Newsletter

Image: LA County American Indian Resource Center

November News...we're thankful for you!

Librarian Mary Yogi serves up a mouth-watering list of cookbooks. Get your Books & Brunch: What's Cooking booklist here. Check out new Library resources (for students, parents, and job seekers -- plus get a reading list created just for you), and check out movies, reads, and more from the American Indian Resource Center.

Check out the pdf enewsletter here. Read on for more goodness!

Spotlight on Native Americans: books, music & movies for you

November is Native American Heritage month, and Library Champion Paul Loesch surveys the collections:

In November, we recognize our nation’s veterans, as well as its indigenous peoples. The two groups often intersect. The Library shares these stories, by and about Native Americans, and also those about Native American writers, poets, singers, actors and others, in its collections of books, movies, and music.

To follow is a quick scan of just some of what’s available to you, free with your Library card, and available online or at your Sidewalk Service library location (available at 67 libraries).

This year, on Veteran’s Day, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian established a National Native American Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

As Veteran's Day honored our veterans, we recall that 29 Native Americans have earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for their courageous and selfless service to the country. Eight of those honors were awarded posthumously.

Native American Ira Hayes is one of six Marines seen hoisting the American flag in the iconic WWII photo taken on Iwo Jima, where the now famous “code talkers” also utilized their native languages to transmit vital military communications.

Code talker Joseph Bruchac gives a firsthand account in Code Talkers; you can read about Hayes and the other flag raisers in Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley and Ron Powers.

You can find Shadow Catcher by Michael Burgan in the Juvenile collection. This volume of photographs from the early 1900s, by famed ethnographer and photographer Edward Curtis, chronicled a a vanishing way of life. Today, sadly, many of these photographs are tributes to Indian Nations that no longer exist in North America.

The Library’s collection, with the marvelous American Indian Resource Center, is rich with works created by Native Americans.

Joy Harjo, America’s Poet Laureate (for a second term this year, an historical first) has authored Crazy Brave and American Sunrise. She also compiled an anthology of 1500 poems by indigenous people: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. You can find them all in the Library catalog.

The Library's collection includes works by other Pulizter Prize-winning Native Americans. Natasha Twetheway edited Best American Poetry 2017, and her novels Memorial Drive and Monument are also available for you to checkout.

More than 50 years ago, novelist N. Scott Momaday became the first Native American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Momaday received it for House Made of Dawn, a captivating work made up almost entirely of a Native American story passed on through Native Americans’ incredible oral history traditions.

Momaday is also the subject of a wonderful documentary on Kanopy, Return to Rainy Mountain, featuring his daughter Jill and clips from interviews with the late author himself. Momaday was among the thousands of Native American children taken from their homes to be educated in Indian boarding schools, featured in the Kanopy documentary Our Spirits Don’t Speak English. Finding that video will also give you links to other Kanopy videos based on Native American history.

Kanopy also offers fictional feature films. The well-known Hollywood production, Buffalo Soldiers, is just one of the videos available free to you on Kanopy with your LA County Library card.

Freegal Music, another Library offering free to you, offers millions of musical selections, as well as unlimited listening. Try its Thanksgiving playlist for more than four hours of musical selections from every genre of music, classical to hip-hop. Freegal also allows cardholders five free downloads every month, in addition to its streaming options. A large selection of Native American Music can be found in this resource.

Hoopla is also free to you with your County Library card, and offers Native American Music for check-out. One selection, Native Spirits offers digitized authentic Native American music while another, Native Dreams, offers music sung in authentic Native American languages.

One of Hoopla’s ebooks explains the Native American Spirit Quest, while another plays Songs of the Native American Church, depicting early Christian music of Native American Christian converts.

Your library card is the deed to a gold mine!