Native American Biographies

The first known autobiography by a Native American woman, Life Among the Paiutes is an eye-opening hybrid of history and memoir by a pioneering activist who witnessed firsthand the impact of the US’s westward expansion.

American schoolchildren have long learned about Squanto, the welcoming Native who made the First Thanksgiving possible, but his story goes deeper than the holiday legend. Born in the Wampanoag-speaking town of Patuxet in the late 1500s, Squanto was kidnapped in 1614 by an English captain, who took him to Spain. From there, Englishmen brought him to London and Newfoundland before sending him home in 1619, when Squanto discovered that most of Patuxet had died in an epidemic. A year later, the Mayflower colonists arrived at his home and renamed it Plymouth.

In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977—his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen’s best-selling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. A wise and unsettling book, Prison Writings is both memoir and manifesto, chronicling Peltier’s life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.

Just before starting second grade, Jim Kristofic moved from Pittsburgh across the country to Ganado, Arizona, when his mother took a job at a hospital on the Navajo Reservation. Navajos Wear Nikes reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexisted in a tenuous truce. After the births of his Navajo half-siblings, Jim and his family moved off the Reservation to an Arizona border town where they struggled to readapt to an Anglo world that no longer felt like home.

Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross - who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story.

Sitting Bull’s name is still the best known of any American Indian leader, but his life and legacy remain shrouded with misinformation and half-truths. Sitting Bull’s life spanned the entire clash of cultures and ultimate destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. The reality of his life, as Bill Yenne reveals in his absorbing new portrait, Sitting Bull, is far more intricate and compelling. In Sitting Bull we find a man who, in the face of an uncertain future, helped ensure the survival of his people.

The autobiography of the famous Apache war chief, Geronimo. A shout of "Geronimo!!!" is still evoked to show courage. Hear, in his own words, the war story of Geronimo and his Chiricahua band of Apache Indians.

Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe and a founder of the American Indian Movement, is one of the most influential Indian leaders of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the first time and also traces the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in Northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected.

Often remembered as the president who died shortly after taking office, William Henry Harrison remains misunderstood by most Americans. Before becoming the ninth president of the United States in 1841, Harrison was instrumental in shaping the early years of westward expansion. Robert M. Owens now explores that era through the lens of Harrison’s career, providing a new synthesis of his role in the political development of Indiana Territory and in shaping Indian policy in the Old Northwest.

Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict - involving not just the North and South, but also the West.

Windrunner -- Young Native American ultra-runners runners who ran as fast as the wind, carried vital messages for hundreds of miles across deserts, plains, and over mountains. This time the message was WAR. The starving Pueblo Indians were rising in battle against the cruel Spanish soldiers occupying their land, New Mexico. And they were calling on other Indian tribes, some their sworn enemies, to join the fight. Running alone is Running Deer, a 14-year-old boy taking the place of his older brother, Star Fire. But can a young boy succeed in this dangerous mission?

This is a collection of stories drawn from many different tribes of Native Americans. Although the different lifestyles of these varied peoples dictate widely different types of story, they are united by a common belief in the spiritual power of the natural world and the magic that inhabits all living things. Stars and animals speak, wizards and giants cast wicked spells and young heroes and heroines brave all dangers to come home safe in the end.

Weaving together more than a hundred interviews with Davis's bandmates, family members, friends, and peers, this book powerfully reconstructs Davis's extraordinary life and career. Washita Love Child thoroughly and finally restores the "red dirt boogie brother" to his rightful place in rock history, cementing his legacy for generations to come.

A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.

Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father - an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist - who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

In the powerful and haunting lands of the Southwest, rainbows grow unexpectedly from the sky, mountain lions roam the desert, and summer storms roll over the Colorado River. As a park ranger, Kristofic explores the Ganado valley, traces the paths of the Anasazi, and finds mythic experiences on sacred mountains that explain the pain and loss promised for every person who decides to love. After reconnecting with his Navajo sister and brother, Kristofic must confront his own nightmares of the Anglo society and the future it has created.

Journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr. grew up believing that his Osage Indian grandmother, Sybil Bolton, had died an early death in 1925 from kidney disease. It was only by chance that he learned the real cause was a gunshot wound and that her murder may well have been engineered by his own grandfather. As McAuliffe peeled away layers of suppressed history, he learned that Sybil was a victim of the "Osage Reign of Terror"....

Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands to his military career against both the French and the British to his presidency.

Born into the Northern Paiute tribe of Nevada in 1844, Sarah Winnemucca straddled two cultures: the traditional life of her people, and the modern ways of her grandfather's white friends. Sarah was smart and good at languages, so she was able to link the worlds. As she became older, this made her a great leader. Sarah used condemning letters, fiery speeches, and her autobiography, Life Among the Piutes, to provide detailed accounts of her people's turmoil through years of starvation, unjust relocations, and violent attacks. In Paiute Princess, Deborah Kogan Ray offers a remarkable look at an underrepresented historical figure.