Blue Hand Books

  Today, the National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards in all five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. The finalists were selected from a starting total of 1,917 books submitted by publishers this year: 473 in Fiction, 671 in Nonfiction, 299 in Poetry, 141 in Translated Literature, and 333 in Young People’s Literature. The winners in all categories will be revealed at the National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20, during which Barbara Kingsolver and W. Paul Coates will also be awarded lifetime achievement awards. Winners receive $10,000, a bronze medal, and a statue; Finalists receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners and Finalists in the Translated Literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator.     An Oprah Daily "Best New Book" and "Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read" * A New York Times ...

  PAULETTE IS A GENIUS - I MET HER IN CONNECTICUT   REPEAT SHOW.  Tiokasin speaks with Dr. Paulette Steeves (Cree-Métis). Paulette is an Indigenous archaeologist with a focus on the Pleistocene history of the Western Hemisphere.  In her research, Paulette argues that Indigenous peoples were present in the Western Hemisphere as early as 100,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. She has created a database of hundreds of archaeology sites in both North and South America that date from 250,000 to 12,000 years before present, which challenges the Clovis First dogma of a post 12,000 year before present initial migrations to the Americas.  During her doctoral studies, she worked with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to carry out studies in the Great Plains on mammoth sites which contained evidence of human technology on the mammoth bone, thus showing that humans were present in Nebraska over 18,000 years ago.  Paulette has taught Anthropolog...

THE LOST JOURNALS OF SACAJEWEA Open Audio Article Player June 05, 2024 LISTEN   “In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.” Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting ...

SciFri · Wilfred Buck Tells The Story Of Mista Muskwa   Star Knowledge Why do we accept as universal the teachings of constellations by their Greek names and stories? Indigenous peoples have their own stories and names for the star formations. These stories capture teachings about the land, medicines, animals and our relations. We don’t need to replace the Indigenous worldview. It’s just as valid. ...

  New poetry collection breaks free of limited Indigenous narratives At left the cover of the new book of poetry Teeth by Dallas Hunt (at right). Photo of Hunt by Conor McNally. Cover art by Michelle Sound and Dallas Hunt. By Odette Auger |  Windspeaker.com Dallas Hunt’s latest release is a book of poems exploring ideas of urban Indigeneity, decolonial theory and how First Nations find ways to create and continue to exist. Hunt, a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River) First Nation, said his new collection Teeth sets out “to challenge the expectations and stereotypes placed on Indigenous writers.” Writing has always called to Hunt, he said, and he was encouraged by teachers and his family.  While his childhood had its tumultuous moments, his kôhkom (grandmother) and mom “really had a knack of finding a way when things were parti...

  Wandering Stars , the new novel by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma), weaves together the complex history of the Boarding School Era as witnessed by the ancestors to the characters in his best-selling debut novel, There, There .  The experiences make up a constellation of experiences that define the characters and inform how all of us understand modern Native existence as only Orange’s prose can. "No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange. With an all-seeing heart, he traces historical and contemporary cruelties, vagaries, salvations and solutions visited upon young Cheyenne people, who cope with the impossible. In them, Tommy finds the unnerving strength that results when a broken spirit mends itself, when a wandering star finds its place, when, in spite of everything, Native people manage to survive." —Louise Erdrich The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a mast...

 Spooky? Established, emerging Indigenous authors produce disturbing fiction for dark anthology Tension, horror and then terror are the elements of a good scary story, and Never Whistle at Night has it all in 26 tales that will keep readers turning the pages and listening for things that go bump in the dark.  Co-editor Shane Hawk talks with Windspeaker about the collection. Gatekeepers, says Shane Hawk, co-editor of the dark fiction anthology Never Whistle at Night , are one reason why Indigenous writers have only broken into the horror genre in the last decade or so. “I think it's a marketability thing where there’s been historically gatekeepers who have allowed who can be published,” said Hawk. “I think now more people are seeing that, ‘hey, Indigenous people can write genre as well’,” says Hawk, who calls San Diego home. He and co-editor Theodore G. Van Alst Jr. were in the position of gatekeepers in 2021 when they put out an open call for eme...

Above: The Berry Pickers: A Novel by Amanda Peters (Mi’kmaq Descent).  The novel begins in July 1962 when a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer.  Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes.  She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field.  Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.  In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective.  As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her.  Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.    

BIG NDN PRESS An Indigenous Present A monumental gathering  showcasing diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms and mediums. This landmark volume is a gathering of over 60 Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more.  Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice. It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories. Reviews This is a gorgeous coffee table book that offe...

https://a.co/d/8tdb7xK GREENFIELD, Mass., Dec. 27, 2023 — Adoptee activist, award-winning journalist and author Trace Hentz, who created the American Indian Adoptees  website  in 2009, has announced a new project, “THE COUNT 2024.” It will coincide with the release of a new history book, “Almost Dead Indians: Atrocity” Book 5 in the Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects series. When Hentz moved to Massachusetts in 2004 she began to tirelessly investigate numerous adoption programs, such as the Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA (The Adoption Resource Exchange of America). Both involved moving (trafficking) Native American babies and children across North America into adoptions with non-Native families.  After her 2009 memoir, “One Small Sacrifice” and a second edition, which followed in 2012,  Hentz met more adoptees and asked them to write their personal narratives, which resulted in five anthologies: “Two Worlds: Lost Children” (2012), “Called Hom...

Wayne Arthurson is writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta until May 31, 2024. “Just find your own path for writing and do it your own way and if that works for you, then that works for you.” —author Wayne Arthurson   By Shari Narine Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Windspeaker.com | October 19th, 2023  The writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta believes the publishing industry is changing for Indigenous writers. “I think it's growing,” said Wayne Arthurson, who is of Cree and French-Canadian descent. “It used to be, maybe even 10 years ago, they have the one or two big name Indigenous writers … and a lot of publishers didn't look outside that… But now I think it's much more open because there's a lot of Indigenous writers who are having books out there that are successful.” Arthurson has been writing for more than 30 years. Final Season , his first of eigh...

   Courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society Press A new memoir called SURVIVAL FOOD shares tales from growing up on the Menominee Indian Reservation. The author, Thomas Weso, was born in 1953.  He passed away in July before the book was published. Thomas Weso grew up in a time of economic transformation – when commodity goods were eaten alongside game from Wisconsin’s Northwoods.  And then there was the rise of processed foods. He often wrote about food. Here he is speaking in a 2021 interview with Wisconsin Historical Society Press. “We should think about where food comes from. Because if we think where food comes from, we’ll take better care of the land around us.” Weso’s wife, the writer Denise Low, says he was interested in writing about Indigenous people in the present. “He had a very zen sense of like, “What’s here now?” and not “what were Indians like, or Indigenous people like, 100 years ago? Here we are now.” Thomas Pecore Weso (1953-2023) was an aut...