Bookseller Picks by Indigenous Authors 2022

Winter Counts

A Novel

By: David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
Length: 8 hours 17 minutes

“Weiden’s book is a thriller with an important social and political message. Following a Lakota ‘enforcer’ who enacts extrajudicial punishment to fill the gaps in the legal system, Winter Counts is a twisty new addition to the growing Indigenous literature canon. Weiden’s exploration of the injustices of reservation life is vital. Read more

Empire of Wild

A Novel

By: Cherie Dimaline
Narrated by: Michelle St. John
Length: 8 hours 16 minutes

“Cherie Dimaline’s latest novel packs a wallop of a story. Absolutely stunning in every way, this latest offering follows the story of Joan, whose husband has disappeared, and her courage when confronted with truths and lies. She and her husband, Victor, live in a Métis community, close and tight knit. As Joan deals with the fallout of her... Read more

Antelope Woman

A Novel

By: Louise Erdrich
Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

This updated edition of National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich’s 1998 novel now features fascinating new content, a new title, and a new foreword by the author—a riveting story that explores tensions between Native American and white cultures.“Audacious and surprising. . . . One of America’s most... Read more

Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids

By: Cynthia Leitich Smith
Narrated by: Kenny Ramos & DeLanna Studi
Length: 6 hours 11 minutes

Edited by award-winning and bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith, this collection of intersecting stories by both new and veteran Native writers bursts with hope, joy, resilience, the strength of community, and Native pride. Native families from Nations across the continent gather at the Dance for Mother Earth Powwow in Ann Arbor, Michigan.... Read more

Healer of the Water Monster

By: Brian Young
Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

Brian Young’s powerful debut novel tells of a seemingly ordinary Navajo boy who must save the life of a Water Monster—and comes to realize he’s a hero at heart. When Nathan goes to visit his grandma, Nali, at her mobile summer home on the Navajo reservation, he knows he’s in for a pretty uneventful summer, with no electricity or cell service.... Read more

Jo Jo Makoons: The Used-to-Be Best Friend

Jo Jo: Book #1

By: Dawn Quigley
Narrated by: Jennifer Bobiwash
Length: 52 minutes

American Indian Youth Literature Award: Middle Grade Honor Book! Hello/Boozhoo—meet Jo Jo Makoons! Full of pride, joy, and plenty of humor, this first book in an all-new chapter book series by Dawn Quigley celebrates a spunky young Ojibwe girl who loves who she is.Jo Jo Makoons Azure is a spirited seven-year-old who moves through the world a... Read more

The Sentence

By: Louise Erdrich
Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
Length: 11 hours 49 minutes

“A heartfelt and occasionally hilarious account of life and work at an independent bookstore through the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. While the reflections on family and pandemic life are cathartic, this book is also about identity and how our history and present shape it. Through encounters with the ghost of a troublesome lifelong customer, and the... Read more

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Native America from 1890 to the Present

By: David Treuer
Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau
Length: 17 hours 44 minutes

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal.

"Chapter after chapter, it's like one... Read more

There There

A novel

By: Tommy Orange
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Cuervo & Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 59 minutes

“There There is the kind of book that grabs you from the start and doesn’t let go, even after you’ve turned the last page. It is a work of fiction, but every word of it feels true. Tommy Orange writes with a palpable anger and pain, telling the history of a cultural trauma handed down through generations in the blood and bones and stories of... Read more

If I Ever Get Out of Here

By: Eric Gansworth
Narrated by: Eric Gansworth
Length: 10 hours 19 minutes

"A heart-healing, mocs-on-the-ground story of music, family and friendship." -- Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of TANTALIZE and RAIN IS NOT MY INDIAN NAME

Lewis "Shoe" Blake is used to the joys and difficulties of life on the Tuscarora Indian reservation in 1975: the joking, the Fireball games, the snow blowing through his roof. What he's not used... Read more

Little Big Bully

Penguin Poets

By: Heid E. Erdrich
Narrated by: Heid E. Erdrich
Length: 1 hour 51 minutes

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

Rez Dogs

By: Joseph Bruchac
Narrated by: Joseph Bruchac
Length: 1 hour 35 minutes

Renowned author Joseph Bruchac tells a powerful story of a girl who learns more about her Penacook heritage while sheltering in place with her grandparents during the coronavirus pandemic.

Malian loves spending time with her grandparents at their home on a Wabanaki reservation—she’s there for a visit when, suddenly, all travel shuts down. There’s... Read more

Hunting by Stars

(A Marrow Thieves Novel)

By: Cherie Dimaline
Narrated by: Meegwun Fairbrother & Michelle St. John
Length: 12 hours 17 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The thrilling follow-up to the bestselling, award-winning novel The Marrow Thieves, about a dystopian world where the Indigenous people of North America are being hunted for their bone marrow and ability to dream.

Years ago, when plagues and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped... Read more

The Barren Grounds

The Misewa Saga, Book One

The Misewa Saga: Book #1

By: David A. Robertson
Narrated by: Brefny Caribou
Length: 7 hours 52 minutes

Narnia meets traditional Indigenous stories of the sky and constellations in an epic middle grade fantasy series from award-winning author David Robertson.

Morgan and Eli, two Indigenous children forced away from their families and communities, are brought together in a foster home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They each feel disconnected, from their... Read more

Postcolonial Love Poem

Poems

By: Natalie Diaz
Narrated by: Natalie Diaz
Length: 1 hour 59 minutes

“Pulitzer Prize-winning Postcolonial Love Poem will make you want Natalie Diaz to write a love poem about you. Here, she writes sensual lesbian poems and warm platonic ones, poems about water and basketball and things lost in translation. Her elegant poetry begs to be studied—add this stunner from a Mexican Mojave poet to your shelf, and eat it... Read more

As Long as Grass Grows

The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

By: Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty... Read more

A Two-Spirit Journey

The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder

Critical Studies in Native History: Book #18

By: Ma-Nee Chacaby
Narrated by: Marsha Knight
Length: 11 hours 57 minutes

A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.... Read more

An American Sunrise

Poems

By: Joy Harjo
Narrated by: Joy Harjo
Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo... Read more

Murder on the Red River

The Cash Blackbear Mysteries: Book #1

By: Marcie R. Rendon
Narrated by: Siiri Scott
Length: 6 hours 3 minutes

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

Firekeeper's Daughter

By: Angeline Boulley
Narrated by: Isabella Star LaBlanc
Length: 14 hours 13 minutes

“This story of a young woman roped into a federal investigation of a drug ring tearing her Ojibwe community apart is riveting and sorrowful. Daunis is an 18 year old non-enrolled Ojibwe with plenty of ambition and skills and won't see a clear path to her future that doesn't involve working in her community. This book moved me in so many ways but... Read more