Geary Hobson (Cherokee/Quapaw/Chickasaw)
In this novella, English professor Hobson, a Cherokee-Quapaw-Chickasaw Indian, pays tribute to those tribes so obscure they have become extinct, or nearly so. Hobson's character, Thomas Darko, represents the last of the Mosopelea tribe, called the Ofo by whites. In this first-person account, Darko looks back on his life from birth in Louisiana in 1905 to young manhood to old age as he settles into the lonely realization that he is the last of his tribe.
University of Arizona Press

Gordon Henry (Chippewa)
Taking inspiration from traditional Anishinabe stories and drawing from his own family's storytelling tradition, Gordon Henry, Jr., has woven a tapestry of interlocking narratives in The Light People, a novel of surpassing emotional strength. His characters tell of their experiences, dreams, and visions in a multitude of literary styles and genres. Poetry, drama, legal testimony, letters, and essays combine with more conventional narrative techniques to create a multifaceted, deeply rooted, and vibrant portrait of the author's own tribal culture.
Michigan State University Press

Louise Erdrich (Chippewa)
Louise Erdrich's mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives.
Harper (April 29, 2008) 

Louise Erdrich (Chippewa)
Richly imagined, full of laughter and sorrow, The Porcupine Year continues Louise Erdrich's celebrated series, which began with The Birchbark House, a National Book Award finalist, and continued with The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.
HarperCollins

Devon A. Mihesuah (Choctaw)
The Roads of My Relations takes advantage of Mihesuah's academic and personal knowledge of one woman's family to illustrate a larger society. Even before the novel begins, there is a diagram of the family tree showing the relationships of the family members. While this tree is helpful, it is not really necessary for understanding this book. Actually, The Roads of my Relations seems to be two books. Together, these interwoven stories express the strength and persistence of a tribe whose identity and pride have survived the disruptions of colonialism. With The Roads of My Relations, Devon A. Mihesuah has created a universal and timeless exploration of heritage, spirituality, and the importance of preserving and passing on tradition.
University of Arizona Press

Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee)
Attis McCurtain is a mixed-blood Choctaw Indian whose return from Vietnam to his small California town initiates a chain of events involving self-discovery and the false divisions between this world and the spirit world. Mundo Morales, the Chicano cop who was Attis's best friend, and Hoey and Cole McCurtain, Attis's father and younger brother, all are forced to come to grips with who they are as mixed-blood people in modern America. At the same time they must try to solve the mystery of how Attis ended up dead in a river after his incarceration in a mental institution for the murder of his white girlfriend upon returning from Vietnam. Ghosts and Choctaw soul eaters move throughout this novel as matter-of-factly as do the living characters, assisting Cole with the search for his brother's missing body and Mundo with the search for Attis's murderer, while leading each man deeper into his own roots. A fine inaugural novel for an important new series from one of the premier publishers of works by and about Native Americans.
University of Oklahoma Press

D'Arcy McNickle (Salish/Kootenai)
Educated at a federal Indian boarding school, Archilde is torn not only between white and Indian cultures but also between love for his Spanish father and his Indian mother, who in her old age is rejecting white culture and religion to return to the ways of her people. Archilde's young contemporaries, meanwhile, are succumbing to the destructive influence of reservation life, growing increasingly uprooted, dissolute, and hopeless. Although Archilde plans to leave the reservation after a brief visit, his entanglements delay his departure until he faces destruction by the white mans law.

In an early review of The Surrounded, Oliver La Farge praised it as simple, clear, direct, devoid of affectations, and fast-moving. He included it in his small list of creditable modern novels using the first Americans as theme. Several decades later, long out of print but not forgotten, The Surrounded is still considered one of the best works of fiction by or about Native Americans.
University of New Mexico Press

Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d' Alene)

The Toughest Indian in the World offers so many pleasures, who could deny it the power to disturb us as well? Funny, dreamlike, heartbreaking, angry--these are stories that could have been written by no one but Sherman Alexie. - Mary Park

Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa)
Creating a framing device of prologue and epilogue, Vizenor presents vignettes, some stingingly satirical and many based on his experiences in the academic world. In the prologue, Vizenor's protagonist, Sergeant Alex Hobriser, a name that is clearly satirical, comments on Eastman Shicer, who is both a cultural anthropologist and an aerobics instructor. This juxtaposition of professions provides a clue of what will follow.
University of Oklahoma Press

Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki)

3rd in the Dawn Land series. Young Hunter is confronted by a dual menace --a giant water monster and a dark-minded mteoulin. (Fiction)
Hardscrabble Books