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Tag Archives: Native American Heritage Month
#BookFaceFriday “Walking in Two Worlds” by Wab Kinew
Watch your step! It’s #BookFaceFriday!
November is National Native American Heritage Month Month, join in paying tribute to the rich ancestry and traditions of Native Americans. Check out “Walking in Two Worlds” by Wab Kinew (Tundra Book Group, 2021). It’s a YA fantasy novel about a teenage girl caught between her gaming life online and the real world. It’s available as an audiobook through Nebraska OverDrive Libraries and is a part of the “Native American Heritage” curated collection. Peruse this collection of over 160 titles that range from YA to nonfiction, available all November.
“With dizzying action set in virtual reality, Walking in Two Worlds is at once exhilarating, clever, and poignant, seamlessly blending traditional knowledge with science fiction for an important entry into the genre of Indigenous Futurism. It doesn’t just walk in two worlds, it sprints.”
— David A. Robertson, award-winning author of the bestselling The Barren Grounds
Libraries participating in the Nebraska OverDrive Libraries Group currently have access to a shared and growing collection of digital downloadable audiobooks and eBooks. 194 libraries across the state share the Nebraska OverDrive collection of 26,898 audiobooks, 36,794 ebooks, and 5,133 magazines. As an added bonus it includes 130 podcasts that are always available with simultaneous use (SU), as well as SU ebooks and audiobook titles that publishers have made available for a limited time. If you’re a part of it, let your users know about this great title, and if you’re not a member yet, find more information about participating in Nebraska Overdrive Libraries!
Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available for book clubs at http://nlc.nebraska.gov/ref/bookclub. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!
Throwback Thursday: Grandmother and Granddaughter
Happy Native American Heritage Month #ThrowbackThursday!
This week’s highlight celebrates Native American Heritage Month with a black and white photograph featuring two Sioux Indian women sitting by a fire outside a tipi. They are dressed in animal hide outfits, and the younger woman has a headband around her head. A pot is suspended over the fire, and a kettle rests on the ground near the fire. The older woman is poking at the fire with a stick. The photograph was taken at the Rosebud Reservation in the 1890’s by John Anderson.
This image is owned and published by the Nebraska State Historical Society. They digitized content from the John Nelson and the J. A. Anderson collection. John Nelson came to Nebraska with his parents at the age of seventeen from Sweden. His photographs tell the story of small town life in Nebraska during the first decades of the twentieth century. John A. Anderson was born in Sweden in 1869. He came to Nebraska with his parents and settled in Cherry County. He worked as a civilian photographer for the army at Fort Niobrara (Nebraska) and later worked as a clerk at the Rosebud Reservation (South Dakota) trading post.
See this collection and many more on the Nebraska Memories archive!
The Nebraska Memories archive is brought to you by the Nebraska Library Commission. If your institution is interested in participating in Nebraska Memories, see http://nlc.nebraska.gov/nebraskamemories/participation.aspx for more information.
Book Club Spotlight – The Sentence
In 2014, renowned Native American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich sat down to write a novel about a haunted bookstore. It wasn’t until the COVID pandemic shaped the way we viewed the world and interacted with each other did that story find life in today’s Book Club Spotlight, The Sentence. Written in real time from 2019 to 2020, Erdrich explores the complex emotions of our shifting cultural landscape and reckons with the difficult present from inside her Minneapolis bookstore.
After an unfortunate stint in prison, Tookie’s life is finally going right. She has a loving husband (the man who arrested her), and a wonderful job at a local Indigenous-run bookstore where she prides herself on matching difficult customers with the perfect book. In November 2019, one of her most difficult customers moved into the fiction section…permanently. Ghosts and bookstores don’t seem like too bad of a match, but the suspicious circumstances of Flora’s death around an old diary, the novel coronavirus, and growing unrest in her home of Minneapolis, Minnesota begins to topple her new life and family.
“I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year. I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, on earth.”
– Louise Erdrich
The Sentence, like Erdrich’s previous novels, explores contemporary life as an Indigenous person in the upper Midwest, with all its heartache and laughter intertwined. As we continue to observe Native American Heritage Month and reflect on our country’s history, this novel is a thoughtful way to open up the discussion around America’s disposition of its Indigenous people. Their removal still haunts us today in the land, the culture, and the resilient survivors, much like the haunting of The Sentence’s bookstore is a colonization in itself. For Adult Book Clubs, they will find a novel that celebrates the humanism and community optimism unique to a flash in the pan moment during the COVID pandemic as a way to digest the more difficult moments. Erdrich wrote through the pandemic with Tookie as her guide. A messy, witty, and loveable protagonist to work through the continuing loss and uncertainty.
This novel features a fictionalized version of Erdrich’s independent bookstore Birchbark Books as it navigates a ghost, the pandemic, and a shifting cultural landscape. With people staying home and the ever growing online retail sites, now more than ever, independent bookstores live and die by their community. With the holidays coming up, consider stopping by your local bookstore for presents and to support your literary community!
“Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters”
Further Resources:
If you’re interested in requesting The Sentence for your book club, you can find the Request Form here. There are 5 copies (A librarian must request items)
Erdrich, Louise. The Sentence. Harper Perennial. (2021)
Posted in Books & Reading
Tagged book club spotlight, books, Native American Heritage Month, Reading
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