Core Titles to Commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Posted on October 14, 2024 in DEIA Resource Lists

Illustration of Indigenous people against a beige background, representative of decolonization

Today marks Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which commemorates “the perseverance and courage of Indigenous peoples,” as President Biden remarked in a proclamation issued last year. Many students are familiar with Columbus Day, which is recognized on the same day, and the explorer it acknowledges, Christopher Columbus, but fewer know of the Indigenous nations he first encountered in the Americas. Many others still may not understand the full scope of the realities that Native American communities continue to face today. This brief collection of resources—drawn from Resources for College Libraries (RCL)—offers readers insights to better comprehend the fraught histories of Indigenous America. While these histories are painful, they are necessary for honoring and accounting for the full breadth of this nation’s history.

  1. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999) by Winona LaDuke
  2. American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (2014) by Jerome A. Greene
  3. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (2016) by Benjamin Madley
  4. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2015) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  5. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America (2014) by Nancy J. Turner
  6. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary (2017) by Joe Jackson
  7. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) by Dee Alexander Brown
  8. The Comanche Empire (2008) by Pekka Hämäläinen
  9. Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (2021) by Nicole Eustace
  10. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (2015) by Elizabeth A. Fenn
  11. Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) by Jessica McDiarmid
  12. Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019) by Pekka Hämäläinen
  13. The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull & the Resistance of the Free Lakotas (2020) by Robert M. Utley
  14. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019) by Nick Estes
  15. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U. S. History (2023) by Ned Blackhawk
  16. Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature (2011) edited by Qwo-Li Driskill et al.
  17. The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (2010) by Aldona Jonaitis et al.
  18. Travellers Through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada (2017) by Cecilia Morgan
  19. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (2021) by Claudio Saunt

More about RCL:

Resources for College Libraries (RCL) supports the undergraduate curriculum with a list of over 90,000 core titles essential for teaching and research. The RCL database is developed and peer-reviewed by practicing librarians and co-published by Choice/ACRL and ProQuest-Clarivate.

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Interested in contributing to TIE? Send an email to Deb V. at Choice dvillavicencio@ala-choice.org with your topic idea.

Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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