Native American Memoir

The author of 18 spellbinding detective novels set on the Navajo Nation, Tony Hillerman simultaneously transformed a traditional genre and unlocked the mysteries of the Navajo culture to an audience of millions. His best-selling novels added Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to the pantheon of American fictional detectives.

After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four White men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird.

George Armstrong Custer, one of the most familiar figures of 19th-century American history, is known almost exclusively as a soldier, his brilliant military career culminating in catastrophe at Little Bighorn. But Custer, author James E. Mueller suggests, had the soul of an artist, not of a soldier. Ambitious Honor elaborates this radically new perspective, arguing that an artistic passion for creativity and recognition drove Custer to success and, ultimately, to the failure that has overshadowed his notable achievements.

An ancient shaman and his granddaughter travel to Harvard to pick up 2,047 skeletons stolen from the ruins of their family pueblo. She wants their time together to heal their broken hearts. He hopes the road trip will make her appreciate family. He fashions a dreamcatcher which sometimes hurls Hollow-Woman into the past to experience her ancestors.