In recent decades, individualistic and secular ways of participating in the world have grown pervasive in Western society. This evolution has compelled shifts in Indian Country as well. In After the Theft of the Sacred, Native American literature scholar Reginald Dyck investigates these shifts, and the resulting complexities of contemporary Indigenous religious and spiritual experiences. Drawing on a wide range of works by well-known Indigenous authors, he shows how Native communi...

In Raven’s Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann calls on readers to nurture material as well as spiritual life, asking beautiful and brutal questions about our individual positions within the universe and within history. The poems in this collection are brimming with an imaginative array of characters, including the playful yet sometimes disturbing trickster Raven, and offer insights into both traditional and contemporary Native life in southeast Alaska....

In Watermelon Nights, Greg Sarris tells a powerful tale about the love and forgiveness that keep a modern Native American family together in Santa Rosa, California. Told from the points of view of a twenty-year-old Pomo man named Johnny Severe, his grandmother Elba, and his mother, Iris, this intergenerational saga uncovers the secrets—and traumatic events—that inform each of these characters’ extraordinary powers of perception. First published in 1998, Watermelon Nights ...

Grand Avenue runs through the center of the Northern California town of Santa Rosa. One stretch of it is home not only to Pomo Indians making a life outside the reservation but also to Mexicans, blacks, and some Portuguese, all trying to find their way among the many obstacles in their turbulent world.Bound together by a lone ancestor, the lives of the American Indians form the core of these stories—tales of healing cures, poison, family rituals, and a humor that allows the inhabit...