Celebrating Indigenous North American Life and Contributions…with Kidlit!

In my eyes, there’s nothing like an exquisitely written piece of children’s nonfiction in its ability to teach things and light a fire in a young mind to learn more. Sorry textbooks, you just don’t cut the mustard in this regard!

Today’s kids need informational texts that are vibrant and nuanced in their voice and style. They need to feel the emotional weight of the subject matter and be able to relate to it on a personal level.

The big kid that is me has been feasting on many (read: MANY…it’s been wonderful, but I’m exhausted!) new nonfiction books as a Round 1 Judge for the 2023 Cybils Award for Nonfiction. If you’re not familiar with the Cybils Awards, you can check out their official website and read this post I wrote last year.

We have SO MANY excellent books nominated and submitted this year that center around Indigenous North America and its peoples. These are BIPOC books that simply didn’t exist when I was a kid, but I get to read them now (big yay!). And while they can be enjoyed three hundred and sixty-five days a year, I thought it a particularly nice time to share them, since Indigenous Peoples’ Day was just last month, and Native American Heritage month is this month.

Please note that these are my own reviews on nominated and submitted books and not necessarily those of the Cybils judging panel.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in!

Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults by Robin Wall Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith, illustrations by Nicole Neidhardt (Zest Books)

Blending the science of nature with spirituality is not an easy undertaking, particularly for a book tailored to the young adult audience. Kimmerer (and Smith) do it in a way that is intuitive, but also groundbreaking. Kimmerer takes traditional shared stories from her Anishanaabe and Potawatomi tribal heritage and blends them with her own life experiences as an environmental scientist, daughter, mother, and Indigenous woman.

I enjoyed learning about her Indigenous approach to naming animals and natural elements with personal pronouns, and capitalizing their names in order to portray the spirits they embody. This would be a fabulous book for the high school classroom to learn more about Native American beliefs systems and cultural practices.

Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs (Crown Books for Young Readers)

This middle-grade historical book has a little bit of everything, for every kind of reader. It begins with a piece of historical fiction titled “When Life Was Our Own”, detailing the season-to-season life of a Wampanoag family and their local community before European contact.

The characters and their storylines are so well-developed that the reader forms a personal connection to the main character, Little Bird, and her beautiful family. I found it tender and wonderfully reminiscent of one of my favorite middle grade novels, National Book Award Finalist The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich, which also follows a young Ojibwe girl named Omakayas and her family over a period of time.

The story of Little Bird and her family weaves throughout the book, alternating with chapters of nonfiction Southern New England Indigenous history, written in the voice of Coombs herself, a historian from the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah. She speaks openly and honestly, including a plethora of thought-provoking discussion questions throughout, making it a valuable resource for an elementary classroom.

The juxtaposition of historical fiction chapters with expository nonfiction ones is powerful and eye-opening. I have not seen another history book for this age group that covers so much of the Indigenous perspective.

Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series by Traci Sorell, illustrated by Arigon Starr (Kokila)

This is an inspiring picture book biography about the fascinating lives of two of the greatest Native baseball players the world has ever seen: Charles Bender and John Meyers. The story details their rich and complicated early lives and careers, each marked by hardship, grit, and persistence in the face of racial adversity and poverty.

Written and illustrated in a journalistic fashion to model the sports newspaper articles of the time, readers learn about white society’s oppression of Native Americans and their culture during the late 1800s and early 1900s and how that impacted major league baseball. Bender and Meyers remain dignified and supportive of one another throughout, competing against each other in an exciting play-by-play fashion. There’s also an important takeaway I appreciated at the very end about the dishonor of Natives that still exists in the form of racist chants, signs, and mascots at sporting events.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer, adapted for young readers by Sheila Keenan (Viking)

Treuer’s personal mission for his book—to capture the vitality and spirit of Native American peoples, past and present, is eloquently expressed in his prologue and epilogue. Having grown up listening to sad stories of his ancestors’ defeats, he decided to change that narrative and tell different stories—ones that are inspiring and full of bravery, determination, and resilience. His author’s voice is amazing, and there is not enough room here to capture all the prolific statements he makes, but here is one of my favorites:
“The HOW of the telling shapes the WHAT. This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain. I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living.”

This is the young adult adaptation of his bestselling book that was a 2019 finalist for both the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. The chapters cover ancient history up through the present, with thoughtful themes such as “Moving on Up: 1945-1970” and “Becoming Indian: 1970-1980”. Treuer is a masterful storyteller, bringing the different historical eras to life with his vivid and at times, first-hand accounts and observations. Read this book and buy it for the teens in your life. They will be better off for having read it!

Indigenous Ingenuity by Deidre Havrelock & Edward Kay (Christy Ottaviano Books)

Having read acclaimed middle-grade novel The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich (mentioned earlier), I was familiar with some of the tools, structures, and advanced systems invented and utilized by Indigenous North America. That book solidified, for me, just how sophisticated and established Indigenous life was prior to European colonization. I was thrilled to discover this book, which makes a wonderful nonfiction companion to it (hint to elementary school teachers designing their classroom curriculum!).

Havrelock and Kay provide a well-written and organized account of many different STEM discoveries and inventions that we owe to Indigenous North America. This is a fascinating book to read straight through, but also wonderfully browsable by a wide variety of topics, ranging from transportation, to communication, to food technology, to fashion. And from serious to light-hearted: Native North Americans had bridges and aqueducts, but they also had whoopee cushions! The layout of this book is visually appealing and user-friendly, even for the most discriminating middle-grade reader.

This Indian Kid by Eddie Chuculate (Scholastic Focus)

This is the kind of YA memoir you relish from start to finish—one that makes you feel like you’ve just taken a cozy seat at Chuculate’s kitchen table to listen to him recount stories from his life. Set in Chuculate’s home state of Oklahoma during the 1970s and 80s, it’s honest and thoughtful, revealing important truths without trying too hard. I remember scenes from this book vividly, as if I were there with him—riding the bus to school, playing on the local sports teams, and navigating complicated family dynamics.

This is a book about growing up and living as a Native American, but in a slice-of-life, approachable way that has been hard to find historically in literature about Native Americans. This is Chuculate’s American story, and it’s also yours and mine. I enjoyed following his life trajectory from childhood to adolescence, as a budding sports journalist and future award-winning author. His humble, hopeful voice throughout gives this memoir a refreshing and rejuvenating spirit that is easy to love.

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I hope you’ll consider each of these books for your home, school, or classroom library. They illuminate an important part of North America’s past and present, shared through the eyes, hearts, and words of Indigenous peoples!

Please stay tuned for Laura Fineberg Cooper’s upcoming blog post on November 21^st. In addition to running and editing our amazing Writers’ Rumpus blog, she’s also a Cybil’s Award Round 1 Judge — for the YA Fiction category. Laura will be reviewing some riveting contemporary fiction she’s been reading, and you won’t want to miss it!