100 Books Like Firekeeper's Daughter

Michelle made me laugh, made me cry, and made me feel the full weight of reconnecting with a mother only to lose her.

I related deeply to her sense of self unraveling after losing the person who anchored her world—I lost my own mother in my late twenties. Through her vivid memories of time spent with her mother and grandmother, and her journey of reclaiming herself through the foods of her childhood, Michelle pulled me in and carried me forward. 

Cherie Dimaline's book really spoke to me because, in addition to great story-telling, it sets Native people in a post-apocalyptic setting.

As Native people, we are so often portrayed as ancient rather than modern. So this work connected the ancient and the modern in a novel way. With relatable characters searching for family and community, it was relatable and real even in the world the book describes.

Terese Marie Mailhot’s raw account of her traumatic childhood and its enduring consequences took my breath away. A nearly lifelong Alaskan, I am acutely aware of the social problems afflicting Indigenous communities; in fact, I’ve done research on the topic.

Yet, I have never read a more honest, painful, and beautifully written testimonial by an Indigenous person about her experience with childhood poverty and neglect, substance abuse in the home, sexual abuse, and resulting poor self-esteem and self-doubt. Mailhot, who was raised on Seabird Island in British Columbia, began writing her memoir as mental health therapy and it became a process of self-discovery.

Her experience highlights the effects of historical trauma on Indigenous individuals and communities, as well as the prevalence of maltreatment of Indigenous women. 

Jim Northrup, Fond du lac Ojibwe author, was my writing mentor from the time I met him in 1991 until he passed away in 2015. He would always ask, “What are you writing today?” That was his way of encouraging me to keep writing. His crime novel, Dirty Copper is the story of Luke Warmwater, who returns to the Reservation after serving in Vietnam. Luke becomes a deputy sheriff on the Rez and sees firsthand the war raging below the appearance of peace.

I would listen to Jim talk about his writing and the progress he was making on his story as he wrote it. Listening to him encouraged me to keep going with my writing. Jim’s way of storytelling through the written word is something I have tried to emulate.

I met Carole LaFavor, Ojibwe, when I was writing for community newspapers and local magazines. I wrote a profile of LaFavor detailing her activism work in the Native community. Later, we were both in a writing group. I first heard some of the early writing she was doing for Evil Dead Center. She was the first Native woman I met writing crime and she inspired me to keep going on the book I was writing at the time.  University of Minnesota Press re-released Evil Dead Center in 2017 with the forward reading, “to underscore the significance of her writing to the Indigenous literary canon, to remind us of the power of her activism for HIV-positive Native peoples, and to return her important claims for the centrality of Two-Spirit peoples, bodies, and histories to the public eye.” - Lisa Tatonetti

Linda Rodriquez, Cherokee, is the second Native American woman I met who writes crime. Before we even met in person she was supportive of my ambition to write in this genre. She not only encouraged me to keep writing but to also join Sisters In Crime, the organization founded to support women mystery/crime writers. Every Last Secret is the #1 book in Rodriquez’s Skeet Bannion series. "Skeet" Bannion fled the stress of being the highest-ranking woman in the Kansas City Police Department, and moved to a small town to work on the local college police force. She thinks she has run away from stress until she needs to track down a killer while dealing with a vulnerable teen and the return of her ex-husband and her ailing father. So much for small town stress relief!

Wanbli Weiden pulls no punches in his vivid, often brutal mystery thriller set on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation. His enforcer protagonist Virgil Wounded struggles with his own heritage and history while fighting to protect his nephew and Lakota community. I appreciated the stark brutality of the fight scenes. I was deeply moved by the raw emotion, depth of characters, and struggles that still exist for Indian Nations today.

People kept telling me to read it, so I finally did–just in time to include it on this list. Rotating narrators–a White missionary’s wife and four daughters from the American South–represent disparate points of view concerning their family’s move to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

One thing I loved is the attention to historical detail and Kingsolver’s ability to include multiple, complex subplots to better frame the colonial history of this particular time/place and to better demonstrate the insidious ongoing brutality of colonization in terms of inequitable global wealth.

Language and religion play a major role in the plundering resource extraction industries, as do political and military interference, apartheid, and so much more. I loved her exploration of language(s): the power held in naming and misnaming. The youngest daughter sums it up best. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.” Characters are primarily White… show more.

Lahiri writes about immigrant families with a kind of quiet precision that always undoes me.

I love how this novel follows Gogol's uneasy relationship with his name, his parents, and the home they left behind. It's a beautiful exploration of how we inherit both love and loneliness from our families, and how long it can take to understand either.

I randomly found The Break in a bookstore and was drawn in by the cover, which features a light-skinned Indigenous woman wearing a black dress covered in florals. It immediately reminded me of a ceremonial dress that was taken from White Earth long ago and now sits in a museum in Washington DC.

There is grief in the many removals and losses Indigenous people have endured through the years, and real human consequences that echo down the generations. But I feel fuller and wiser when I get to explore this through other’s perspectives.

There are many characters to keep track of in this book, but it is gratifying to get lost in their journeys, gleaning insights and teachings from their stories.