Reading List: Native American Heritage Month

As part of our calendar celebrating national heritage months and observances, explore these selected works that speak to Native American history and heritage.

The Common has worked with translators Loren Goodman and Michael Bazzett to publish in English several poems by Humberto Ak’abal (1952 – 2019), a poet of K’iche’ Maya ethnicity, who was born in Momostenango, Guatemala.
Ilan Stavan’s new retelling of the Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl brings this Aztec philosopher’s 15th-century poetry from the Nahuatl to English, ridding it of the Christian motifs and colonial influences that have been cast onto other versions of the text.
Mary Leauna Christensen’s “Para” weighs naturalness against preservation and pressure against identity, as she arranges the funeral of her grandmother and the return of her body to Cherokee.
Explore the poetry of longtime contributor Ron Welburn (Gingaskin Cherokee and Assateague descendant), including “Seeing in the Dark” from Issue 06, “Always Know” from Issue 19, and our November 2019 poetry feature, as well as an interview with Welburn on the emergence of Native American literature.
In “A Ceremony for Yellow House,” Kabl Wilkerson (Citizen Band Potawatomi) embarks on a journey in West Texas to honor twenty-one Comanche-Apache who were murdered by settlers in 1877.
Cherokee writer and novelist Brandon Hobson writes about cycles of addiction, violence, and the complexities of finding home in an excerpt from his book, Where the Dead Sit Talking, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.
Poems from Spawn by Marie-Andrée Gill; translator Kristen Renee Miller notes, “In Gill’s Mashteuiatsh community in Quebec, the native language of Ilnu-aimun is spoken as a first language by about seventeen percent of residents, French by eighty percent. It’s no surprise, then, that Spawn, published originally in French, is a text acutely aware of its existence discomfort within a settler language.”
Princess Ixkik’ by Ilan Stavans is a retelling from the Popol Vuh, a popular creation story in indigenous Latin America, rooted in Mayan oral tradition.
Through the archival images in “On and Off the Map” (Issue 03), Michael Kelly examines whose stories are told – and by whom – and how Native peoples were erased from early colonial maps.
In the studio feature “Words Often Unheard,” Stephanie Sosa interviews archivist Michael Kelly and scholars Lisa Brooks and Kiara Vigil about a collection of books by Native American Indian authors at Frost Library.