University presses have played an important, if complex, role in the history of Native studies and more than 80 members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) currently publish in this field. University presses have a unique ability to tell stories and promote scholarship that rarely get a hearing in the mainstream world of trade publishing, especially when the dominant cultural narratives assume the erasure and irrelevance of Indigenous life. Native studies also require the kind of interdisciplinary approach—often mixing memoir, history, religious studies, ritual studies, sociology, and more—that tends to scare away more traditional media outlets.
While early work in Native studies was often written by non-Native authors, that has changed dramatically in this century with the emergence of Native American and Indigenous Studies as its own field. Today, some of the most widely regarded books in the field, such as Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press), which won the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction and Ma-Nee Chacaby’s A Two-Spirit Journey (University of Manitoba Press), which won the CBC’s Canada Reads 2025, are published by university presses.
The University of Oklahoma Press and the University of Nebraska Press were early trailblazers in developing a robust tradition of publishing in Indigenous studies. And the University Press of Kansas has had a long tradition of publishing in this field as well. Located in Lawrence, home of the Haskell Indian Nations University, the press’ works range from Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams, now in its second edition, to the Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures, edited by Farina King, Kiara M. Vigil, and Tai S. Edwards, which represents the press’ goal to prioritize Native voices and Native sovereignty.
Here is a selection of outstanding Native American and Indigenous Studies books published by university presses to check out this month. A dozen are featured in the latest episode of PBS Books/AUPresses digital series Uncovered, which will debut November 10, and five are in the AUPresses 2026 University Press Week reading list:
Eli Baxter, Aki-wayn-zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth
(McGill-Queen’s University Press)
One man’s story of growing up in the hunting and gathering society of the Ojibways and surviving the residential school system, woven together with traditional legends in their original language.
Philip J. Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract
(University of Washington Press)
Early 20th century Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork and hide painting but also experimented with modernist art and produced hundreds of abstract paintings of public figures like Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein. This book explores Sully’s stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, Dakota women’s aesthetics, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s.
Tom Mould, Eddie Johnson, and Jay Wesley, Choctaw Traditions: Stories of the Life and Customs of the Mississippi Choctaw
(University Press of Mississippi)
Drawing on more than 1,400 stories from interviews with over 100 tribal members from all of the nine Choctaw communities in Mississippi and Tennessee, this book captures the rich detail and complexity of Choctaw customary life in the last three decades.
Grayhawk Perkins, Grayhawk’s Native American Folktales
(University of Alabama Press)
A collection of traditional Indigenous folktales for ages 7 to 12 that will captivate contemporary readers and audiences. Featuring universal animal characters such as Deer, Rabbit, Bobcat, and Turtle, these stories about the natural world reveal human behavior and lessons about how to treat others.
Elizabeth Rule, Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital
(Georgetown University Press)
The first and fullest account of the suppressed history and continuing presence of Native Americans in Washington, D.C., inspired by author Elizabeth Rule’s award-winning public history mobile app and decolonial mapping project, Guide to Indigenous DC.
Carolyn Ross Johnston and Terri McKinney Baker, Living Indigenous Feminism: Stories of Contemporary Native American Women
(University of Georgia Press)
Authors Carolyn Ross Johnson and Terri McKinney Baker argue that indigenous women have always lived a pattern of gender power and balance, and that their lives and visions can offer fresh guidance for the shared future we are making now.
Aamaawia John Bickers, The Miami Nation
(Indiana University Press)
As the United States sought to expand into what is now Ohio and Indiana, the Indigenous Myaamia (Miami) peoples of the Wabash River Valley came together to protect their lands and their people. The Miami Nation tells the fascinating history of how the Miami Nation responded to American imperial expansion, illuminating the challenges, achievements, and occasional missteps along the way.
Camilla Townsend and Nicky Kay Michael, On the Turtle’s Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren
(Rutgers University Press)
On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of folklore from the Lenape tribe, also known as the Delaware Nation, originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago but never published until now.
Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teaching
(Syracuse University Press)
In this book, Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa) scholar Wendy Makoons Geniusz contrasts the way in which Anishinaabe botanical knowledge is presented in the scientific academic record with how it is preserved in Anishinaabe culture.
Sharon V. Salinger, Perceived in Print: Indigenous American and French Ideas of the Other
(University of Virginia Press)
Perceived in Print uses the published writings of adventurers and churchmen in the 16th and early 17th centuries to unlock what people from a diverse range of Indigenous cultures thought about the French and how the French perceived the inhabitants of these New Lands.
Samuel J. Redman, Tarnished Promises: Indian Peace Medals in North America
(University of Colorado Press)
Using a collection of 13 peace medals held at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Tarnished Promises details the history of Indian peace medals, which were used as tools of colonialism and also Native American agency, and explores their meaning at different points in time and to different peoples.
William Green, This Is the Route of My Forefathers: The 1837 Ioway Map
(University of Iowa Press)
The state of Iowa is named for the Ioways, and in This Is the Route of My Forefathers, William Green decodes the 1837 map drafted by Ioway leaders to provide insights into the tribe’s political and diplomatic strategies, their relationships with neighboring nations, and how they resisted and negotiated in the face of dispossession.
Annie Boochever, illustrated by Apay’uq Moore, A Bright Light of Hope: The Elizabeth Peratrovich Story
(University of Alaska Press)
The first picture biography for young people that tells the true story of Elizabeth Peratrovich, a remarkable Alaska Native woman who fought, alongside other Alaska leaders, to guarantee equal treatment under Alaska law, regardless of race.
Thomas Michael Swensen, The Great Land: An Indigenous History of Alaska
(University of Washington Press)
Reconstructs Alaska’s history from Indigenous perspectives, showing how Native communities forged the region’s political, economic, and cultural foundations and offering a powerful new understanding of how Native peoples shaped the modern Alaskan state.
Shokhí: A Kanza Relative, a Monument, and Rematriation, edited by c. huffman, Tai S. Edwards and Jay T. Johnson
(University Press of Kansas)
Part of the Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures
For almost a century, the city of Lawrence, Kansas, displayed a 28-ton red quartzite boulder as a memorial to the town’s founders. However, this boulder had a centuries-long relationship with Kaw Nation citizens. In this book, contributors chronicle how a Grandfather Rock became a monument and how the boulder was brought home to Kaw Nation-owned Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park in 2024.
Janice Gould, This Music: Record of a Poet Becoming, edited by Jennifer Elise Foerster, Deborah A. Miranda, Lisa Tatonetti, Kim Shuck, and Marie-Elise Wheatwind
(University of Arizona Press)
The final, posthumously published work of celebrated Koyoonk’auwi (Concow) poet and essayist Janice Gould. Told through lyrical prose poems and personal photographs, this memoir traces Gould’s life as a queer/Two-Spirit California Native coming of age in the late 1960s, and includes reflections on her mixed-blood heritage, her experiences in lesbian feminist circles, and her journey as a poet and musician.
Victoria Freeman, Where Histories Meet: Indigenous and Settler Encounters in the Toronto Area
(University of Calgary Press)
Traces the histories of the Toronto region’s Indigenous peoples and their relations with settlers, focusing on the period from the colonial treaties of the 1780s to the Indian Act of 1876.
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Since 2012, members of the Association of University Presses have participated in an annual celebration of University Press Week. Following the example of the first University Press Week, proclaimed by US President Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1978, this event recognizes the impact that a global community of university presses has on every one of us.
We mark University Press Week each November with a new theme, events, featured UP work, blog tours, and more, organized by the UP Week Task Force.
Read more about the latest celebration, enjoy highlights from past UP Weeks, and get tips on how you can join the celebration each fall and #ReadUP year-round.
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