American history has a bad habit of beginning the story too late. We tend to start with Columbus, Jamestown, or Plymouth Rock, as though the history of the continent were merely a prelude to the arrival of Europeans. But the Americas were hardly an empty stage awaiting their leading actors. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples built complex societies, established trade networks, developed sophisticated agricultural systems, waged wars, forged alliances, and created cultures as varied as the landscapes they inhabited. The arrival of Europeans did not introduce history to the Americas. It introduced a collision of worlds—with consequences that Native Americans are still living with today.
November is Native American Heritage Month, a good excuse to revisit a history too often reduced to a handful of familiar episodes: Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, the Trail of Tears, Little Bighorn, and perhaps a few obligatory paragraphs about reservations. The real story is considerably more complicated—and often more uncomfortable. It is a story of conquest and survival, broken treaties and shifting alliances, cultural destruction and cultural persistence. It is also a story of Native peoples who were never merely passive victims of events, but historical actors who fought, negotiated, adapted, resisted, and endured. The books featured here offer opportunities to move beyond the familiar mythology, question some comfortable assumptions, and explore the Indigenous experience as an essential part of American history—not a footnote to it.
Here are Native American themed books that I've read over the last year or so.
The Lost Cities of El Norte: Coronado's Quest, the Unconquered West, and the Birth of American Indian Resistance. Peter Stark. Mariner Books, 2026. 432 pages.
In 1540, Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado led the largest overland expeditionary force to ever march in the Americas, consisting of about 375 Europeans, up to 1,300 Indian allies, several hundred servants, and 1,500 horses. They set out from Mexico City, formerly the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and moved north into "El Norte Misterioso," The Mysterious North, determined to find the fabled golden cities of Cibola to enrich and to glorify both their King and themselves. Coronado and his people traversed 2,500 miles of unmapped terrain, ranging across the present-day U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Kansas. They were the first Europeans to gaze upon the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains; made first contact with the Puebloan peoples; crossed the Sonoran Desert and the Great Plains, where they encountered endless herds of bison and the nomadic tribes who followed them. Unfortunately, they discovered no cities of gold, meeting only with hardships and resistance. Two years later, Coronado led a bedraggled and beaten group of 100 hangers-on, some clad only in animal skins and many with permanently damaged bodies, as they hobbled back into Mexico City. Coronado himself was reduced to being carried in a litter, having suffered serious injuries, perhaps some brain damage. On his return, he was promptly arrested and charged with abusing the Indians that he encountered - breaking the relatively new orders from the King demanding more humane treatment, failures in leadership, and ultimately the failure to push on to complete his mission to find wealth. Peter Stark has written a riveting account of the expedition and its impact on the American West.
Xolo. Donna Barba Higuera and Mariana Ruiz Johnson. Levine Querido, release date November 4 2025. 224 pages. Ages 7-10.
I bought a copy of this book to read during a break at the Southern Festival of Books this past weekend, and it proved to be a great discovery. I wish I had attended the author's session. It's a beautifully illustrated children's story of Aztec mythology. Aztec creator and feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl had a dog-headed twin brother, a hideous monster, named Xolotl. Shunned and denigrated by his brother and the other gods, Xolotl struggles to find himself and his function in the realm of the gods. Of course, he becomes the hero, rescuing mankind from extinction and becoming the powerful Lord of the Underworld, In the process, he creates dogs as humanity's most loyal and devoted companions. If there's a child in your life that is interested in other cultures, mythology, and art, especially a child who love dogs, this book will be a huge hit. And if there is not such a child in your life, get a copy for yourself. You'll love it.
Gods of Jade and Shadow. Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Del Rey, 2019. 352 pages.
Imagine Cinderella set in Jazz Age Mexico, and you've imagined the kernel at the heart of this story, with one big difference: the Fairy Godmother in this story is actually the Mayan God of Death, Hun-Kame. Casiopea Tun and her mother live in her wealthy grandfather's house in the Yucatan, near the state capital of Merida. Because her mother had married and been widowed by a Mayan commoner beneath her social status, thereby disgracing the family, they were treated like servants by her grandfather and the rest of the family, forced to serve and clean, but Casiopea has dreams of escaping the mundane drudgery. Left alone one day while the rest of the family was on an outing, she opens a locked chest in her grandfather's room, accidentally releasing Hun-Kame from imprisonment and initiating a link between herself and the god that would transform her life. Hun-Kame had been overthrown by his twin brother, with the help of Casiopea's grandfather, and imprisoned for eternity in the chest, minus a few particular possessions and body parts which were required for him to retake his rightful place as Lord of the Underworld. Hum-Kame and Casiopea were now joined, and together they set out on a quest that will take them across Mexico to recover those objects and to eventually defeat the evil usurper and resume his reign. Along the way, they meet and contend with various Mayan spirits and mythical figures seeking to thwart their quest. They are also in a race against time since both are weakening as time passes- Hun-Kame is literally draining life from Casiopea, not only gaining the strength required to remain active in the human world, but also becoming more and more mortal in the process. Finally, Casiopea must defeat her arrogant cousin Martin in a life and death race that will determine the true ruler of the Underworld. This was a fun blend of mythology, magical realism, and historical fiction.
There There. Tommy Orange. Knopf, 2018. 304 pages.
This novel has gotten a huge amount of attention since its publication, and reviewers have raved about it. I was moved to pick it up after I saw an Instagram book influencer ( @vestcody ) call it a modern day Canterbury Tales and include it in a list of modern replacements for classics commonly taught in high school. I read it in two sittings, and I was blown away. It definitely deserves the hype, and I look forward to reading Orange's follow-up.
There There absolutely lives up to the Canterbury comparison, in both structure and quality, and it will be hailed as a classic for years to come. Chaucer's Canterbury, generally considered unfinished, introduces some thirty characters, pilgrims on their way to visit the shrine to Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, but only 24 tales were completed. In There There, a dozen "Urban Indians" in Oakland, California all have their seemingly disparate lives converge at the Big Oakland Powwow, a huge annual event that draws indigenous dancers, vendors, and attendees from throughout the Americas. Each character has his or her own issues, arising from drugs, alcohol, domestic abuse, and other issues centering on identity that are found throughout the Native American community. Their lives all intersect on that fateful day at the Powwow. As author James Baldwin wrote, "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." Orange captures that sentiment perfectly. I recommend this book to all readers.
Wandering Stars. Tommy Orange. Vintage, 2024. 337 pages.
Wandering Stars is Orange's second novel, his follow-up to the destined-to-be-a-classic There There. It does not disappoint, and it confirms that Orange is a truly gifted writer. It is both a prequel and a sequel to There There, focusing on the family of Opal Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather and their three grandsons/grand-nephews as they deal with the aftereffects of the climax event that occurred a few months earlier at the Big Oakland Powwow, They are also dealing with the effects of generational trauma, trauma which has been passed down through four generations of their family. Their ancestors' lives have echoed throughout their own lives, even when they didn't know it. That trauma starts with Jude Star, a boy survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. At Sand Creek, a Colorado militia unit attacked and slaughtered approximately 230 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly women and children. The militiamen then took "trophies" of their "victory" - scalps, ears, noses, digits, breasts, and genitals - back to Denver where they were put on display for crowds of paying gawkers. His son Charles endured abuse at the Carlisle Indian School, where the idea was to "save the man by killing the Indian inside." Following his escape from Carlisle, Charles had a relationship with Opal Viola Bear Shield, the namesake of the present-day Opal. The whole line grapples with addiction and questions of identity, identity in various senses: personal identity, family relationships, and ethnic identity -what does it mean to be a 21st century Indian?
Wandering Stars is challenging. It can be depressing. There's not a lot of real "action." The book jumps between times, narrators, and voices. Often, the narrating character interprets things said to him/her in a dozen different ways in his/her head; it sometimes made me wonder if I hear and take things said to me far too literally. Maybe I don't have enough internal dialogues during conversations. For its faults - if they are faults - it is still a moving and impactful read.
Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. Sam Kean. Little, Brown and Company, 2025. 464 pages.
I'm a fan of Sam Kean's podcast, "The Disappearing Spoon," and all of his books. He tells great, little-known stories that blend history and science. His most recent book is one of his best and one of my favorite reads so far this year. In it, he explores the field of experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeologists are not content to study documents and artifacts. They seek to experience life as the people of the past did, and they carry out controlled, scientific experiments designed to replicate ancient human behavior and lifestyles, all in hopes of answering the questions that simply analyzing artifacts can't answer. Some traditional archaeologists look down on the field and consider it frivolous or sensationalistic.
Kean seeks out the experts and learns the skills that they study. He learns and practices mummification, hide tanning, trepanation (skull surgery), flint knapping, beer brewing, open ocean navigation, Roman roadbuilding, and ancient tattooing among other skills. He learns to cook and eat ancient foods including ostrich eggs, guinea pigs, walrus, acorn bread, and various insects. He plays the ancient Aztec ball game and learns how to build and fire a giant trebuchet (a medieval siege sling weapon). He relates these experiences with great deference and respect for his teachers, who are - not surprisingly - extremely interesting and unique people, and he incorporates lots of humor, often at his own expense. (I really wish he had made a video series of each chapter. I think it would be a huge streaming hit.) But wait - there's more! Each chapter also includes a gripping short story that immerses the reader in each culture that he addresses. This is a must-read book for people who love history!
Old School Indian. Aaron John Curtis. Hillman Grad Books, 2025. 352 pages.
Abe Jacobs is a Mohawk Indian who left the reservation at eighteen to go to Syracuse University. There, he met his future wife Alex, and they moved to Miami where she became an elementary school teacher, and he became a clerk in book store with dreams of being a writer. Their relationship is wild, unconventional, passionate, and open, and Abe has lost touch with his Mohawk identity. At age 43, he develops an extremely rare autoimmune disorder that his Miami doctors say is basically untreatable and terminal. Running from his illness and troubled marriage, Abe returns to the Rez and his family. He reconnects with tradition, his Mohawk identity, and himself in what's described as a "coming-of-middle-age" story that deals with family and the deeply embedded ripple effects of history and culture. It's also irreverent, funny, and innovative. Like There, There by Tommy Orange, I think it's destined to be a modern classic. If college professors taught novels anymore, I could see it added to required class reading lists. I would say the same for high school reading lists, except that it is pretty sexually explicit. It's a great book club selection, and a great novel.
The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America's Forgotten War. Jamie Holmes. Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2026. 320 pages.
When Florida became a state in 1845, it was probably the most dangerous, least populated, and least explored state in the Union. White settlers were deterred by heat, hurricane, insects, swamps, bears, wolves, panthers, venomous snakes, and disease. The interior of the state was largely terra incognita - unknown and frightening for white pioneers. Meanwhile, the Seminoles and the Miccosukees survived and struggled to maintain their independence and their culture, The federal government policy of removing eastern Indians to Oklahoma Territory threatened that. In 1835, that threat boiled over into the Second Seminole War which continued until 1842, making it America's longest war until Vietnam. It also ranks as the most expensive, and one of the deadliest and most destructive of the Indian Wars. When it was over, much of the white development in the territory had been destroyed and most of the Seminoles had been forcibly removed to Oklahoma, but a few Seminoles and Miccosukees survived and remain to this day. Jamie Holmes has written a new history of the war, focusing on Osceola the famous warrior leader, and the lesser known Abraham, the Black Seminole leader and interpreter who played very prominent role. It's a solid history of the war, although I wouldn't call it revolutionary, but it does a really good job of telling the story of the Black Seminoles. However, I am deducting a star from my rating for the ridiculous use of the phrase "forced labor camps" instead of plantations.
Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier. Robert G. Parkinson. W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. 480 pages.
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the gold standard when it comes to searing critiques of European imperialism and colonialism in Africa around the turn of the 20th century. Charles Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Mr. Kurtz, revealing large scale brutality, repression, and racism in the process. Here, Parkinson deftly uses Conrad's novella as a starting point for an exploration of the colonial American frontier in the 18th century, viewed through the lives and actions of members of two families who were at the center of the efforts to colonize the Ohio River Valley. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen - the very word "frontiersman" may have been coined to refer to Thomas Cresap, the patriarch, also nicknamed "the Maryland Monster" - who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. From the 1730s, when Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies literally fought each other for control of the Ohio Valley, through the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, these two families were involved in, and linked to, horrific acts of carnage and destruction that were discussed throughout the colonies and in Britain. Parkinson not only demonstrates how the frontier shaped the American nation, but also shaped new interpretations of race and citizenship, and he also reveals how reputations, legacies, and heroic status are constantly changing.
Theodore de Bry: The New World. 45th Ed. Larry E, Tise and Michiel van Groesen. TASCHEN, 2026. 480 pages.
Flemish engraver and printer Theodore de Bry started publishing his series of books on the Americas in 1590. Over the next several decades, he and his sons published thirteen volumes from their Frankfurt publishing house. The New World was entirely new and unknown to Europeans at the time, and in fact, to the de Bry family themselves; none of them ever traveled far from their home, let alone to the Americas. Instead, they used their groundbreaking colored copperplate engraving technique to reproduce drawings and watercolors made by the real explorers, men like Roanoke governor John White and Jacques le Moyne, the French artist who accompanied the doomed Fort Caroline expedition, supplemented with texts written by men like Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Thomas Herriot, Girolamo Benzoni, and various Spanish conquistadors. The de Brys also added healthy doses of their own imaginations to both the art and to the narratives. The volumes were published in various languages, and the text was massaged to be more palatable to particular audiences, emphasizing Spanish (i.e. Catholic) brutality for Protestant England and northern Europe or glorifying Spanish accomplishments for Catholic southern Europe, for example. The original books became a sensation despite their extravagant costs, and they shaped European attitudes toward the New World for centuries. I used several of the illustrations in my American history classes to discuss historical perspectives and how to "do" history. This volume reproduces over 200 of the original engravings, along with text and with excellent commentary on the illustrations and the truths behind them, and if you are familiar with the publisher Taschen, you know that it's done well. I will be taking a long time to absorb this book, as I pore over each illustration and each paragraph to take it all in.
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Ned Blackhawk. Yale University Press, 2023. 616 pages.
This is a phenomenal book that very nearly achieves its author's incredibly lofty goal: to reshape and reset American history by recognizing that Native Americans and government policy toward Native Americans have been essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. It is destined to become a classic, and it would easily be a 5 out of 5 read for me, except there is one glaring factual error that I think is beneath a Yale University history professor and his editor(s). (He refers to Henry Knox as "the future Secretary of State." He was the first Secretary of War, never State.) But otherwise, it is an incredibly informative retelling of American history from the Native American perspective, an overview painted in broad strokes and covering five centuries. Native Americans and government policy toward them have been both affected by and have affected every major period and event in American history. It is a suitable companion to Dee Brown's iconic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I highly recommend it.
Finally, here's proof that one's taste in books is extremely subjective, and it's perfectly fine that you don't love the same books that everyone else loves:
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Stephen Graham Jones. S & S/Saga Press, 2025. 448 pages.
Stephen Graham Jones is apparently a very successful writer of western horror fiction, lauded by authors like Stephen King and Tommy Orange and often compared to Cormac McCarthy, but I had never heard of him until his newest book appeared everywhere, including on practically every "Best of 2025" list that I saw. A diary written by a Lutheran minister in Montana in 1912 is discovered and examined by an academic who happens to be his direct descendant. The minister recounts stories told to him by a Blackfoot Indian named Good Stab, stories of a flesh-eating, blood-sucking supernatural vampire roaming the plains out for revenge. What's not to like, right? It's my first Did Not Finish of the year, after about a fifth of the way through. It is - incredibly - mind numbingly BORING. First of all, it's a story within a story within a story, so there is a huge gulf between the reader and the "action." Secondly, the language is stilted and tedious. The creature doesn't just attack and eat animals, it eats "big mouths," "little mouths," "prairie runners," "whitehorns," "blackhorns," "long legs," "dirty faces," "moving shadows," and "wags-his-tails." What? What's that? Huh? Finally, its pace is not slow; it's plodding and ponderous, a real slog. Multiple times, I realized that the creature was eating, and I thought "Wait, what happened?" I see references in reviews and summaries to extreme violence and gore and found myself in the middle or at the end of such scenes without knowing how I got there. This is a terrible book, at least for me.
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