National Native American Heritage Month | Love Is a War Song

Here's the list and our descriptions of our picks celebrating and uplifting Native Stories and Indigenous Voices.

Love is a War Song by Danica Nava

Love Is a War Song is basically: Pop star Avery cancels herself by wearing the world’s worst idea for a magazine cover — like, girl logged on Hard Mode. So she panic-yeets to Oklahoma to ‘find herself,’ which is millennial for ‘run away but with vibes.’

However, she is going there because accusation so being a paper Indian abound and they aren’t wrong. While she is of native descent she doesn’t know anything about her culture, her heritage. So when the safest place to avoid the paparazzi is her grandmother’s failing ranch, Avery signs up for a crash course in Native know-how. There she meets Lucas, a ranch hand who looks at her like she’s a human landfill fire AND the reason the ranch is broke. They bicker, they bond, they fix the ranch, and Avery learns that culture isn’t an aesthetic you can mood-board on Pinterest.

It’s enemies-to-lovers with horses, healing, and the exact amount of mutual roasting that qualifies as foreplay.

Danica Nava is Chickasha and the first Indigenous woman to have a traditionally published romance featuring Native Americans as the main characte in her first book, The Truth According to Ember.

The Sentence by Louis Erdich

A woman got caught with the wrong crowd at the wrong time doing the wrong things and goes to prison for transporting a body she didn’t even know was in the car across state lines. After getting out she takes a job at a book store. That’s haunted. By a white woman with massive cultural appropriation issues. The book is a very readable look about the razor thin line between appreciation and appropriation. For white and non-native people its a mirror of how we trip over ourselves to listen and still miss the damn point. For native people it’s a celebration of capturing and living out traditions and embracing your heritage in a modern age.

Also recommended: 2 titles

1) The Truth According to Ember - Danica Nava

2) Fire Keepers Daughter - Angeline Boulley - Coming to Netflix soon via Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground

For Further Research

#NotYourPrincess Voices of Native American Woman. By Lisa Charlieboy

This is such a fun book its a collection of arts: photography, poems, essays, drawings, and interviews of native woman.  There’s gorgeous images of native women in traditional dress with modern additions, Olympic gymnasts, National hockey players, and still designed images (comics) made by native women from all over and from many tribal affiliations. It’s not a large book in size but i would recommend it for a coffee table style book.

1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

2.A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliot memoir exploring mental health crisis within the main characters native community and family. Title is the simply translation of the Mohawk term for depression.

Novella Moment:

Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson - from 1884. Ramona is the story of a girl raised in a wealthy Californio household where the Señora treats her like a live-in intern who somehow owes her money. Ramona is gorgeous, kind, mixed-race, and treated like she’s one missing chore away from being grounded forever.

Felipe, the Señora’s son, is in love with her, but he’s got the confidence of a golden retriever who apologizes when you step on him.

Enter Alessandro: respectful, talented, emotionally available — basically the human version of a warm blanket fresh from the dryer. Naturally, the Señora takes one look at him and goes, “Absolutely not. Racism time.”

Ramona and Alessandro elope like fairy-tale characters but immediately get hit with the realities of colonization. Every time they try to settle, white settlers appear like pop-up ads going, “This land is actually ours now. Thanks though.”

Life becomes a tragic road trip. Alessandro, crushed by relentless displacement, starts breaking down, and in one terrible moment, a white settler shoots him for walking into the wrong house. Justice system: “Anyway…”

Ramona is shattered. Felipe re-enters with the soft-boy energy of a man who’s been in love since page one, and gently brings her home. Eventually they marry — not a passion story, more an emotionally-tired-but-functional arrangement — and move to Mexico where Ramona builds a peaceful life but never stops carrying Alessandro in her heart like a private playlist she doesn’t share.

And that’s Ramona: a love story, a tragedy, and a long sigh about colonization.

Young Reader Recs

Read to me: My Heart Fills With Happiness by Monica Gray Smith: Cree-Maytee (Canada) things that make a little girl happy the sun on her face, holding hands with Someone you love, feeling the grass under your feet. Board book

Read with me: Fry Bread by Kevin Noble Maillard     

Sing-song-ish. Gorgeous illustrations by Caldecott Honoree Juana Martinez-Neal *fry bread is a family constant for generations. Fry bread is time, brings families together. Fry Bread is us, a celebration of old and new traditional and modern, similar and different.  “A cycle of heritage and fortune”

Lower Elementary: The First Fire, A Cherokee Story by Brad Wagnon

Thunder and his sons saw the animals needed a source of heat and light so they sent lightening to strike a tree.  The tree burst into flames but it was on an island. Many different animals try to bring the fire back to the main land. Raven use to be white…but now it is black from being too close to the fire. The fire gave owls rings around their eyes when they got too close.

Upper Elementary: Kindred Spirits Choctaw author Leslie Stall and Navajo illustrator Johnson Yazzie…. For no good reason I often forget to add illustrators, terrible habit but the amazing pictures of this book could not go without a shout out. This book is about the centuries long relationship with the Choctaw nation and the Irish. In 1845 the potato famine devastated Ireland. This is when many Irish moved to the US, Boston area. Across the ocean the Choctaw nation heard about the famine and it felt akin to the suffering they had recently experienced on the trail of tears. They sent $170 to Ireland for potato’s. Equal to $5000 today. Fast forward to Covid. The reservations were grossly overlooked by the federal government. The Hopi and Navajo tribes especially. The Irish heard and because of the kindness expressed to them generation before they sent supplies and about 3 million dollars to help the tribes recover and sustain.

Middle Grade:  The BirchBark House series by Louise Erdrich.

Historical Fiction my love language genre, It’s a nine book series spanning 100 years of the Ojibwa family.  11 year old Little girl named EwMAckeeus. It’s a companion to the Laura Engles Wilder Little house series. If you read them in tandem you get the settlers and Ojibwa perspective for this time period. Seasons are almost a sub character in the book and are portrayed Pretty  accurate. In the winter small pox causes destruction. The first book came out while i was still in high school. When I went back to reread it as an adult I feel like it as more aware of the sad hard parts of the book. So when we decided to do this episode I literally googled, “how do kids feel about the sad part of The BirchBark House series” and because the internet never misses, it showed me a video of a teacher who asked this question to their students….the common feelings were that it is not overwhelming and needed for a historically accurate feel. I will go ahead and drop a TW for infant death

Louise also illustrates. Her parents met working at a BIA school on the Turtle Mountain Rez in ND. Dad is German. Level 6.1 Points 7

HS/YA: The Fire Keepers Daughter by Angeline Boully Donna is a 1/2 white 1/2 native teen. Her native dad died when she was younger in an on the job type accident. She is going thru teen angst and feels on the outside on both sides of her family. She meets a new guy and somehow ends up in the middle of an investigation of a meth drug trafficking ring. The Bf is undercover…she doesn’t know and he has….dramatic pause….a cheek scar. Boully describes this book as a Native Nancy Drew. Level 5.1 Points 20

Honey Pot Title: Quick Read - high points even if not related

One of Us is Lying by Karen McMannus   (360 pages) a student makes an app to spread school gossip and dies. The story unwind from there Level 5.1 14 points. Once again, thanks to Accelerated Readers very weird way of assigning grade levels: When considering this book keep in mind it does have  cursing and some sexual references.  There might be some 5th grade 1st month children who are ready and not bothered by these subjects but just because it SAYS 5th grade does not mean it is for every 5th grader. AND just because your Sophomore brings home a book that is 5.1 reading level, they are not lazy reading a baby level book. AR Just has a singular employee that throws dice all day and whatever they fall on is how he assigns the grade level and we all have to deal with it.