Upcoming Events

Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)

Join us as we welcome Aaron John Curtis, author of Old School Indian! He will be joined in conversation by Mona Susan Power (A Council of Dolls, Sacred Wilderness).

OId School Indian is a coming-of-middle-age novel about an Ahkwesáhsne man's reluctant return home and what it takes to heal.

Abe Jacobs is Kanien'kehá ka from Ahkwesáhsne--or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. Now forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease--one his doctors in Miami believe will kill him. Running from his diagnosis and a failing marriage, Abe returns to the Rez, where he's convinced to undergo a healing at the hands of his Great Uncle Budge.

“With its profound exploration of identity, language, and cultural survival, Old School Indian is a novel of pure heart and mastery. Through the vivid and deeply human lives of a Mohawk family, Curtis weaves a narrative that is both urgent and timeless, drawing us into a world where every word, every action, carries the weight of history and the hope for the future.” -- Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez

Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)

Join us as we welcome author Dennis Staples (This Town Sleeps) to explore his new novel, Passing Through a Prairie Country.

Passing Through a Prairie Country is a darkly humorous thriller about the ghosts that haunt the temples of excess we call casinos, and the people caught in their high-stakes, low-odds web.

For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Spoken of only in whispers as “the sandman,” he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation’s main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons’ dreams and preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a midtwenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine’s siren song. Here he falls afoul of the sandman, an encounter he barely escapes through the timely intervention of his cousins Alana and Cherie, who both work at the casino and are intimately aware of the sandman’s power. Meanwhile, Glenn Nielan, recently out of the closet and an aspiring documentarian, hopes to capture the faces of the Ojibwe land while experiencing the casino’s thrills. But he will learn that all who choose to play the sandman’s games are in danger of falling into his grasp.

Open Book
1011 Washington Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55415

Birchbark Books is thrilled to welcome author Stephen Graham Jones for a reading and conversation about his new novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. He will be joined by Carson Faust, author the forthcoming novel, If the Dead Belong Here.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter will be available for purchase at the event or you can preorder a copy today (pub date is March 18).

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is the story of a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the true masters of horror.

Birchbark Bizhiw
1629 Hennepin Avenue #275
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(entrance map)

Join us for a wonderful conversation between author Eowyn Ivey and Louise Erdrich as they discuss Eowyn's new novel, Black Woods, Blue Sky.

“Black Woods, Blue Sky is a fable about what it is to love, a tale of longing, a call to renew our deepest bonds with the living world.” —Louise Erdrich

Birdie's keeping it together, of course she is. So she's a little hungover on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter to the lodge while she waits tables, but Emaleen never goes hungry. It's a tough town to be a single mother, and Birdie just needs to get by.

And then Birdie meets Arthur, who is quieter than most men, but makes her want to listen; who is gentle with Emaleen, and understands Birdie's fascination with the mountains in whose shadow they live. When Arthur asks Birdie and Emaleen to leave the lodge and make a home, just the three of them, in his off-grid cabin, Birdie's answer, in a heartbeat, is yes.

Out in the wilderness Birdie's days are harsher and richer than she ever imagined possible. Here she will feel truly at one with nature. Here she, and Emaleen, will learn the whole, fearful truth about Arthur.