Native American Heritage Month was federally declared in 1990 and recognizes “Native Americans are essential to the fabric of the United States.”1 Commemorate with a selection Yale University Press titles related to Indigenous resistance, literature, art, and history.
Many titles in this reading list are from The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity, yet additional titles can be found in The Lamar Series In Western History and throughout our catalog. This reading list highlights Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices, for your reading today and everyday.
Our Beloved Kin
A New History of King Philip’s War
Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America (Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize)
Talking Back
Native Women and the Making of the Early South
Alejandra Dubcovsky
“An artful, powerful book. . . . [A] substantial contribution to our knowledge of women in the so-called ‘forgotten centuries’ of European colonialism in the southeast.”—Malinda Maynor Lowery, author of The Lumbee Indians
The Rediscovery of America
Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Ned Blackhawk
A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America (Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction)
In Our Hands
Native Photography, 1890 to Now
Edited by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Jaida Grey Eagle and Casey Riley
A groundbreaking exhibition catalogue of Native, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit photography from the nineteenth century to the present day
Surviving Genocide
Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas
Jeffrey Ostler
“Intense and well-researched, . . . ambitious, . . . magisterial. . . . Surviving Genocide sets a bar from which subsequent scholarship and teaching cannot retreat.”—Peter Nabokov, New York Review of Books
Traitor, Survivor, Icon
The Legacy of La Malinche
Edited by Victoria I. Lyall and Terezita Romo
The first major visual and cultural exploration of the legacy of La Malinche, simultaneously reviled as a traitor to her people and hailed as the mother of Mexico
Philip J. Deloria
“[A] brilliant book. . . . This book reminds us that at least one question about America has been settled. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that prevailed throughout most of our history, the Indians will remain.”—Peter Iverson, American Historical Review
The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie
Nicole E Soukup
The first posthumous survey of Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie’s paintings, which invite further conversation about American history, memory, and place
Pekka Hamalainen
From the author of Lakota America, an award-winning history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Comanche empire
- Biden, Joseph R. “A Proclamation on National Native American Heritage Month, 2023.” The White House, October 31, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/31/a-proclamation-on-national-native-american-heritage-month-2023/.
Between Memory and History