Indigenous Reads of 2025
A list of books I've read by Indigenous authors (ideally about Indigenous issues or characters) in 2025. Books about Indigenous people/topics written by non-Indigenous authors aren't included here, but anthologies/co-authored books with a mixture of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors are included. For this list, I'm only including authors Indigenous to the Americas, Oceania, and Sápmi, although Indigenous peoples obviously exist in other parts of the world.
created by tequeguava
last updated August, 2026
Comments
Great List! I would also recommend books by Tommy Orange and Waubgeshig Rice as well as Cherie Dimaline!
I actually already have books by all 3 of those authors on my TBR, just didn't get to them so far this year! I tried to read There There by Tommy Orange but honestly wasn't vibing with it at all, so DNFed it at least for now. I own copies of Moon of the Crusted Snow and Moon of the Turning Leaves but just haven't gotten to them yet. I think the only Cherie Dimaline I've read so far is The Marrow Thieves? Which I honestly didn't really enjoy at all, but her adult fiction might be better than her YA?
If I remember right There There def had its slow moments but the ending really pulls everything together well, the sequel is satisfying. For Cherie Dimaline, I agree nothing blew me away, but I’ve never read a YA that did haha. The sequel to the Marrow Thieves was much better!
Yeah, I only made it about 1/3 of the way through There There iirc? I've definitely heard a lot of good things about the sequel but honestly next to nothing about the first book. Which...I mean there's probably a reason for that lmao.
Oh? The sequel is better? I just finished The Marrow Thievs and didn’t much care for it. I hadn’t planned on reading the sequel…. But you think folks should?
I actually think I would recommend people to read the sequel instead of Marrow Thieves. That sad, what did you not like about it specifically, depending on that I might say maybe not haha
Basically, I think the plot of this book is a bit of a mess. It is a lot of wandering around with vague goals that are not really clear, and I was given basically no reason to care about for the first 150 pages of this 230 page book. I know if you get north things will be better, but why.
Then a crisis happens, and it was gripping, as was the immediate aftermath, and the results of that crisis become the main driver of the plot, making me wonder what I was doing for the first 150 pages.
Then right as things were trending up, it got torpedoed but some incredibly obnoxious forced drama that was basically a thing for 20 pages before being completely irrelevant and having no impact on the story.
Yeah I see what you mean. There is some of that in Hunting by Starts but it does feel more cohesive. I do think both books are probably more enjoyed by a YA audience for that reason (its easier to suspend reality and questions). Give it a go and see if you'd like but also - I don't think your necessarily missing out on anything by not reading it soo...
11/25/2025: Following the recent news that celebrated Canadian-American author Thomas King has been confirmed to have no Cherokee, or any other Indigenous North American, ancestry, I will no longer be adding books by him to lists centring Indigenous authors on Pagebound or tagging his books I've read as "indigenous" on StoryGraph. However, I will also not be removing his books previously read and marked with those tags or included on those lists, since at the time both he and everyone else had no reason to doubt his Indigeneity.
I have previously not included on this list books I've read by authors who've had their claims to Indigenous ancestry challenged in the past, including Joseph Bruchac, but that was because those challenges were already known at the time I read their books.
