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Native American Heritage Month Books for Teens

Celebrate the history and culture of Native American and indigenous peoples in November with these titles for teens. Picked by Chicago Public Library's Teen Services librarians.

Chicago Public Library

12 items

  • Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
    PaperbackNew York : Little, Brown and Company, 2009. — FICTION
  • When Alan, a half-Navajo spiritual mystic, meets Aimee, a gifted psychic in his new high school, they realize they've had precognitive dreams of each other. Together they must confront an evil spirit that has been responsible for…
    BookNew York : Bloomsbury, 2011. — FICTION
  • Code Talker

    a Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two

    Bruchac, Joseph, 1942-
    After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.
    BookNew York : Dial Books, c2005.
  • When werecat Kayla tells her boyfriend what she is, tragedy ensues. Help comes in the form of werecat Yoshi and his friends, werepossums Clyde and Aimee. The four set out to solve the mystery of a possessed antique carousel while fielding…
    PaperbackSommerville, Massachusetts : Candlewick Press, 2015. — FICTION
  • Lewis "Shoe" Blake, a seventh-grader from the Tuscarora Reservation, has a new friend: George Haddonfield from the local Air Force base. But in 1975 upstate New York, there's a lot of tension between Native Americans and whites... and…
    BookNew York : Arthur A. Levine Books, 2013.
  • In a world that barely survived an apocalypse which left it with pre-twentieth century technology, Lozen serves as a monster hunter for four tyrants who are holding her family hostage.
    BookNew York : Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, Inc., 2013. — FICTION
  • Moccasin Thunder

    American Indian Stories for Today

    This collection includes ten short stories about contemporary Native American teens by members of tribes of the United States and Canada, including Louise Erdrich and Joseph Bruchac.
    BookNew York : HarperCollins, c2005. — FICTION
  • For two years, Ellis traveled across the United States and Canada speaking with Native children to produce this collection of interviews with kids ages nine to eighteen. Their stories hail from all over the continent, from Iqaluit to…
    BookToronto, Ont. ; Berkeley, CA : Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, 2013. — E98.C5E45 2013
  • This dystopian thriller set in futuristic Canada won the 2017 Kirkus Prize for young adult literature. In this world, only indigenous people have the ability to dream, and recruiters force them to donate their bone marrow to those who…
    PaperbackToronto, Ontario : Dancing Cat Books, [2017] — FICTION
  • Alaskans Luke, Chickie, Sonny, Donna and Amiq share their experiences in the early 1960s when they are forced to attend a Catholic boarding school where, despite different tribal affiliations, they come to find a sort of family and home.
    BookTarrytown, N.Y. : Marshall Cavendish, c2011. — FICTION
  • #NotYourPrincess

    Voices of Native American Women

    This collection of poems, essays and art by Native women chronicles the challenges and stereotyping they face. A new generation of women is using their voices to create change.
    PaperbackToronto : Annick Press, [2017] — E98.W8N68 2017
  • To escape a government that needs antigens in aboriginal blood to stop a plague, sixteen-year-old Cassandra and her family flee to the Island, where she not only gets help in communicating with the spirit world, she learns she has been…
    BookNew York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, c2012. — FICTION