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Match Book

Indigenous Stories for Young Readers

Credit...Joon Mo Kang

Dear Match Book,

I have two granddaughters, ages 11 and 12, and some distant relatives who lived in Oklahoma’s Cherokee County. I am looking for recommendations for books about Native Americans and indigenous people that would be appropriate for a young age group. Thanks for your thoughts.

JACK W. BEAL
RIDGEFIELD, CONN.

Dear Jack,

In junior high school I read two books that I swiftly absorbed into my personal canon: “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” Scott O’Dell’s wrenching novel based on the true story of a native girl who survived on her own for nearly 20 years on one of California’s Channel Islands in the 19th century; and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” Dee Brown’s meticulous and devastating history of the decimation of Native American life at the hands of white settlers and the United States government. And as much as those books moved me, I envy your granddaughters’ contemporary reading opportunities. Today you have the chance to introduce them to the growing stack of indigenous stories told by Native Americans writing from within their own cultural experience.

Drawn Together

The illustrated tales in “Trickster,” the graphic story collection edited by Matt Dembicki, are a great place to start. Each of these collaborations between Native American storytellers and comic book artists coheres in surprising ways. The discrete frames of the comics capture the dramatic plot shifts, waggish asides and magical turns that the nature tales take: A vengeful coyote searches for a human bride, a rabbit uses his wiles to woo a wolf, a bright yellow alligator learns a transformative lesson about the perils of arrogance. As with the best anthologies, this one’s richness lies in its variety of tone. Many of the fables are antic, others too terrifying to read at night. Moreover the myths spring from a range of storytelling traditions — Cherokee, Yupik and Abenaki among them — and the writers themselves hail from professional fields so diverse (there are musicians, naturalists and historians in the bunch) that researching their lives launches you on a series of deeper cultural journeys.

Two of the most beguiling myths in “Trickster” come from writers whose longer work you should also consider reading with your granddaughters. Tim Tingle’s engaging spectral diptych, “How I Became a Ghost” and “When a Ghost Talks, Listen,” mix history — 10-year-old Isaac narrates his family’s tragic journey on the Choctaw Trail of Tears in 1830 — with speculative elements: Isaac can time-travel and even has some shape-shifting friends. If Tingle’s work helps your granddaughters develop an interest in fantastical fiction by native authors, you can point them toward a book on my to-read list for next year: Rebecca Roanhorse’s middle grade novel, “Race to the Sun,” which will be published in 2019.

Another contributor to “Trickster,” Joseph Marshall III, layers nonfiction and fiction in his slim, suspenseful novel “In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse” (with illustrations by Jim Yellowhawk), about a mixed-race Lakota boy who learns more about his heritage through his grandfather’s gripping stories about the fierce Lakota warrior of the title.

For more historical fiction, turn to the five interwoven novels of Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark series. The first three, beginning with “The Birchbark House,” follow the life of Omakayas, a young Ojibwe girl who is a gifted healer. The next two, “Chickadee” and “Makoons,” leap forward in time and are named for Omakayas’s twin sons. The books trace two generations of the family’s westward journey across the United States in the mid-19th century. All the books share an exquisite attention to the daily lives of people whose survival is intimately interdependent on nature and a direct, elegant style that respects young readers by never flinching from sorrow.

First-Person Plural

Native history surfaces throughout the first-person accounts in “Looks Like Daylight,” Deborah Ellis’s interviews with 45 young indigenous people — including members of the Nez Perce, Navajo and Inuit nations — throughout the United States and Canada. The past feels very present for these children who live in cities, suburbs and on reservations: One Haida Gwaii boy remembers the legacy of residential schools within his own family; a Cree high schooler talks about the pride he feels while learning traditional drumming. And a Seminole girl, the winner of a local science fair who overcame her fear of flying in order to compete in a national contest, looks toward the future: “I’m sure there will be other things in my life that will make me afraid. But I won’t let it get in the way.”

Yours truly,
Match Book

Do you need book recommendations? Write to matchbook@nytimes.com.

Check out Match Book’s earlier recommendations here.

Nicole Lamy is a writer and book critic, and the former books editor of The Boston Globe. Follow her on Twitter @NicoleALamy.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Indigenous Stories for Young Readers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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