November
The last to hold, oak and maple leaves, are whipping around as the gales of November come blowing. As the landscape is stripped down to the essentials, it becomes a reflective time, a time to gather good books and good conversations to feed our minds as we prepare for the hunkering time. November is Native American Heritage Month. There is a wealth of storytelling, spirituality, environmentalism, and humor to be found among native writers. Enjoy!
Food! Cookbooks
Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories, and Recipes from the Upper Midwest by Heid E Erdrich (2013)
Erdrich writes with humor and warmth as she pairs local family gathering stories with recipes using pre-colonial ingredients. If you celebrate Thanksgiving, there are delicious ways to incorporate manoomin (wild rice) into just about anything. While focusing on traditional native foods; corn, squash, sunflowers, trout, and manoomin, Erdrich allows room for “regular” pantry items so one does not feel too stressed about drifting a bit from pre-colonial food.
The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (2017)
Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America by Sean Sherman (Nov 11, 2025)
Sherman is a James Beard awarded chef, an indigenous foodways advocate and founder of the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis. There’s no better way to understanding a culture than reading and cooking through its traditions. Sherman celebrates a variety of indigenous nations with stories behind eating with the seasons and focusing on plant-forward dishes. Once you’ve cooked, consumed, and shared some of Sherman’s plates, take a trip to Minneapolis and treat your family to dinner at his restaurant!
Classic Novels
House Made of Dawn: A Novel by N. Scott Momaday (1968)
Winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and referred to as a break through novel for American Indian writers, Momaday’s story includes many of the tragic themes current native writers are addressing. Returning from World War II to his home in New Mexico, Abel is plagued by walking in two worlds, the seasonal rhythm of his ancestry and the modern, industrial American norms. Seeking to find home, both spiritually and physically, defines Abel’s struggles and resolutions.
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
Silko began writing in the 1970s and was quickly recognized as brilliant with a genius award by the MacArthur Foundation. Ceremony follows Tayo after his return to his reservation after surviving the horrors of captivity as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Drawn to his Indian past and its traditions, his search for comfort and resolution becomes a ritual–a curative ceremony that defeats his despair.
Philosophy & World View
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec (2025)
Krawec writes to dismantle and connect the histories written by settlers and those stories told by native people in North America. She asks, “What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to indigenous movements of solidarity?”
Thunder Song: Essays by Sasha taqseblu La Pointe (2024)
An unapologetically punk dive into indigenous identity, stereotypes, cultural displacement, and environmental degradation, La Pointe’s collection is a voice for the next generation of native people claiming a bigger role in the United States as professionals, artists, activists, policy makers, and leaders.
Memoir
Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa (2024)
Taffa tells the story of her family as she comes of age in the 1970s and 1980s, moved off the reservation to a community divided by natives trying to be model minorities and those stubbornly holding onto traditional ways. While her story itself is compelling, it is Taffa’s writing that draws you in so close, it is hard to stop reading. Again, the existential crisis of belonging in two worlds is forefront as a theme.
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magpie Earling
Earling was asked by the Lewis and Clark Museum to write about their journey. Considering this task, the voice of Sacajewea kept whispering to Earling. So, not a true memoir, but an imagined one, The Lost Journals is a powerful telling of a young woman’s survival during a historically transformative time for her people. Earling intertwines streaming consciousness, dreams remembered, poetry, song to create a unique language for Sacajewea that truly communicates an experience we can only imagine.
October
Night comes a little earlier and a shade darker. Mushrooms and spiderwebs magically multiply. The morning chill creeps a little deeper into your bones. There’s a persistent longing for creamy potato soup. It is spooky time! If you don’t generally read in the horror genre, fall is the best time to drift that way. Here are a few titles worth reading while you slurp up something hot and fattening.
Paranormal Investigations
The Haunting of Room 904 by Erika T. Wurth (2025)
Wurth is new to the horror game and mixes a fast-paced noir with paranormal tendrils prying open worlds better kept shut. In her second novel, set in Denver, the Brown Hotel hires investigator Olivia Becente to help them understand why every few years a woman is found dead in room 904, no matter what room she checked into the night before. Ever since her sister’s unexpected & strange death, Becente can’t stop seeing and hearing from the dead which gives her some added insight into what is happening at the Brown Hotel. As she goes deeper into the investigation, the past begins to collide with the present and Becente learns more about her sister’s death than she cares to know. There are pagan cults, corrupt journalists, friend betrayals and ghostly visitations that will keep you reading into the night.
Psychological Thriller
Fox: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oats (2025)
Who doesn’t like a book set at an east coast elite boarding school with a little murder thrown into the halls. Everyone loves Mr. Fox, the charming new English teacher. But when his car is found submerged in the swamp with unidentified body parts scattered in the woods, people begin to question his character, especially Detective Horace Zwender. Disturbing relationship patterns begin to emerge. A classic victim verses predator, psychological thriller where the limits of revenge against evil is called into question. Oats illustrates the spiraling path of innocence to criminal like no other.
Literary Horror or Native American Gothic
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (2025)
Jones’ collection of novels and short stories dates back to 2000, but in the last five years his “final-girl” slasher works have gained wide appeal. A member of the Blackfeet tribe, he uses mythology, magical realism and native symbolism to create an atmosphere within his writing that is transformative, as in while reading you may forget you’re sitting in your comfortable home as a sense of foreboding permeates the air. This historical novel follows the life of Good Stab, a Blackfeet Indian as he seeks justice on the Montana plains in 1912 following a massacre of 217 Blackfeet. Jones also uses irony and dark humor to acknowledge and bring to light uncomfortable themes of racism and cultural blindness.
Graphic Horror
From Hell : Being a Melodrama in Six Parts by Alan Moore (1999)
Set in Whitechaple, the poor neighborhood in London where serial killer Jack the Ripper took the lives of at least five women in the fall of 1888, From Hell follows the theory the murders were part of a conspiracy to cover up the birth of an illegitimate royal child fathered by Prince Albert Victor. There is a high level of Victorian creepiness in the text and especially in the illustrations. The black and white drawings evoke desperation and evil born from privilege and the occult (there’s a touch of Freemason weirdness). While the Queen wields power, most women are rendered oppressively without agency, giving the reader a disquieting feeling of witnessing misogyny at its most brutal expression. There’s a lot in this story, including ideas about all time being concurrent and societal responsibility for individual crime. If you pick this one up, give yourself time to digest it in its entirety.