Voices in Publishing feature.
Native Noir: PW Talks with Marcie R. Rendon
The author of the Cash Blackbear mysteries discusses Indigenous representation in media, portraying hard-hitting issues in fiction, and storytelling from a Native perspective.
Tundra Books Readies an Indigenous Children’s Imprint
A new imprint from Tundra promotes Indigenous talent and Champions Indigenous stories
AudioFile’s Audiobook Club Plays ‘Rez Ball’
The magazine’s first selection is Ojibwe writer Byron Graves’s award-winning YA novel.
Five New Picture Books Share Indigenous Stories
New picture books depict contemporary Indigenous children and elders and highlight stories of kinship, heritage, and community.
