November is National Native American Heritage Month. To celebrate at Mizzou Libraries, we’ve curated a list of books with the help of Mizzou’s Four Directions. Thank you to Four Directions for taking the time to share your expertise and recommendations.

Below are a few we have available for check out. You can view the whole list of book recommendations here.

Interested in more than books? Four Directions has compiled a list of resources including podcasts, articles, blogs, etc.

Have a purchase recommendation? Use our book recommendation form.

Rez Metal : Inside the Navajo Nation Heavy Metal Scene

Rez Metal captures the creative energy of Indigenous youth culture in the twenty-first century. Bridging communities from disparate corners of Indian Country and across generations, heavy metal has touched a collective nerve on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona in particular. Many cultural leaders—including former Navajo president Russell Begaye—have begun to recognize heavy metal’s ability to inspire Navajo communities facing chronic challenges such as poverty, depression, and addiction. Heavy metal music speaks to the frustrations, fears, trials, and hopes of living in Indian Country.

My grandfather’s knocking sticks : Ojibwe family life and labor on the reservation

Child uses her grandparents’ story as a gateway into discussion of various kinds of labor and survival in Great Lakes Ojibwe communities, from traditional ricing to opportunistic bootlegging, from healing dances to sustainable fishing. The result is a portrait of daily work and family life on reservations in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hollywood’s Indian : the portrayal of the Native American in film

The bloodthirsty savage, whooping and screaming and eager to scalp any white man who dared travel west, has been a staple of film since the earliest days of the medium. More recently, Native Americans have frequently been portrayed as environmentally aware, unburdened by the trappings of modern life, with much to teach whites. In this collection of essays, seventeen scholars explore the changing depictions of Hollywood’s Indian and how those representations have reflected larger changes in American society Offering both in-depth analyses of specific films and overviews of the industry’s output, from The Vanishing American (1926) to The Indian in the Cupboard (1995), Hollywood’s Indian provides insightful characterizations of the depiction of Native Americans in film. Taken as a whole the volume explores the many ways in which these portrayals have made an impact on our collective cultural life.

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Tiffany Midge 

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she doesn’t like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege.

3November is National Native American Heritage Month. To celebrate at Mizzou Libraries, we’ve curated a list of books with the help of Mizzou’s Four Directions. Thank you to Four Directions for taking the time to share your expertise and recommendations.

Below are a few we have available for check out. You can view the whole list of book recommendations here.

Interested in more than books? Four Directions has compiled a list of resources including podcasts, articles, blogs, etc.

Have a purchase recommendation? Use our book recommendation form.

The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen Hardcover, Sean Sherman

Here is real food—our indigenous American fruits and vegetables, the wild and foraged ingredients, game and fish. Locally sourced, seasonal, “clean” ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy.

2018 James Beard Award Winner: Best American Cookbook

Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity. The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Grace Dillon 

In this first-ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction Grace Dillon collects some of the finest examples of the craft with contributions by Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors. The collection includes seminal authors such as Gerald Vizenor, historically important contributions often categorized as “magical realism” by authors like Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie, and authors more recognizable to science fiction fans like William Sanders and Stephen Graham Jones. Dillon’s engaging introduction situates the pieces in the larger context of science fiction and its conventions.

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Tiffany Midge 

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge’s musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, standalone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she doesn’t like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege.

Bad Indians, Deborah Miranda

This beautiful and devastating book—part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir—should be required reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

June is Pride Month and to help celebrate this month of love and acceptance, here are some books available at Mizzou Libraries that tell stories of triumphs and struggles of the LGBTQ community.

These are just a few recommendations, so be sure to search the library catalog to see what else we have.

Have book recommendation? Let us know here.

For the Fiction Fans:

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan 

This is the story of Paul, a sophomore at a high school like no other: The cheerleaders ride Harleys, the homecoming queen used to be a guy named Daryl (she now prefers Infinite Darlene and is also the star quarterback), and the gay-straight alliance was formed to help the straight kids learn how to dance. When Paul meets Noah, he thinks he’s found the one his heart is made for. Until he blows it. The school bookie says the odds are 12-to-1 against him getting Noah back, but Paul’s not giving up without playing his love really loud. His best friend Joni might be drifting away, his other best friend Tony might be dealing with ultra-religious parents, and his ex-boyfriend Kyle might not be going away anytime soon, but sometimes everything needs to fall apart before it can really fit together right. This is a happy-meaningful romantic comedy about finding love, losing love, and doing what it takes to get love back in a crazy-wonderful world.

http://merlin.lib.umsystem.edu/record=b5027477~S1

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong 

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father. Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the “Fun Home.” It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail. More recently, this memoir was turned into a Tony award winning musical and you can check out the book and lyrics as well.

http://merlin.lib.umsystem.edu/record=b7753395~S1

For the Non-Fiction Fans

Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton 

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives–ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials–early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films–Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

http://merlin.lib.umsystem.edu/record=b12124869~S1

A Queer History of the United States for Young People by Michael Bronski; Richie Chevat