Celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Heritage Month with these young adult reads that uplift the voices of Indigenous folks.
See all books in this list in our catalog.
From Gaming to social media, pirate radio to garage bands, Star Trek to D&D, and missed connections at the pow wowo, Indigenous culture is so much more than how it's usually portrayed. These comics are here to celebrate those stories! Featuring an all-Indigenous creative team, Indiginerds is an exhilarating anthology collecting 11 stories about Indigenous people balancing traditional ways of knowing with modern pop culture.
Summary taken from the publisher's website.
Set at a classic drive-in restaurant that seems to exist in every Native community, this anthology unites the stories of teens from all kinds of backgrounds through the shared theme of Native joy, with stories and poems reflecting hope, healing, humor, love, friendship, romance, and joy. The road to Sandy June's Legendary Frybread Drive-In slips through every rez and alongside every urban Native hangout. The menu offers a rotating feast, including traditional eats and tasty snacks. But Sandy June's serves up more than food: it hosts live music, movie nights, unexpected family reunions, love long lost, and love found again. That big green-and-gold neon sign beckons to teens of every tribal Nation, often when they need it most. Featuring the voices of both new and acclaimed Indigenous writers, and edited by bestselling Muscogee author Cynthia Leitich Smith, this collection of interconnected stories serves up laughter, love, Native pride, and the world's best frybread.
Explore the past 150 years through the eyes of Indigenous creators in this groundbreaking graphic novel anthology. Beautifully illustrated, these stories are an emotional and enlightening journey through Indigenous wonderworks, psychic battles, and time travel. See how Indigenous peoples have survived a post-apocalyptic world since Contact.
A year after her brother Ally's death was ruled suicide by overdose, Andy starts university without her "honorary twin," writing him letters as she strives to embrace her bisexuality and her Indigenous identity. When Andy discovers Ally's hidden poems, she tries to piece together these remaining fragments of her brother. First-year college student Andy can't afford to slow down. Study, volunteer, work, make new friends, fall in love— whatever it takes to keep her from obsessing over her brother Ally's death, which was ruled suicide by overdose. Navigating a new life chapter without her "honorary twin," Andy writes letters to him as she strives to embrace her bisexuality and her Indigenous identity. Once she discovers Ally's hidden poems, Andy pours over them to make sense of her brother's life— and his death. Back in senior year, Ally dreamed of being a poet. His parents encouraged him to write as a hobby, but they always expected him to inherit the family-owned bookshop with his sister. Ally wrote to cope with his emptiness, until he turned to drugs to fill the void. Reaching for her brother through unanswered words, Andy must reckon with living a once-shared life alone.
Ever since Lucy Smith's father died five years ago, 'home' has been more of an idea than a place. She knows being on the run is better than anything waiting for her as a 'ward of the state.' But when the sharp-eyed and kind Mr. Jameson, with an interest in her case, comes looking for her, Lucy wonders if hiding from her past will ever truly keep her safe. Five years in the foster system has taught her to be cautious and smart. But she wants to believe Mr. Jameson and his 'friend-not-friend', a tall and fierce-looking woman who say they want to look after her. They also tell Lucy the truth her father hid from her—she is Ojibwe; she has—had—a sister, and more siblings, a grandmother who'd look after her and a home where she would be loved. But Lucy is being followed. The past has destroyed any chance at safety she had. Will the secrets she's hiding swallow her whole and take away any hope for the future she always dreamed of? When the past comes for revenge, it's fight or flight.
Four teens on the Blackfeet Reservation find themselves the suspects of an investigation when a classmate is found murdered during the annual Indian Days celebrations.
Winifred has lived in the apartment above the cemetery office with her father, who works in the crematorium, all her life, close to her mother's grave. With her sixteenth birthday only days away, Winifred has settled into a lazy summer schedule, lugging her obese chihuahua around the grounds in a squeaky red wagon to visit the neglected gravesides and nursing a serious crush on her best friend, Jack. Her habit of wandering the graveyard at all hours has started a rumor that Winterson Cemetery might be haunted. It's welcome news since the crematorium is on the verge of closure and her father's job is being outsourced. Now that the ghost tours have started, Winifred just might be able to save her father's job and the only home she has ever known. All she has to do is get help from her con-artist cousin to keep up the ruse and somehow manage to stop her father from believing his wife has returned from the grave. But when Phil, an actual ghost of a teen girl who lived and died in the ravine next to the cemetery, starts showing up, Winifred begins to question everything she believes about life, love, and death.
Summary taken from the publisher's website.
Lou has enough confusion in front of her this summer. She'll be working in her family's ice-cream shack with her newly ex-boyfriend—whose kisses never made her feel desire, only discomfort—and her former best friend King, who is back in their Canadian prairie town after disappearing three years ago without a word. But when she gets a letter from her biological father—a man she hoped would stay behind bars for the rest of his life—Lou immediately knows that she cannot meet him, no matter how much he insists. While King's friendship makes Lou feel safer and warmer than she would have thought possible, when her family's business comes under threat, she soon realizes that she can't ignore her father forever.
When Bryce's mom walks out on her abusive boyfriend and back into jail for breaking her probation, he's left facing the summer of his junior year with no parents, no phone, and only the clothes on his back. With nowhere to call home, Bryce crashes at his grandparents' house on Wolf Creek Reservation. Wolf Creek is full of memories and old friends, including Robbie and Mikayla, who hang out at the local skate park. Skateboarding reminds Bryce of his late dad: carefree, riding as if he could fly. If Bryce could learn to ride like that, he'd take his crew to the top of the skateboarding championship at the end of the summer, and finally prove he's not a loser, especially to the online-famous, captivating Mikayla. Summer is looking up, even as he's falling on his face. But when a fresh loss takes Bryce down, he'll need to learn to lean on his Ojibwe community to get back on the board. Only then can he discover his father's real legacy—and the true meaning of unconditional love.
Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things—from strawberries to witch hazel to water lilies and lichen—provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass. Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith, this new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth's oldest teachers: the plants around us. With informative sidebars, reflection questions, and art from illustrator Nicole Neidhardt, Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults brings Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the lessons of plant life to a new generation.
Summary taken from the publisher's website.
Bugz is caught between two worlds. In the real world, she's a shy and self-conscious Indigenous teen who faces the stresses of teenage angst and reserve life. But in the virtual world, her alter ego is not just confident but dominant in a massive multiplayer video game universe. Feng is a teen boy who has been sent from China to live with his aunt, a doctor on the reserve, after his online activity suggests he may be developing extremist sympathies. Meeting each other in real life, as well as in the virtual world, Bugz and Feng immediately relate to each other as outsiders and as avid gamers. As their connection is strengthened through their virtual adventures, they find they have much in common in the real world, too: both must decide what to do in the face of temptations and pitfalls, and both must grapple with the impact of family and community trauma. But betrayal threatens everything Bugz has built in the virtual world, as well as her relationships in the real world, and it will take all her newfound strength to restore her friendship with Feng and reconcile the parallel aspects of her life: the traditional and the mainstream, the east and the west, the real and the virtual.
Imagine an America very similar to our own. It's got homework, best friends, and pistachio ice cream. There are some differences. This America has been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces are less charming and should never see the light of day. Seventeen-year-old Elatsoe ("Ellie" for short) lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered, in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. The picture-perfect façade of Willowbee masks gruesome secrets, and she will rely on her wits, skills, and friends to tear off the mask and protect her family.
Killing the Wittigo explains the traumatic effects of colonization on Indigenous people and communities and how trauma alters an individual's brain, body, and behavior. It explores how learned patterns of behavior— the ways people adapt to trauma to survive— are passed down within family systems, thereby affecting the functioning of entire communities. The book foregrounds Indigenous resilience through song lyrics and as-told-to stories by young people who have started their own journeys of decolonization, healing, and change. It also details the transformative work being done in urban and on-reserve communities through community-led projects and Indigenous-run institutions and community agencies. These stories offer concrete examples of the ways in which Indigenous peoples and communities are capable of healing in small and big ways, and they challenge readers to consider what the dominant society must do to create systemic change.
Haunting illustrations are woven throughout these horror stories that follow one extended Cherokee family across the centuries and well into the future as they encounter predators of all kinds in each time period.
Miikwan and Dez are best friends. Miikwan's Anishinaabe; Dez is Inninew. Together, the teens navigate the challenges of growing up in an urban landscape- they're so close, they even completed their Berry Fast together. However, when Dez's grandmother becomes too sick, Dez is told she can't stay with her anymore. With the threat of a group home looming, Dez can't bring herself to go home and disappears. Miikwan is devastated, and the wound of her missing mother resurfaces. Will Dez's community find her before it's too late? Will Miikwan be able to cope if they don't?
When brothers Max and Jay help a classmate in trouble, they struggle with the consequences of their violent actions and worry they may be more like their abusive father than they thought, so the brothers turn to their Bribri roots to find their way forward.
A book of questions and answers for Native and non-Native young readers alike. Ranging from "Why is there such a fuss about non-Native people wearing Indian costumes for Halloween?" to "Why is it called a traditional Indian fry bread taco?" to "What's it like for Natives who don't look Native?" to "Why are Indians so often imagined rather than understood?" and beyond.
Ezra Cloud hates living in Northeast Minneapolis. His father is a professor of their language, Ojibwe, at a local college, so they have to be there. But Ezra hates the dirty, polluted snow around them. He hates being away from the rez at Nigigoonsiminikaaning First Nation. And he hates the local bully in his neighborhood, Matt Schroeder, who terrorizes Ezra and his friend Nora George. Ezra gets into a terrible fight with Matt at school defending Nora, and that same night, Matt's house burns down. Instantly, Ezra becomes a prime suspect. Knowing he won't get a fair deal, and knowing his innocence, Ezra's family sends him away to run traplines with his grandfather in a remote part of Canada, while the investigation is ongoing. But the Schroeders are looking for him...
For too long, stories and artistic expressions from Indigenous people have been written and recorded by others, not by the individuals who have experienced the events. In Ours to Tell, sixteen Indigenous creators relate traditions, accounts of historical events, and their own lived experiences. Novelists, poets, graphic artists, historians, craftspeople, and mapmakers chronicle stories on the struggles and triumphs lived by Indigenous people, and the impact these stories have had on their culture and history. Some of the profiles included are: Indigenous poet E. Pauline Johnson, acclaimed novelist Tommy Orange, brave warrior Standing Bear, poet and activist Rita Joe. With each profile accompanied by rich visuals, from archival photos to contemporary art, Ours to Tell brilliantly spotlights Indigenous life, past and present, through an Indigenous lens. Because each profile gives an historical and cultural context, what emerges is a history of Indigenous people.
Derrick, a Navajo boy who lives on a reservation in New Mexico, is excited to earn a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school on the East Coast. When his grandmother grows ill, he realizes that her fear of boarding schools grows out of her own time spent in a federal Native boarding school. Derrick decides to try to shatter her generational silence and tell her tale so he can carry her voice into the future.