Library: What's on display at the Caltech Library?: Native American Heritage Month

National Native American Heritage Month is celebrated each year in November. It is a time to celebrate the traditions, languages, and stories of Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Island communities and ensure their rich histories and contributions continue to thrive with each passing generation. It is also a time to evaluate our pledge to maintain the meaningful partnerships we have with Tribal Nations and renew our commitment to our nation-to-nation relationships as we seek to ensure every community has a future they deserve. -National Park Service

Visit the Smithsonian's site honoring Native American Heritage Month for events, resources, podcasts, and exhibits.

The California Institute of Technology sits in the traditional territory and homeland of the Gabrielino Tongva people. The Gabrielino Tongva people are a state-recognized tribe and are working toward federal recognition. Tongva people still live in the Los Angeles area but are now a minority group on their own land. We are settlers and guests on this land, a land which had and continues to have significant connection to the Gabrielino Tongva tribe. The indigenous people of Los Angeles are still here despite ethnic cleansing, forcible removal, unrecognized sovereignty, and outright denial of their existence.

Caltech’s use of land is not limited to its Pasadena campus. Caltech conducts research around the world in facilities situated in traditional territories of indigenous people.

You can learn more about the traditional territory you are in at Native Land Digital. Learn more about creating a land acknowledgement here: Land Acknowledgement: You're on California Indian Land, Now What?

Land acknowledgements are just a first step in the healing process. The objective for many indigenous groups is restitution by returning land to indigenous political and economic control, also called “Land Back.” Learn more about Land Back at landback.org.

Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present by Adrienne Keene with illustrations by Ciara Sana
Publication Date: 2021

Celebrate the lives, stories, and contributions of Indigenous artists, activists, scientists, athletes, and other changemakers in this beautifully illustrated collection. From luminaries of the past, like nineteenth-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis - the first Black and Native American female artist to achieve international fame - to contemporary figures like linguist jessie little doe baird, who revived the Wampanoag language.
We Are Not a Vanishing People: The Society of American Indians, 1911–1923 by Thomas Constantine Maroukis
Publication Date: 2021

In 1911, a group of Native American intellectuals and activists joined together to establish the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization by Indians for Indians. It was the first such nationwide organization dedicated to reform. They used a strategy of protest and activism that carried into the rest of the twentieth century.
We Are the Land: A History of Native California by Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, Jr.
Publication Date: 2021

Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California.
Iwígara: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science by Enrique Salmón
Publication Date: 2020

The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same breath - known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwígara - has resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world, passed down for millennia by native cultures. Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón builds on this concept of connection and highlights 80 plants revered by North America’s indigenous peoples.
Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors by Denise Lajimodiere
Publication Date: 2019

Denise Lajimodiere's interest in American Indian boarding school survivors stories evolved from recording her father and other family members speaking of their experiences. Her research helped her to gain insight, a deeper understanding of her parents, and how and why she and her siblings were parented in the way they were.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability by Melissa K. Nelson and Daniel Shilling (Editors)
Publication Date: 2018

This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond.
There There: A Novel by Tommy Orange
Publication Date: 2018

Not since Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich has such a powerful and urgent Native American voice exploded onto the landscape of contemporary fiction. There There is a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.
California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History by William J. Bauer, Jr.
Publication Date: 2016

Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived. Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives.
An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 by Benjamin Madley
Publication Date: 2016

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publication Date: 2014

Acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology by Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen
Publication Date: 2013

In the first book ever published on Indigenous quantitative methodologies, Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen open up a major new approach to research across the disciplines and applied fields. While qualitative methods have been rigorously critiqued and reformulated, the population statistics relied on by virtually all research on Indigenous peoples continue to be taken for granted as straightforward, transparent numbers.
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson
Publication Date: 2005

M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended.
Native Universe: Voices of Indian America by Gerald McMaster and Clifford E. Trafzer (Editors)
Publication Date: 2004

This gorgeous volume draws from the vast archives of the National Museum of the American Indian and the voices of some of the most prominent Native American scholars, writers, activists and tribal leaders. With its insightful, firsthand prose, the book is a reminder that the ancient philosophies and folkways are just as valuable and relevant in today’s world as they were generations ago.

We Are the Land: A History of Native California by Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer
Publication Date: 2021

Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California.
Indigenous Languages and the Promise of Archives by Adrianna Link, Abigail Shelton, and Patrick Spero (Editors)
Publication Date: 2021

Indigenous Languages and the Promise of Archives captures the energy and optimism that many feel about the future of community-based scholarship, which involves the collaboration of archives, scholars, and Native American communities. The American Philosophical Society is exploring new applications of materials in its library to partner on collaborative projects that assist the cultural and linguistic revitalization movements within Native communities.
Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction by Miriam C. Brown Spiers
Publication Date: 2021

Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Demonstrating how Indigenous science fiction expands the boundaries of the genre while reinforcing the relevance of Indigenous knowledge, Brown Spiers illustrates the use of science fiction as a critical compass for navigating and surviving the distinct challenges of the twenty-first century.
Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization by Mark D. Freeland
Publication Date: 2020

Many of the English translations of Indigenous languages that we commonly use today have been handed down from colonial missionaries whose intent was to fundamentally alter or destroy prior Indigenous knowledge and praxis. In this text, author Mark D. Freeland develops a theory of worldview that provides an interrelated logical mooring to shed light on the issues around translating Indigenous languages in and out of colonial languages.
Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action by Kari Marie Norgaard
Publication Date: 2019

Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle.
Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martínez
Publication Date: 2019

In Life of the Indigenous Mind, David Martínez examines the early activism, life, and writings of Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), the most influential indigenous activist and writer of the twentieth century and one of the intellectual architects of the Red Power movement. An experienced activist, administrator, and political analyst, Deloria was motivated to activism and writing by his work as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.
Ecology and Ethnogenesis: An Environmental History of the Wind River Shoshones, 1000–1868 by Adam R. Hodge
Publication Date: 2019

In Ecology and Ethnogenesis Adam R. Hodge argues that the Eastern Shoshone tribe, now located on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, underwent a process of ethnogenesis through cultural attachment to its physical environment that proved integral to its survival and existence. He explores the intersection of environmental, Indigenous, and gender history to illuminate the historic roots of the Eastern Shoshone bands that inhabited the intermountain West during the nineteenth century.
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
Publication Date: 2018

"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living.
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
Publication Date: 2018

From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.
Standing up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud by Renya K. Ramirez
Publication Date: 2018

Standing Up to Colonial Power focuses on the lives, activism, and intellectual contributions of Henry Cloud (1884–1950), a Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965), an Ojibwe, both of whom grew up amid settler colonialism that attempted to break their connection to Native land, treaty rights, and tribal identities.
Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet by Rosalyn R. LaPier
Publication Date: 2017

In Invisible Reality Rosalyn LaPier presents an unconventional, creative, and innovative history that blends extensive archival research, vignettes of family stories, and traditional knowledge learned from elders along with personal reflections on her own journey learning Blackfeet stories. The result is a nuanced look at the history of the Blackfeet and their relationship with the natural world.
Stories for a Lost Child by Carter Meland
Publication Date: 2017

The summer before going into high school, Fiona receives a mysterious box in the mail, one that she hopes will answer her questions about her Anishinaabe Indian heritage. Fiona's desire to know more and her mother's reluctance to share stir up bitter feelings of anger and disappointment that slowly transform as she reads the stories into a warmer understanding of the difficulties of family, love, and the weight of the past.
Indian Country: Telling a Story in a Digital Age by Victoria L. LaPoe and Benjamin Rex LaPoe
Publication Date: 2017

Storytelling has always been an important part of Native culture. Stories play a part in everyday Native life-they are often oral and rich in detail and language and serve as a form of recording history. Digital media now allow for the extension of this storytelling. This necessary text evaluates how digital media are changing the rich cultural act of storytelling within Native communities.
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life by Winona LaDuke
Publication Date: 2016

Haymarket Books proudly brings back into print Winona LaDuke's seminal work of Native resistance to oppression. This thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Publication Date: 2015

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together.
Ottawa Stories from the Springs: Anishinaabe dibaadjimowinan wodi gaa binjibaamigak wodi mookodjiwong e zhinikaadek by Howard Webkamigad (Editor)
Publication Date: 2015

Sometimes things come to people out of the blue and seemingly for a reason. The Anishinaabe word for this isnigika. The stories contained in this collection reached Howard Webkamigad nearly eighty years after they were recorded. These rich tales, recorded by Anishinaabe people in the Harbor Springs area of Michigan, draw on the legends, fables, trickster stories, parables, and humor of Anishinaabe culture.
Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America by Nancy J. Turner
Publication Date: 2014

In Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, Nancy Turner integrates her research into an ethnobotanical tour-de-force. Drawing on information shared by Indigenous botanical experts and collaborators, the ethnographic and historical record, and from linguistics, palaeobotany, archaeology, phytogeography, and other fields, she weaves together a complex understanding of the traditions of use and management of plant resources in this vast region.
Follow the Blackbirds by Gwen Nell Westerman
Publication Date: 2013

In language as perceptive as it is poignant, poet Gwen Nell Westerman builds a world in words that reflects the past, present, and future of the Dakota people. An intricate balance between the singularity of personal experience and the unity of collective longing, Follow the Blackbirds speaks to the affection and appreciation a contemporary poet feels for her family, community, and environment.
Document of Expectations by Devon Abbott Mihesuah
Publication Date: 2011

When Hopi/White Mountain Apache anthropologist Tony M. Smokerise is found murdered in his office at Central Highlands University, the task of solving the crime falls to jaded Choctaw detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Charles T. Clarke. This virtuosic mystery novel explores, in engrossing detail, the complex motives for a killing within the sometimes furtive and hermetic setting of academia.
Plain of Jars: and Other Stories by Geary Hobson
Publication Date: 2011

It's an acute understanding of conflict that characterizes Plain of Jars, a book populated by bullies, men in combat, abusive spouses, and Native Americans seeking a sense of personal identity in an environment where conformity is law. The U.S. Marine Corps sets the stage for a number of these stories, whose protagonists combat racism, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the looming reality of the Vietnam War.
Dragonfly Dance by Denise K. Lajimodiere
Publication Date: 2010

Dragonfly Dance is a collection of poems remarkable for their candor and sense of catharsis. Writing from the vantage point of an American Indian women, Denise Lajimodiere opens a door into the lives of Native girls and women. Her poems often reflect the deep tensions between Native culture and white culture. Reflected in Lajimodiere's poems, life is sometimes beautiful but rarely easy.
Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures by Helaine Selin (Editor)
Publication Date: 2003

In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Thai, and Andean views of nature and the environment, among others, the book includes essays on environmentalism and images of the Other, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, worldviews and ecology, rethinking the Western/non-Western divide, and landscape, nature, and culture.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. -HarperCollins Publishers

Books by Louise Erdrich

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 2012

From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece—at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 2008

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, The Plague of Doves is a gripping novel about a long-unsolved crime in a small North Dakota town and how, years later, the consequences are still being felt by the community and a nearby Native American reservation. Bestselling author Louise Erdrich delves into the fraught waters of historical injustice and the impact of secrets kept too long.
The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 2006

While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 2002

For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. To complicate his fears, his quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation.
Tracks: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 1988

Set in North Dakota at a time in this century when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance—yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender.
The Beet Queen: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 1986

On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. After being orphaned in a most peculiar way, they seek refuge in the butcher shop of their aunt Fritzie and her husband, Pete. Ordinary Mary, who will cause a miracle, and seductive Karl, who lacks his sister's gift for survival, embark upon an exhilarating life-journey.
Love Medicine: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
Publication Date: 1984

Set on and around a North Dakota reservation, Love Medicine is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.

Books about Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich by David Stirrup
Publication Date: 2013

Louise Erdrich is one of the most critically and commercially successful Native American writers. This book is the first fully comprehensive treatment of Erdrich’s writing, analysing the textual complexities and diverse contexts of her work to date. Drawing on the critical archive relating to Erdrich’s work and Native American literature, Stirrup explores the full depth and range of her authorship.
Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: A Casebook by Hertha D. Sweet Wong (Editor)
Publication Date: 1999

Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, came out in 1984 to instant national acclaim, winning a National Book Circle Critics Award. In its centrality to Native American literary tradition, Love Medicine is an uncompromising and irresistible portrait of a community till then too often portrayed in flat or comic terms. Hertha Wong has established herself as the leading commentator on Erdrich.

The All Nations resource guide highlights the impact of Indigenous Librarianship and the importance of serving the library and information needs of Indigenous and Native peoples. It contains information on equitable access to information, literacy, welcoming spaces, and sustainability for future generations of library staff and patrons. The collection of resources throughout the guide are primarily Indigenous-centric and includes scholarly works from allies and non-Native librarians in tribal and mainstream libraries. As sovereign nations, the guide includes references to treaties and federal and state resources.

This introductory page features a guide on terminology, allyship, stereotypes, and land acknowledgments, as well as digital maps for use in learning and teaching and an informative video on why treaties matter.