Upcoming Events
Wednesday, May 8 @ 6pm Central
Staci Lola Drouillard: Reading & Celebration
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
Join us for an evening with Staci Drouillard as she discusses her debut children's book A Family Tree and her recent memoir Seven Aunts.
Grandma’s garden was not just any garden. It was where a spruce tree, only as tall as baby Francis, reached her roots into the soil and stretched her branches toward the sky. Here, on the shore of Gichigaming, is where Francis and the sapling felt right at home. But when Grandma and Grandpa decide to move away, Francis wants to take the tree with them—can they?
Brimming with tenderness, A Family Tree traces the journey of one family, and a little tree, as they adapt to change by drawing on the strength of their roots.
Seven Aunts is an inspired patchwork of memoir and reminiscence, poetry, testimony, love letters, and family lore. In this multifaceted, unconventional portrait, Staci Lola Drouillard summons ways of life largely lost to history and reveals the true heart and soul of that history: women who defied expectations and overwhelming odds to make a place in the world for the next generation.
Thursday, May 9 @ 6:30pm Central
Debra Magpie Earling in Conversation with Louise Erdrich
Minneapolis Central Library - Pohlad Hall
300 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55401
Join Birchbark Books along with Milkweed Editions for a special conversation between award-winning authors Debra Magpie Earling and Louise Erdrich about the power of reclaiming narrative! Debra will discuss her novels The Lost Journals of Sacajawea and Perma Red, both published by Milkweed Editions.
Earling’s novels are powerful stories about the strength and resilience of indigenous women in the wake of colonial violence. Her most recent novel reclaims Sacajewea’s life story, bringing this mythologized figure vividly to life and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.
Free and open to the public!
Tuesday, June 11 @ 7pm
Victoria Blanco: Out of the Sierra - In Conversation with Kathryn Savage
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
A displaced family charts a path forward in this testament to the power of perseverance and the many forms resistance can take.
The Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico, make up one of the largest Indigenous tribes of North America. Renowned for maintaining their language and cultural traditions in the face of colonization, they have weathered numerous hardships—climate disaster, poverty, cultural erasure—that have only worsened during the twenty-first century.
Based on more than a decade of oral history and participatory field work, Out of the Sierra paints a vivid and vital portrait of Rarámuri displacement. When drought leaves the Gutiérrez family with nothing to eat, they are faced with the choice many Rarámuris must make: remain and hope for rain and aid, or leave their sacred homeland behind. Luis, Martina, and their children choose to journey from their home in the Sierra Madre mountains toward a new and uncertain future in a government-funded Indigenous settlement.
“In this compassionate witnessing of the Rarámuri’s living history, Blanco has intentionally reframed a long history of colonized literary poaching from Indigenous people. By centering their origin story and portraying their daily lives as resistance against cultural subjugation, Blanco's eloquent prose reminds us of the wisdom of the Rarámuri's teaching of korima, that gifts from the land are meant to be shared with loving generosity.” —Diane Wilson
Thursday, June 13 @ 6:30pm Central
Anton Treuer: Where Wolves Don't Die
Minneapolis Central Library - Pohlad Hall
300 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55401
Join Birchbark Books for a lively reading and discussion with Anton Treuer about his new book for young adults, Where Wolves Don't Die!
Ezra Cloud hates living in Northeast Minneapolis. His father is a professor of their language, Ojibwe, at a local college, so they have to be there. But Ezra hates the dirty, polluted snow around them. He hates being away from the rez at Nigigoonsiminikaaning First Nation. And he hates the local bully in his neighborhood, Matt Schroeder, who terrorizes Ezra and his friend Nora George. Ezra gets into a terrible fight with Matt at school defending Nora, and that same night, Matt's house burns down. Instantly, Ezra becomes a prime suspect. Knowing he won't get a fair deal, and knowing his innocence, Ezra's family sends him away to run traplines with his grandfather in a remote part of Canada, while the investigation is ongoing. But the Schroeders are looking for him. . .
From acclaimed author Anton Treuer comes a novel that's both taut thriller and a raw, tender coming-of-age story, about one Ojibwe boy learning to love himself through the love of his family around him.
Thursday, June 20 @ 7pm
The Span of a Small Forever: April Gibson with Douglas Kearny
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, The Span of a Small forever is an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
Gibson offers a unique perspective on “the body,” viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms.
Gibson presents her body as a “looking glass” that re-envisions illness, womanhood, motherhood, religious relics and collective loss through her physicality, through her lamenting, through her unearthing, reckoning and rebirth. Not only do we see her, but see the “we” in her. The Span of a Small Forever is both testimony and transformation—heart-shattering in its honesty, it ultimately offers us transcendent beauty, nourishment, and the strength we need to go on in our lives.
Wednesday, June 26 @ 7PM
Teresa Peterson - Perennial Ceremony
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
Travel through a garden’s seasons toward healing, reclamation, and wholeness—for us, and for our beloved relative, the Earth
In this rich collection of prose, poetry, and recipes, Teresa Peterson shares how she found refuge from the struggle to reconcile her Christianity and Dakota spirituality, discovering solace and ceremony in communing with the earth. Perennial Ceremony brings us into this relationship, as Peterson guides us through the Dakota seasons to impart lessons from her life as a gardener, gatherer, and lover of the land.
"Perennial Ceremony is a powerful, necessary gift for our times. Teresa Peterson writes with passionate grace of Dakota practices and teachings that nourish our world and transformed her life. With compassion, humor, wisdom, and courage, she offers a path through the disastrous fires of our own making. A book I'll return to again and again for solace, guidance, delectable recipes, and most of all: inspiration." — Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls
Tuesday, July 16 @ 7pm Central
Marcie Rendon: Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium
Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)
We are thrilled to host the publication event for Marcie Rendon's new poetry collection, Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium. Marcie will be joined in conversation by Lyz Jaakola with an opening song by Mark Erickson, an Anishinaabe traditional singer
In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon summons her ancestors’ songs, and her poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations. Bringing memory to life, the senses to attention, she breaks the boundaries that time would impose, carrying the Anishinaabe way of life forward in the world.
"This collection undoubtedly sings through and for generations to come! These powerful poems ask us to trust the wind to catch and carry our songs and prayers. Through each page, Marcie R. Rendon guides us to radically dream a future of strength and reminds us that ‘Win or lose, there’s dancing to be done." - Tanaya Winder, author of Words Like Love
Recent Events
Tuesday, March 19 @ 6:30pm Central
Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars
Minneapolis Central Library - Pohlad Hall, 2nd floor
In-person registration for this event is full. Register for the virtual Zoom event below.
A standby queue will also be operated outside Pohlad Hall the night of the event, should any last minute seats become available. Standby space is not guaranteed, and likely to be limited.
First print, first edition copy of Wandering Stars is now available. Click here to order yours today!
Presented in collaboration with Talk of the Stacks, Birchbark Books is proud to welcome award-winning author Tommy Orange. In 2019, the author published his debut novel, There There, to widespread critical acclaim. A winner of the PEN Award and the American Book Award, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the breakout bestseller follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
In his new work, Wandering Stars, Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous. He once again delivers a story that is piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage, serving as a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.
Of the new book, Louise Erdrich raves: “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange. With an all-seeing heart, he traces historical and contemporary cruelties, vagaries, salvations, and solutions visited upon young Cheyenne people, who cope with the impossible. In them, Tommy finds the unnerving strength that results when a broken spirit mends itself, when a wandering star finds its place, when, in spite of everything, Native people manage to survive.”
Tuesday, March 12 @ 5:30pm
Kao Kalia Yang Book Launch - The Rock in My Throat
Minnesota Humanities Event Center
987 Ivy Avenue East
St. Paul, MN 55106
Join AmazeWorks for the launch of author Kao Kalia Yang’s new children’s book, The Rock in My Throat, from Lerner Publishing. After an introduction from Carol Hinz (Lerner Publishing) and Rebecca Slaby (AmazeWorks), Kao Kalia Yang will read from her new book, followed by a conversation, Q&A, and book signing. Book sales by Birchbark Books. See the Eventbrite page for more details!
Please note: Events hosted by Birchbark Books are held at our new event space:
Birchbark Bizhiw, 1629 Hennepin Avenue #275, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
Events are not held at the bookstore.