Indigenous Authors

Swift Fox All Along

By: Rebecca Thomas

Narrated by: Lisa Nasson

Length: 11 minutes

Abridged: No

What does it mean to be Mi’kmaq? And if Swift Fox can’t find the answer, will she ever feel like part of her family? When Swift Fox’s father picks her up to go visit her aunties, uncles, and cousins, her belly is already full of butterflies. And when he tells her that today is the day that she’ll learn how to be Mi’kmaq, the butterflies... Read more

A Stranger At Home

By: Christy Jordan-Fenton & Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak...

Narrated by: Lisa Nasson

Length: 1 hour 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Traveling to be reunited with her family in the arctic, 10-year-old Margaret Pokiak can hardly contain her excitement. It’s been two years since her parents delivered her to the school run by the dark-cloaked nuns and brothers. Coming ashore, Margaret spots her family, but her mother barely recognizes her, screaming, “Not my girl.”... Read more

When I Was Eight

By: Christy Jordan-Fenton & Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak...

Narrated by: Lisa Nasson

Length: 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Bestselling memoir Fatty Legs for younger readers. Olemaun is eight and knows a lot of things. But she does not know how to read. Ignoring her father’s warnings, she travels far from her Arctic home to the outsiders’ school to learn. The nuns at the school call her Margaret. They cut off her long hair and force her to do menial chores,... Read more

Cuentos sagrados de América

By: Maria Garcia Esperon

Narrated by: Erika Robledo

Length: 5 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

Quince mil años antes de que los Europeos pisarán las Américas, la gente ya se había propagado de punta a punta y de costa a costa. Como todos los humanos, estos Nativos Americanos buscaban comprender su lugar en el universo, la naturaleza de su relación con lo divino, y el origen del mundo en el que habían emergido sus antepasados. Las... Read more

Grandmother’s Stories

By: Daniel Auger

Narrated by: Nimet Kanji

Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

My grandmother was the greatest storyteller I have known. In her soft voice, she spoke of heroes and giants, of evil deeds and of mysterious spirits. Sometimes her stories were short, others epic, but she always managed to hold my brother and me completely under her spell. She seemed to have an infinite supply, at times telling a tale of the... Read more

Watishka Warriors

By: Daniel Auger

Narrated by: Bobbi Goddard

Length: 4 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

After living away for years, Sandy Lafonde returns to her childhood home at the Watishka First Nation reserve. Little has changed since she left — a local gang menaces the area, the community is splintered and the Cree youth are left restless and frustrated. Sandy realizes that she needs to do something to help, so she proposes to start a... Read more

The Hopi Survival Kit

By: Thomas E. Mails

Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab

Length: 12 hours

Abridged: No

For nearly a century the Elders of Hotevilla—a tiny village on a remote Hopi reservation in Arizona—have been guarding the secrets and prophecies of a thousand-year-old covenant that was created to ensure the well-being of the earth and its creatures. But the elders are dying, and there is no one left to pass on its remarkable teachings.... Read more

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem

By: Kliph Nesteroff

Narrated by: Kliph Nesteroff

Length: 9 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

*A Best Book of the Year by NPR and Esquire*

"A remarkable book." —Steve Martin

"An illumating and stereotype-busting history of Native Americans and comedy" (The Washington Post) from Kliph Nesteroff, “the human encyclopedia of comedy” (VICE).

It was one of the most reliable jokes in Charlie Hill’s stand-up routine: “My people are from... Read more

Winter in the Blood

By: James Welch

Narrated by: Darrell Dennis & Tanis Parenteau

Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

A contemporary classic from a major writer of the Native American renaissance — "Brilliant, brutal and, in my opinion, Welch's best work." —Tommy Orange, The Washington Post

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter... Read more

Dog Flowers

By: Danielle Geller

Narrated by: Charley Flyte

Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history
 
“An honest, intimate, and heart-wrenching memoir that explores the fractured family, the damaging effects of alcoholism and poverty, and what it means to seek healing from the... Read more

The Sea in Winter

By: Christine Day

Narrated by: Kimberly Woods

Length: 4 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

American Indian Youth Literature Award: Middle Grade Honor Book! In this evocative and heartwarming novel for readers who loved The Thing About Jellyfish, the author of I Can Make This Promise tells the story of a Native American girl struggling to find her joy again.It’s been a hard year for Maisie Cannon, ever since she hurt her leg and could... Read more

A Generous Spirit

By: author

Narrated by: Michelle Thrush

Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is... Read more

The Language Warrior's Manifesto

By: Anton Treuer

Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab

Length: 5 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Across North America, dedicated language warriors are powering an upswell, a resurgence, a revitalization of indigenous languages and cultures. Through deliberate suppression and cultural destruction, the five hundred languages spoken on the continent before contact have dwindled to about 150. Their ongoing survival depends on immediate,... Read more

Indigenous Writes

By: Chelsea Vowel

Narrated by: Brianne Tucker

Length: 16 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Delgamuukw. Sixties Scoop. Bill C-31. Blood quantum. Appropriation. Two-Spirit. Tsilhqot’in. Status. TRC. RCAP. FNPOA. Pass and permit. Numbered Treaties. Terra nullius. The Great Peace… Are you familiar with the terms listed above? In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue... Read more

Earth Keeper

By: N. Scott Momaday

Narrated by: N. Scott Momaday

Length: 51 minutes

Abridged: No

""Dazzling. . . . In glittering prose, Momaday recalls stories passed down through generations, illuminating the earth as a sacrosanct place of wonder and abundance. At once a celebration and a warning, Earth Keeper is an impassioned defense of all that our endangered planet stands to lose."" — EsquireA magnificent testament to the earth, from... Read more

Belief

By: Marlion Pickett & Dave Warner

Narrated by: Meyne Wyatt & Dave Warner

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

From prison to premiership glory; this is Marlion Pickett’s extraordinary story.

It’s the third quarter in the biggest game of the season. A young man lines up for goal.  The 100,000 strong crowd leaps to its feet and roars as Marlion Pickett sends the ball soaring through the goalposts for his first ever major, celebrated by every teammate, a... Read more

One Bead at a Time

By: Beverly Little Thunder

Narrated by: Jules Koostachin

Length: 8 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

One Bead at a Time is the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit Métis writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder’s narrative... Read more

Fight or Submit

By: Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson

Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

In the opening to his memoir, Grand Chief Ron Derrickson says his "story is not a litany of complaints but a list of battles" that he has fought. And he promises he will not be overly pious in his telling of them. "As a businessman," he writes, "I like to give the straight goods."



In Fight or Submit, Derrickson delivers on his promise and it... Read more

Murder on the Red River

By: Marcie R. Rendon

Narrated by: Siiri Scott

Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

A murdered man in a field. The sheriff needs Cash—a twenty-something tough, smart Indian woman with special seeing powers.Cash and Sheriff Wheaton make for a strange partnership. He pulled her from her mother’s wrecked car when she was three. He’s kept an eye out for her ever since. It’s a tough place to live—northern Minnesota along the Red... Read more

Blue Bear Woman

By: Virginia Pesempaeo Bordeleau

Narrated by: Tai Amy Grauman

Length: 4 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Blue Bear Woman or Ourse bleue is the first novel in Quebec written by an Indigenous woman. The story of a young Cree woman’s search for her roots and identity, this is also the author’s debut novel, originally published in 2007, and it will be her second book to be published in English. The novel has been described as a “texte de... Read more

Little Big Bully

By: Heid E. Erdrich

Narrated by: Heid E. Erdrich

Length: 1 hour 51 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry

In a new collection that is "a force of nature" (Amy Gerstler), renowned Native poet Heid E. Erdrich applies her rich inventive voice and fierce wit to the deforming effects of harassment and oppression.

Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled... Read more

Apple

By: Eric Gansworth

Narrated by: Eric Gansworth

Length: 8 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

How about a book that makes you barge into your boss's office to read a page of poetry from? That you dream of? That every movie, song, book, moment that follows continues to evoke in some way?The term Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside.Eric Gansworth is... Read more

The Brave

By: James Bird

Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett

Length: 9 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Collin can't help himself―he has a unique condition that finds him counting every letter spoken to him. It's a quirk that makes him a prime target for bullies, and a continual frustration to the adults around him, including his father. When Collin asked to leave yet another school, his dad decides to send him to live in Minnesota with the... Read more

Black Water

By: David A. Robertson

Narrated by: David A. Robertson

Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Book of the Year
A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Maclean’s 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter“An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity and love.” —Cherie... Read more