When I was a young girl we would sit in a circle around a fire, the center as our hearth. The tall evergreens towered above us, swaying in the Northern prairie night sky, between thousands of tiny stars. My Mosom’s deep, ancient voice held the space as he told stories of our trickster, Wesakechak, and the dark spirit of the Witigo.
Us little ones, young Nehiyaw and Métis, would sit in awe and horror, unable to turn our ears down low. As a young Cree girl, this was the embodiment of storytelling. It was generational, sacred, amongst nature, and manifested ancient memory, as well as present and future memory. These teachings and philosophies are in my blood, which is exactly why when I sat down to write my memoir, Soft As Bones, I wove it together as a braided spiral. In my culture, circles are very important, as well as the spiral. It represents connectedness, and I was taught that we are connected to everything around us, everything that came before us, and everything that follows.
Soft As Bones is a memoir woven with my personal experiences, my parents’ and grandparents’ stories, colonial impact on our lineage, all blended together with ceremony, healing, and stories of Witigo and Wesakecahk. True to Indigenous storytelling, it is not just my personal memoir, it is collective—Soft As Bones is a microcosm for understanding intergenerational trauma, telling some of our shared histories and experiences, as well as generational healing and teachings for Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. It is a book that does not vilify, but instead captures the ambivalence and complexity of the range of human emotion and experience, especially the Indigenous experience.
Soft As Bones does not speak for all Indigenous experience, because we are not a homogeny. We are connected, but we are not all the same, but there is a common thread across Indian Country. As storytellers, we carry our lineages, ancestors, and the land with us. Here are seven books by Indigenous storytellers that embody, reckon with, and claim the past in order to reclaim the present, and pave the way for what is still to come.
The Sky Was Once A Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake
Drake’s debut poetry collection that won the National Poetry Series is a journey as much as a revelation, illuminating the terrain of Diné girlhood with grace and defiance. The Sky Was Once A Dark Blanket captures the Native experience of connection to language, land, and lineage all through the modern lens of what it means to be a young Diné woman existing in the modern world. From remembering Mildred Bailey, Native American Jazz singer, to water, Coyote, songs, and critiquing the influence of Kylie Jenner—The Sky Was Once A Dark Blanket embodies histories and preserves futures all at once.
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah Miranda
Miranda’s memoir is a collage of personal memory, tribal history, and archival fragments telling the stories of her Ohlone and Costanoan-Esselen family that creates a mosaic confronting California’s genocidal mission past. Deeply lyrical and intimate prose intentionally resists linear storytelling, embracing Indigenous storytelling and the non-linear way we are connected to our histories and future. Beyond that, her structure mirrors the disruption that Native communities experienced as a result of colonialism.
We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People by Nemonte Nenquimo
Nenquimo traces her journey from her childhood in the Amazon rainforest to becoming a powerful leader and activist for the Waorani people of Ecuador. This memoir is deeply rooted in oral tradition and ancestral teachings, while also challenging the violent history of colonialism, missionary intervention, and environmental destruction that has threatened our Indigenous ways of life. We Will Be Jaguars is fierce advocacy and spiritual resilience, reclaiming a future where Indigenous land stewardship is essential when looking towards the future, highlighting that protecting the Earth is inseparable from protecting Indigenous memory and presence.
Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot
Mailhot’s memoir pulses with raw emotion and literary fire. She tells her story in poetic fragments, diving into the complexities of mental health, love, and survival as a Native woman who grew up on Seabird Island in the aftermath of colonial violence. Heart Berries strips everything down to its inner emotional core, baring truths about pain and self-sovereignty with a voice of unwavering honesty. In writing herself whole, she makes space and claims it for Indigenous women to exist—truthful, messy, brilliant, complex, dynamic, and unapologetically alive.
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
Johns blends haunting memory and horror in Bad Cree, a novel that is equal parts page-turning and cultural meditation. Dreams and waking life begin to blur for the protagonist Mackenzie when she wakes up from a nightmare holding the head of a dead crow. This young Cree woman finds herself being pulled back to the land—and the unresolved grief of her family’s past. What emerges is a story of reconnection to language, kin, and ancestral magic and power. Johns’ novel shows that the act of remembering is not passive—it is transformative, and sometimes terrifying.
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec
Becoming Kin draws on Anishinaabe teachings, Christian history, and contemporary politics in order to confront the mythologies of settler colonialism with clarity and grace. This book asks the important question of what it would mean to truly live in kinship—with each other, the land, and the past. Krawec blends her personal memories and storytelling with activism, offering the reader a roadmap for decolonial healing rooted in honesty and accountability. Becoming Kin is a powerful invitation to examine the stories we inherit and the systems we live within.
Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Simpson’s Theory of Water embodies the sacred teachings of water for Indigenous people across Turtle Island. This book explores water like the constellations in the night sky, non-linear, but fully connected and part of the same system all rooted in Nishnaabe thought. Theory of Water envisions paths forward that honor ancestral wisdom while disrupting colonial frameworks, all through personal memory, cultural history, alongside the work of other influential artists and writers. Simpson invites readers to reconsider time, relationality, and governance through Indigenous paradigms—it is visionary, poetic, and deeply rooted in land and love.