Seven books by Native writers, and the first thing to know is that they do not come from one place. Seminole. Cherokee. Muscogee. Norway House Cree. Umpqua. Turtle Mountain, twice. Those are separate nations with separate languages, governments, and histories, and the phrase "Native American author" flattens all of it into a single beige fact. If your class leaves this unit knowing that Cherokee and Seminole are as different as Portugal and Poland, you have taught the most useful thing on this shelf. The second thing: this is not only a history unit. Three of these books are about Native families living right now — making fry bread on a Saturday, getting a dress ready for a powwow, planting strawberries — which is the direct answer to the assumption most children arrive with, that Native people are something that happened. The range runs from a five-year-old on the carpet to a twelve-year-old with a novel. Read the heads-up first, because three of these carry real weight and one of them is the heaviest thing we'd hand a ten-year-old.
These seven answer one question — who are Native people, actually — and they answer it in enough different registers that a class can hold more than one idea at once. Any single one does the job on its own. Pick by the child in front of you. The spread that matters most is the one between now and then. Fry Bread, We Are Grateful, and Jingle Dancer are set in the present tense, in kitchens and gardens and powwow grounds, with cars and lawyers and video in them; a child who reads only these would think Native people are simply people, which is the correct conclusion and the one most units fail to reach. Then When We Were Alone, Indian No More, and The Birchbark House say what was done: a residential school, the Termination Act, and a smallpox winter in 1847. And We Are Water Protectors sits in the present and argues about the future. Run the shelf without the contemporary books and you teach that Native people are a sad thing from the past. Run it without the hard ones and you teach a lie. The entries below say which is which, and they name the nation for every author, because that specificity is the whole lesson.