BY DEANNA KALIAN ’20
November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to recognize the talents of the many Native Americans who have contributed to American culture. Here are five Native American writers you should know:
Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, has written 15 novels and has also published volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories and a memoir. Her novels have received numerous awards; her first, “Love Medicine,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Another book, “The Plague of Doves,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
“The Round House,” recipient of the 2012 National Book Award for fiction, remains Erdrich’s most famous work and follows the story of an Ojibwe boy who stops at nothing to figure out the identity of his mother’s attacker, commenting on issues of tribal sovereignty and justice.
“Erdrich’s work centers on Native American characters, but draws on the literary methods and narrative style pioneered by William Faulkner,” according to the Open Education Database.
Tommy Orange, a member of the Arapaho and Cheyenne Nations, is the author of the novel “There There,” released in 2018. The debut work, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was a New York Times bestseller, takes readers to the “Big Oakland Powwow.” There, Orange introduces readers to 12 characters, whose lives and brilliant personalities intersect with devastating results. “There There” was Mount Holyoke’s 2019 Common Read.
According to The Paris Review, “Orange places himself in the vanguard of ... a ‘Native Renaissance,’” a resurgence of interest in Native American artistic endeavors post-Standing Rock in 2016.
“It’s an exciting time to be a Native writer,” Orange said in an interview in The Paris Review.
Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Nation, was named the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019, becoming the first Native American recipient. Although primarily known for her poetry, Harjo has published memoirs, children’s books, screenplays and even musical compositions. One of her poetry collections, “In Mad Love and War,” won the American Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award.
Harjo’s latest anthology, “An American Sunrise” published in August 2019, details the history of the Muscogee people in Oklahoma, entwined with the narrative of her personal and family life.
“Her poems [in ‘An American Sunrise’] sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice,” according to the book’s description.
Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, has authored 16 novels, six short-story collections, nearly 300 short stories appearing in journals and magazines and one graphic novel, “My Hero.” Jones has received four This is Horror Awards, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, among others. He is currently the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
His book, “The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong” straddles the genres of horror and western. According to Publishers Weekly, the book is “a wild, hallucinatory novel about a nameless man named Pidgin del gato, who returns to New Mexico to bury his father only to discover someone has stolen his father’s body.”
nila northSun, a member of the Shoshone Nation and Chippewa/Ojibwe on her father’s side, is an activist and poet who has been writing since the 1970s. She was the director of a tribal emergency youth shelter of the Shoshone Nation for eight years and is also a grant writer for the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Reservation, where she currently lives.
She has published five poetry collections and one non-fiction book, “After the Drying Up of the Water,” a history of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Nation. north- Sun won the University of Nevada, Reno’s Silver Pen award in 2000 and the Indigenous Heritage Award for Literature four years later.