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North American Indian Cooking by Beverly Cox

The reissued James Beard and IACP award winner Spirit of the Harvest brings authentic Native American recipes into the modern home kitchen. This carefully researched cookbook presents 150 recipes from across the United States, incorporating many indigenous ingredients and traditional dishes from the Cherokee, Chippewa, Navajo, Sioux, Mohegan, Iroquois, Comanche, Hopi, and many other North American tribes. Each chapter is introduced by an expert on the region and discusses the cultures of major tribal groups, their diets, their ceremonial use of food, and the historic dishes they developed. Spirit of the Harvest celebrates the many cooking traditions that have stood the test of time and are still very much alive today.

Praise for Spirit of the Harvest:

“Those readers who are unfamiliar with the amazing natural bounty of food that this country provides . . . are in for a real surprise.”
 —Spirituality and Health

“Most of us have scant knowledge about what might be called the original American cuisine. Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs offer the book to right that wrong.”
–Today’s Diet and Nutrition

Find it here.

An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry

Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.

This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project, including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others, to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.

Find it here.

Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorell

Twelve Native American kids present historical and contemporary laws, policies, struggles, and victories in Native life, each with a powerful refrain: We are still here!

Too often, Native American history is treated as a finished chapter instead of relevant and ongoing. This companion book to the award-winning We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga offers readers everything they never learned in school about Native American people’s past, present, and future. Precise, lyrical writing presents topics including: forced assimilation (such as boarding schools), land allotment and Native tribal reorganization, termination (the US government not recognizing tribes as nations), Native urban relocation (from reservations), self-determination (tribal self-empowerment), Native civil rights, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), religious freedom, economic development (including casino development), Native language revival efforts, cultural persistence, and nationhood.

A 2022 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor Book
A 2022 Robert F. Sibert Honor Book

Find it here.

by Kevin Noble Maillard

Fry bread is food. It is warm and delicious, piled high on a plate. Fry bread is time. It brings families together for meals and new memories. Fry bread is nation. It might look or taste different, but it is still shared by many, from coast to coast and beyond. Fry bread is us. It is a celebration of old and new, traditional and modern, similarity and difference.

Find it n Juvenile Non-Fiction here.

by Traci Sorell

The Cherokee community is grateful for blessings and challenges that each season brings. This is modern Native American life as told by an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

The word otsaliheliga (oh-jah-LEE-hay-lee-gah) is used by members of the Cherokee Nation to express gratitude. Beginning in the fall with the new year and ending in summer, follow a full Cherokee year of celebrations and experiences. Written by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, this look at one group of Native Americans is appended with a glossary and the complete Cherokee syllabary, originally created by Sequoyah.

In this simple rhyming story from the author of Held in Love, a child says thank you for the gifts nature provides, from hazelnuts in the hedge to apples from the tree, eggs from the hens to milk from the cow. Eventually, the family has enough ingredients to make something special … a delicious apple cake!

Find it in Picture Books/J EASY CAS here.