Indigenous Writers

As a leading researcher in the field of biology, Robin Wall Kimmerer understands the delicate state of our world. But as an active member of the Potawatomi nation, she senses and relates to the world through a way of knowing far older than any science. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she intertwines these two modes of awareness--the analytic and the emotional, the scientific and the cultural--to ultimately reveal a path toward healing the rift that grows between people and nature. The woven essays that construct this book bring people back into conversation with all that is green and growing; a universe that never stopped speaking to us, even when we forgot how to listen.

With the rise of urban living and the digital age, many North American healers are recognizing that traditional medicinal knowledge must be recorded before being lost with its elders. A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle is a historic document, including nearly 200 color photos and maps, in that it is the first in which a native healer has agreed to open his medicine bundle to share in writing his repertoire of herbal medicines and where they are found. Providing information on and photos of medicinal plants and where to harvest them, anthropologist David E. Young and botanist Robert D. Rogers chronicle the life, beliefs, and healing practices of Medicine Man Russell Willier in his native Alberta, Canada. Despite being criticized for sharing his knowledge, Willier later found support in other healers as they began to realize the danger that much of their traditional practices could die out with them.

With Young and Rogers, Willier offers his practices here for future generations. At once a study and a guide, A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle touches on how indigenous healing practices can be used to complement mainstream medicine, improve the treatment of chronic diseases, and lower the cost of healthcare. The authors discuss how mining, agriculture, and forestry are threatening the continued existence of valuable wild medicinal plants and the role of alternative healers in a modern health care system. Sure to be of interest to ethnobotanists, medicine hunters, naturopaths, complementary and alternative health practitioners, ethnologists, anthropologists, and academics, this book will also find an audience with those interested in indigenous cultures and traditions.

Smudging is the burning of herbs as a spiritual practice. In this revised edition of her book on smudging, the author explains and illustrates this integral part of traditional Native American life. She also offers advice on how to reclaim traditions and find personal healing rituals.

A personal story of Black Elk and the teachings woven into the narrative. Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota elder and shaman, was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. He traveled widely throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, addressing large groups and conducting healing ceremonies. 

"An unprecedented account of the shaman's world and the way it is entered." -Stanley Krippner, PHD., coauthor of Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self and Healing States

"Hogan remains awed and humble in this sweetly embracing, plangent book of grateful, sorrowful, tender poems wed to the scarred body and ravaged Earth."
—BOOKLIST

"In this new collection, Linda Hogan weaves together memory, the Milky Way, buffalo and rivers with the wonder and wisdom of an ancient soul, and a passionate heart. We are blessed, once again, by her words."
-- DEBORAH A. MIRANDA, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Linda Hogan explores new and old ways of experiencing the vagaries of the body and existing in harmony with earth's living beings in A History of Kindness. Throughout this clear-eyed collection, Hogan tenderly excavates how history instructs the present, and envisions a future alive with hope for a healthy and sustainable world that now wavers between loss and survival.

Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day, such as environmental protection and human rights. Sharing the gifts she has received from elders around the world, Mitchell urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. For those seeking change, this book offers a set of cultural values that will preserve our collective survival for future generations.

Using beautiful storytelling to relay traditional tales passed down through the generations, Marshall once again takes the reader on a journey of growth and inspiration. Each chapter presents one story that exemplifies a quality or way of life that will encourage in readers a sense of inner peace amidst the busyness of modern life. From the hunting adventures of the raven and the wolf, we see the importance of tolerance; the lessons of the grasshopper impart the wisdom of patience; and the experiences of a young man named Walks Alone teach us about silence and turning within.

Speaking to these and other universal qualities, such as faith and selflessness, Marshall gives readers insight into their own lives using tales from the past interspersed with stories from his own life growing up on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In him, we see a clear example of the wisdom of history enhancing the state of the current world. This magnificent work will give readers an insider's view of the Lakota people while providing universal lessons to enrich life.

Plants of Power is a guide to sacred plants traditionally used by Native Americans and other Indigenous people. It's an excellent tool for those seeking to connect more fully with the mysterious world of plants, animals and Spirit. For thousands of years Native cultures have used plants to heal physical and spiritual ailments. Highlighted here are 14 significant plants, with information on their properties, growing conditions and medicinal applications, along with descriptions of Native American ceremonies and rituals in which these plants play a central role.

Alfred Savinelli has wildcrafted plants for almost 40 years and is part of a network of Native American wildcrafters from Canada to South America. An active defender of plant rights and Indigenous wisdom, he seeks to promote health and well-being through spiritual harmony. His shop, Native Scents, sells herbal products and related items and sponsors a Native Prisoners Support program that provides prisons with herbs for religious ceremonies. He lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained.

Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

Activating the Heart is an exploration of storytelling as a tool for knowledge production and sharing to build new connections between people and their histories, environments, and cultural geographies. The collection pays particular attention to the significance of storytelling in Indigenous knowledge frameworks and extends into other ways of knowing in works where scholars have embraced narrative and story as a part of their research approach.

In the first section, Storytelling to Understand, authors draw on both theoretical and empirical work to examine storytelling as a way of knowing. In the second section, Storytelling to Share, authors demonstrate the power of stories to share knowledge and convey significant lessons, as well as to engage different audiences in knowledge exchange. The third section, Storytelling to Create, contains three poems and a short story that engage with storytelling as a means to produce or create knowledge, particularly through explorations of relationship to place.

One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. A member of the Kiowa tribe, Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, and grew up on Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo reservations throughout the Southwest. It is a part of the earth he knows well and loves deeply.

In Earth Keeper, he reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people. “When I think about my life and the lives of my ancestors," he writes, "I am inevitably led to the conviction that I, and they, belong to the American land. This is a declaration of belonging. And it is an offering to the earth.”  

In this wise and wonderous work, Momaday shares stories and memories throughout his life, stories that have been passed down through generations, stories that reveal a profound spiritual connection to the American landscape and reverence for the natural world. He offers an homage and a warning. He shows us that the earth is a sacred place of wonder and beauty, a source of strength and healing that must be honored and protected before it’s too late. As he so eloquently and simply reminds us, we must all be keepers of the earth.

A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From the remote community of her childhood to the larger urban centers she later called home, Chacaby experienced abuse, addiction, racism, homophobia, and homelessness. Eventually, with the right support and drawing on her grandmother's teachings for strength, she emerged from those experiences grounded in faith, compassion, humor, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

Long before it came to be known as Duluth, the land at the western tip of Lake Superior was known to the Ojibwe as Onigamiising, "the place of the small portage." There the Ojibwe lived in keeping with the seasons, moving among different camps for hunting and fishing, for cultivating and gathering, for harvesting wild rice and maple sugar. In Onigamiising Linda LeGarde Grover accompanies us through this cycle of the seasons, one year in a lifelong journey on the path to Mino Bimaadiziwin, the living of a good life.

In fifty short essays, Grover reflects on the spiritual beliefs and everyday practices that carry the Ojibwe through the year and connect them to this northern land of rugged splendor. As the four seasons unfold--from Ziigwan (Spring) through Niibin and Dagwaagin to the silent, snowy promise of Biboon--the award-winning author writes eloquently of the landscape and the weather, work and play, ceremony and tradition and family ways, from the homey moments shared over meals to the celebrations that mark life's great events. Now a grandmother, a Nokomis, beginning the fourth season of her life, Grover draws on a wealth of stories and knowledge accumulated over the years to evoke the Ojibwe experience of Onigamiising, past and present, for all time.

First published in 1972, Vine Deloria Jr.'s God Is Red remains the seminal work on Native religious views, asking new questions about our species and our ultimate fate. Celebrating three decades in publication with a special 30th-anniversary edition, this classic work reminds us to learn "that we are a part of nature, not a transcendent species with no responsibilities to the natural world." It is time again to listen to Vine Deloria Jr.'s powerful voice, telling us about religious life that is independent of Christianity and that reveres the interconnectedness of all living things.

Difficulties are a part of life but so is the wisdom that helps us overcome them. On Keep Going, Lakota elder and award-winning storyteller Joseph M. Marshall III offers the unique perspective of his people to remind us that the most important and enduring lessons come through the power of perseverance. In this original author adaptation, Marshall shares with heartwarming understanding and moving insight stories that stretch back across generations through the Lakota oral tradition. Whether you re currently involved in a challenging situation or simply in need of a voice of encouragement, Keep Going will inspire each and every step along the path ahead of you.

"We want to live as if there is no other place," Hogan tells us, "as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life." In offering praise to sky, earth, water, and animals, she calls us to witness how each living thing is alive in a conscious world with its own integrity, grace, and dignity. In Dwellings, Hogan takes us on a spiritual quest borne out of the deep past and offers a more hopeful future as she seeks new visions and lights ancient fires.