16 Native American Literature Units: Short Stories, Essays, Poetry, and Film for High School

Ready to integrate more Native voices into your curriculum this year?

While trickster tales, creation myths, and other traditional stories definitely have their place in an American literature curriculum, it’s important that your students don’t get the message that Indigenous literature is only something from the past or something to read about in their history books. 

That doesn’t mean those works—or the past itself—aren’t important. But some of the most powerful and accessible ways for students to understand that past are through the eyes of Native writers working today. Contemporary writers can help students see not only what happened, but how that history continues to shape people, communities, art, and everyday life.

I also know that it can be tough to find money in the budget for new novels or plays.  Sometimes you just can’t teach those longer texts, even though you would love to be able to make that happen.

So, I’ve spent the past few years looking for essays, short stories, poems, videos, and films that are engaging enough for your average jaded teen and accessible enough for students who might not know much history or background.  Read on for more details about the 16 units that came out of that research.  

Below, I’ll share how I approach teaching these units, the background students need, the questions worth wrestling with, and the activities and pairings that help them make sense of each work for themselves. My hope is that you’ll find ideas you’re excited to use in your own classroom, with enough detail to build your own lessons. And if you’d appreciate having the planning already done, I’ll include links to the complete units I’ve created.  

I donate 50 percent of the earnings on all of these units to the Lakota Law Project which works with Native communities to protect children and families, sacred lands, and tribal sovereignty.

Unit on Stereotypes of Native People

Students might know some of the stereotypes surrounding Indigenous people, but they likely don’t fully understand where they come from, why they are harmful, or why positive stereotypes can be equally painful as negative ones.  For this unit, students watch a short video of Native teens explaining “6 Misconceptions About Native American People”; then they read and discuss “‘Strong’ Black Woman? ‘Smart’ Asian Man? The Downside To Positive Stereotypes” by Kumari Devarajan. 

Next, they watch “Love You Some Indians” by Rosie Shebala.  This powerful spoken word poem focuses on stereotypes as well, and the hurt and harm that is caused by what so many view as harmless word choices or team names. Like other great spoken word poems, this one packs a punch in its short three minutes, and is accessible even to students who claim that they don’t like poetry.

Finally, students read and analyze “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” by Sherman Alexie.   This satirical poem is a great choice for exploring stereotypes around Indigenous people.  The haunting final line, that in the Great American Indian novel “all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts” makes a powerful statement on the ways that Native Americans have been portrayed in literature and the media.  

I definitely recommend teaching a unit like this as a starting point, not as the end-all and be-all of teaching Native literature. Challenging stereotypes is important, but students also need to develop a rich and varied understanding of Indigenous writing. You can check out my unit on Native Stereotypes here.

Units on Storytelling and Why Indigenous Literature Matters 

My unit on “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” by Leslie Marmon Silko starts off by getting students to write some of their own family stories, share them, and discuss similarities. This is a fun, low-key way to warm up the class and get students thinking a little about why we humans like to tell stories.  

In her essay/talk, Silko touches on why stories matter, how stories are told in the Pueblo tradition, and how recent history has influenced the tradition of storytelling. She also tells a few great stories which serve to convey culture, beliefs, and important ideas.  I like to have students explore the story with close reading questions that get them noticing the choices that Silko makes—like how she tells listeners that if they expect or need a linear, logical structure to the speech, they might have a hard time following what she is about to say.  Finally, students come back to their original groups to compare their family stories to the ones in Silko’s talk.  You can check out my unit on this compelling piece here. 

Jimmy Santiago Baca, a poet of Chicano and Apache descent, is another writer whose work gets students thinking about why stories and language matter.  “I Am Offering This Poem” by Jimmy Santiago Baca is a classic, accessible, and lovely poem that examines the question of why literature is essential.  It’s also a powerful choice for discussing themes around why we need literature and how we show care and love for others—and it’s also a great choice for teaching diction, metaphor, extended metaphor, repetition, point of view, imagery, tone, and theme in poetry.  

To teach this poem, the unit starts with my typical openers: bellringer freewrites on topics in the poem and a quick figurative language writing exercise. Before students read the poem themselves, they watch a video of Baca reading it aloud. 

After students work through close reading questions on the poem, they watch “Episode 1143 | Jimmy Santiago Baca: Words Have the Power to Change The World,” created by New Mexico in Focus in 2018.  While you might think that author interviews are not engaging enough for your classes, I encourage you to give this one a try!  Baca’s calm, wise demeanor, his knack for storytelling and words, and his sad yet inspiring life story make for a compelling watch. After discussing the poem and video, students write their own imitation of the original poem using a Mad Libs-style handout where they just need to fill in the blanks.  This exercise is always a hit with students who are surprised by how great their writing turns out!  You can check out my unit on the poem here.

“Coming Into Language” by Jimmy Santiago Baca is an incredibly powerful essay and another great choice for exploring why literature matters. Telling the story of how Baca first found his love for reading and writing, this essay is also a great choice for discussing themes around identity, self expression, metaphor, and the American prison system.  

To approach this essay, I have students unpack figurative language passages by explaining the comparison and the meaning that is created by that comparison.  Then, they discuss some of the bigger questions of the essay like “What does Baca’s story about finding the book on Chicano history suggest about how he defines identity?  How does the essay as a whole define what it means to have or form an identity?”  And finally, since Baca’s portrayal of the U.S. prison system is hard to ignore, students explore sources on the civil rights implications of cash bail, education in prison, and the prison experience.  You can check out my unit on this powerful essay here.

“‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened’ Is Always a Great Way to Start” by Thomas King is another essay and a great choice for examining questions around how we view the world and the stories we tell about our worlds. It’s a powerful introduction to creation stories and why they matter, and it’s also an entertaining and vulnerable look at King’s own life and the stories he tells about it. The combination of compelling confession, fun and funny storytelling, and deep philosophical and cultural analysis make this essay a great choice for many different kinds of students.

Once again, students start off with a bellringer freewrite—one of my favorites for this unit is “Why do people get upset when they learn that stories that were described as being true are actually made up?”—and students also work through close reading questions that start off more concrete and end with them thinking about the critique of the essay as a whole of the Western way of defining and being in the world.  

Since this essay also plays a lot with fact and fiction—and the ways that we humans often blur the lines between those two categories—it’s a great choice for playing the classic “Two Truths and a Lie” game.  (Bonus: It’s another great way for students to hone their storytelling skills!) You can see my unit on Thomas King’s essay here. 

When I first read “Raphael” by Stephen Graham Jones, I knew it would be a hit with teen readers, but as I read and reread it to work on the best way for those teen readers to not just enjoy the story but actually analyze it, I realized what a masterpiece it is.  Truly, it’s one of my favorite short stories of all time.   

Besides being a chilling, dark story about the tragic outcomes of four teen friends, this text is a great choice for analyzing literary horror. Dealing with themes of guilt, peer pressure, the past, storytelling, and our deepest universal fears, it’s also a perfect story for teaching theme, symbol, repetition, point of view, plot, and suspense.  

What I love so much about literary horror, when it’s done as well as it is in this story, is that it really gives students a chance to analyze how the author’s choices help to create both meaning and an effect on the reader. If Stephen Graham Jones’ goal is to scare and disturb the reader, he definitely accomplishes that goal, but exactly how he does it is not always easy to parse. And the more you dig into this story, the more layers of meaning you’ll find. 

Since this story is so emotionally impactful, I like to have students spend a few minutes writing on their initial reaction before they delve into analysis. And boy, is there plenty to analyze in this story!  In fact, I wrote 36 close reading questions for the story.  (I know that’s probably a hard sell for many students, but I believe this story is compelling enough to get them to do the work.) Since it’s such a subtle masterpiece, students will likely miss many of the most meaningful details.  

Finally, since this is very much a scary story that’s about how to tell a scary story, I have students discuss the different tropes in the text, like the classic “realizing the story is about you/you are in the story” and then write their own horror stories.  I find that, like with the poem imitation for “I Am Offering This Poem,” students respond really well to having just the right amount of structure to inspire them.  You can check out my unit on this spectacular story here (and don’t worry, I include an editable version of the close reading questions!)  

I started viewing the film Smoke Signals with my classes way back in the early 2000s, and it was always a hit.  It’s sad, lovely, and hilarious—but it also deals with themes of Native storytelling, family, forgiveness, and the past.  Created by a largely Native cast and crew and based on the short stories of Sherman Alexie, this movie is well worth the viewing time.  

Perhaps because I find this film such a joy, I had a really hard time coming up with a way to “teach” it.  I even considered trying to get students to complete close reading questions on the script—but that didn’t seem like the right approach to a film.  Finally, I settled on a focus on the stories within the story.  

After watching the film, students get into small groups and analyze one story each with questions that get them thinking about the purpose of the story, how it compares to other stories in the film, and how it relates to the themes of the film as a whole. Students also get the transcripts of just the one story they’re analyzing.

After completing the analysis of their story, they do a jigsaw activity and then they come together to discuss the bigger questions of the film. This kind of close attention to one small part of the movie gives students more concrete details and examples to bring to a bigger discussion on questions that would probably be too high-level for them to discuss right off the bat.  When they have a really solid understanding of their chosen story, they can fully participate in discussing questions like “What do smoke, fire, and ash symbolize in the film as a whole?” Or “How do the characters in the film define themselves and their experiences through the lens of pop culture and the movies?“

I’m sure your students will love Smoke Signals as much as mine did—don’t be surprised when they engage in contests of who can do the best “Hey, Victor!” imitation! You can find my unit on the film here.

Units on the Legacy of Colonialism

Most students know about the Trail of Tears, so my goal in creating a unit on that devastating event was for them to get a better understanding of the emotional reality of the event, why it still matters today—and ultimately, to understand why we all need to continue to examine our shared history.  This unit brings together multiple sources, with Linda Hogan’s poem “The Trail of Tears: Our Removal” at its center.

Students start out by exploring two engaging videos: one on the history of the Trail of Tears and one on why treaties still matter today. Then, they move on to a creative exploration of some first-hand accounts and historical documents from the period.  

After that, students work to analyze Hogan’s prose writing on the removal as well as her poem “The Trail of Tears: Our Removal.”  Exploring the lasting legacy of the Trail of Tears, this lovely and challenging poem is also a great choice for analyzing enjambment, point of view, metaphor, shifts, and theme in poetry.  

This unit includes an optional extension activity that really drives home why these events of the seemingly distant past are actually very relevant today. In her spoken essay, Linda Hogan says, “Yet, as this piece of my work on our migration reveals, it could be the story of any of today’s people being forced to flee their homes. It happens daily, the stories of refugees in other countries and their many losses, the forced removal of tribal people from their lands by continued colonization and warfare.” So for this optional extension, students research a group of people who are currently being forced to leave their homes including the cause of their removal and the conditions they are enduring.  You can check out my unit on the Trail of Tears here.

I imagine that a lot of students learn about Native American boarding schools and forced assimilation, but likely it’s a quick slide presentation or passage in their history books.  As with the other units, my goals are for students to get a multifaceted understanding of the topic, understand why it still matters today—and also to read and discuss some great literature. 

The unit starts off with some more straightforward sources that help students to understand the context and history—in case they missed that single slide in their history class.  This includes examining photographs taken at the Carlisle school as well as listening to the NPR story, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” and/or having them read the New York Times article, “Lost Lives, Lost Culture: The Forgotten History of Indigenous Boarding School.” I think it’s a good idea for students to answer some basic questions on these sources just to make sure they’re getting the important info they’ll need later on in the unit.

Like with the other units, a contemporary poem is really the centerpiece of this unit—in this case, it’s Louise Erdrich’s poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways.”  This powerful poem portrays ways in which victims of mistreatment and abuse resist oppression and rebel in their own ways; it’s also a great choice for teaching point of view, extended metaphor, diction, enjambment, setting, alliteration, and theme in poetry.  The final elements of this unit include viewing and discussing visual art by Ka’ila Farrell-Smith and watching a short documentary on “Joe Buffalo,” a professional skateboarder who survived the residential schools in Canada.  You can check out this unit here.

I learned about the Dakota 38 after I had read and loved the poem “38” by Layli Long Soldier.  Her poetry is definitely not taught very much in high schools, and what a shame—she’s so good!  This is also another unit that just grew the more I learned.  What started out as a study of one event in history and a contemporary poem about that event turned into a unit on why we study history and how the way that we memorialize our shared history matters. 

The event at the center of this unit, the hanging of the Dakota 38, was the largest mass execution in U.S. history; it was the result of a complex history of money, land, and betrayal, and it is also an event that has been brushed aside and largely ignored for more than a century and a half.

Before getting into the main sources, the unit starts with an examination of all the different terms that have been used to describe the events leading up to that hanging: Dakota War of 1862, the Sioux Uprising, the Dakota Uprising, the Sioux Outbreak of 1862, the Dakota Conflict, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, and Little Crow’s War. Students spend a few minutes analyzing and writing about the connotations of the words “war,” “uprising,” “outbreak,” and “conflict.”

Students then move on to an analysis of paintings “Attack on New Ulm” by Anton Gag and “The siege of New Ulm, Minnesota,” by Henry August Schwabe to look more deeply at how the way we tell the story of history matters.  Students listen to a This American Life story about what happened—and why some people who grew up in the town where the Dakota 38 were hanged believe they come from a place where “nothing ever happened.”

Next, students read and analyze “The Speech of Little Crow on the Eve of the Great Sioux Uprising,” and Layli Long Soldier’s poem “38.”  This is a challenging poem for sure, but the way that Long Soldier works with visual cues in the poem is fascinating, and when students have the right context and close reading questions that help them to notice the important details, they are able to understand and discuss the text. 

After reading, analyzing, and discussing the poem, students watch the documentary Dakota 38  and then they write an in-class synthesis essay in which they use three texts from the unit to develop their own thesis about the Dakota 38, history, and memorialization.  You can check out this thematic unit here. 

Units on Resistance, Rebellion, and Transformation

One of my favorite topics, especially from a literature perspective, is unconventional forms of resistance—bonus points when that resistance is joyful, clever, or ironic.  The Alcatraz Occupation and especially the document that came out of that occupation, “The Alcatraz Proclamation” by the Indians of All Tribes, ticks all of those boxes.  

The Occupation of Alcatraz was a powerful 19-month long protest in which the Indians of All Tribes lived on Alcatraz Island and created a small society; the occupation sparked the Indian Activist movements of the late 20th century including the Occupation of Wounded Knee, The Trail of Broken Treaties and the more recent Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock among many other actions.  

Studying the Occupation of Alcatraz gives students a chance to explore an important resistance movement and, through the Alcatraz Proclamation, to see how humor and satire can be used to push for change.  For this unit, after students learn about the occupation through a short video and an interview with LaNada War Jack, they work through a close reading of the satirical “Alcatraz Proclamation,” a document created by activists in the occupation which leans heavily on irony.  Finally, students discuss why activists might have chosen the tool of satire and how even though the occupation didn’t achieve all of its goals, it can also be seen as a success in other ways. You can see my unit on the Alcatraz Occupation here.  

“When Mountain Lion Lay Down With Deer” by Leslie Marmon Silko explores metamorphosis, storytelling, the past, nature, and connection to ancestors. It also gives students plenty to analyze, from setting and point of view to metaphor, imagery, syntax, repetition, and the shape of the poem on the page.

Students start with bellringer freewrites on time, special places, and/or transformation. My favorite for this unit is: “Write about a story that you know not because you personally remember it, but because you’ve been told it so many times. What makes this story so compelling?”

When students get to the poem, they use a graphic organizer instead of answering close reading questions. They work through the poem analyzing one grammatical sentence at a time (not by line breaks—though they will pay attention to those).  First, they paraphrase the sentence. Then they compare their version with Silko’s and notice what they left out. Finally, they consider what those details add to the poem. 

For example, Silko begins, “I climb the black rock mountain / stepping from day to day / silently.” A student might paraphrase this as “The speaker climbs a mountain.” That gets the basic action, but it leaves out the strange idea of stepping “from day to day” and the way “silently” is a single word in the line. Those choices might lead students to realize that the speaker is moving through time as well as space, and how the word “silently” suggests that it is a solo, silent journey—and that this detail is important. I find that this method helps students notice details they might otherwise miss and teaches them a method for analyzing poetry independently.  You can check out my unit on Silko’s poem here.

“Remember” by Joy Harjo is one of the more accessible poems on this list and a lovely choice for exploring memory, storytelling, and our connections to the past. It also gives students plenty to work with when analyzing point of view, imagery, diction, and repetition. Joy Harjo was the first Native American to serve as the U.S. poet laureate and the second poet to serve three terms in that role.

Along with my usual bellringer freewrite and close reading questions, I have students choose eight images from the poem to quote and draw. This might sound like a strange way of analyzing poetry, but I have found drawing to be a very successful approach for poems that contain a lot of imagery, as this poem does. This step also challenges students to break the poem into chunks or sections and to choose what they think are the most important images.

Another fun element to this lesson is that students watch and react to a 3-minute visual interpretation of the poem. The film is worth discussing in its own right, and I like giving students a chance to respond to another art form as part of their study of literature.  You can check out my unit on “Remember” here. 

Responding to classic poems by Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, “America I Sing You Back” by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke adds a distinctly Native voice to the conversation about who gets to sing the American experience. I designed a five-day unit around the poem that would work well at the beginning of an American literature course—or whenever you want students thinking about who gets to tell our story.

Students first watch and discuss Amanda Gorman’s TED Talk, “Using Your Voice is a Political Choice.”  Then, after reading, analyzing, and discussing Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing” and Langston Hughes’ poem “I, Too” they move on to analyze Hedge Coke’s poem.

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know that I’m going to use a freewrite to get students thinking about the essential questions of the poem. Since this poem deals a lot with themes of birth and death, my favorite prompt is probably this one: “Arlo Guthrie has said, ‘The death of what’s dead is the birth of what’s living.’ Write about a time in your life when the end of something was the beginning of something else. Is it necessary for something to die in order for something else to be born?”   

This is a fairly challenging poem, and so for the close reading questions I try to walk that thin line between not overwhelming students with the details and also getting them to notice what matters most in the poem.  For example, in order for students to understand the extended metaphor of mother and child that Hedge Coke creates in the first few lines of the poem, I first have them list all of the verbs that the speaker uses to describe what she did for America in the past.  Once they have listed all of the verbs—“sung,” “held,” “wept,” “gave,” “prepared,” “held,” “helped,” “held,” “nourished,” “fed,” “placed,” “comforted,” “cried,” “grew,” “painted,” “circled”—then it’s not as much of a stretch for them to understand that metaphor.  

The poem ends on a note of defiant hope as the speaker demands a future of harmony and togetherness—one that reckons with the past and welcomes people home.  You can check out this thematic unit here.

Units on Healing, Recovery, and Everyday Life

“Busted Boy” by Simon Ortiz tells the story of a Native speaker who witnesses a Black boy being arrested at a bus station. It’s an accessible poem with plenty to discuss about race, power, and what it means to witness someone else’s experience. It also gives students a lot to work with when analyzing diction, imagery, enjambment, and point of view.

In order to get students thinking about the essential questions before diving into the poem, the freewrite prompts for this unit ask students to write about a time they were “busted,” a time they saw a stranger in pain, and/or someone who doesn’t share their identity but whose struggles overlap with their own.  Then, before reading, students brainstorm every meaning of the word “busted” they can think of and leave the list on the board.

After students read the poem, I have them turn it into an eight-panel comic using at least four quotations. Stick figures are fine; the point is to decide what to show and which words matter. They also make a found poem using only words from Ortiz’s poem, which gets them paying attention to his diction in a different way.  These two activities are low-key, but they give students a way into the poem that more straightforward questions might not.

Finally, the close reading questions get students to notice how this seemingly straightforward story offers a nuanced portrayal of the American experience: it’s sad and “busted,” but people are doing the best they can and the poem mostly doesn’t judge their choices. You can see out my unit on this poem here.

“The Man to Send Rainclouds” by Leslie Marmon Silko is a seemingly simple story about the peaceful death and burial rituals of the old shepherd Teofilo. Dealing with themes of cultural assimilation, nature, religion, ritual, and tradition, it’s also a great choice for teaching setting, allusion, figurative language, and symbolism.

I think that one of the bigger challenges with this story is that it’s not super plot heavy and a lot of the more important elements are very subtle.  Students might not pay much attention to the details around Teofilo’s burial, for example, so I get them noticing that before they move on to discuss the bigger themes of the text.  Like in much of her other work, Silko doesn’t really seem to judge the characters’ choices in the story, and so it makes for great discussion because there are no easy answers to questions around mourning, assimilation, and culture.  You can check out my unit on “The Man to Send Rainclouds” here.  

When I started researching, I thought I was looking for enough literature to fill a month. Instead, I found more writers, texts, and questions than I could fit into a single unit. And, uh, yeah, it’s six years later and I’m still not done making the Native literature units I want to make! 

The works I’ve shared here are by turns funny, sad, lovely, enraging, challenging, and memorable—and sometimes all of the above at once. They explore colonialism, resistance and rebellion, reindigenization, and everyday life without offering easy answers or oversimplified explanations. 

I hope you’ve found a few texts you’re excited to teach—and ideas that help your students discuss, analyze, question, and enjoy them.

Cover Image: Photo by Anthony Camerlo on Unsplash