The main theme of William Kent Krueger’s 2019 novel, This Tender Land, is family. In it, two orphaned boys at an Indian school set off in a stolen canoe on a trip down Minnesota’s Gilead River, which eventually leads to the Mississippi. Their goal is to live with their Aunt Julia in St. Louis. They consider the canoe’s other inhabitants — Emmy, a young girl recently orphaned, and Mose, a Native American whose tongue was cut out as a toddler and who communicates in sign language — part of their family.

An important secondary thread belongs to Mose, who is abruptly faced with his Sioux ancestry on the trip. Fortunately, he is befriended by a fellow Sioux, who goes by the name of Forrest but whose real name is Hawk Flies by Night. After his encounter with his people, Mose briefly goes by the name Broken to Pieces, or Amdacha.

It turns out, Minnesota used to be Indian tribal land, and many Sioux still live there. This makes Krueger’s novel reminiscent of the nonfiction Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which was turned into a much-lauded film by Martin Scorsese. Set in Oklahoma, it involved the betrayal of an Osage tribe at the hands of white men. (Krueger, it should be noted, also pens the Cork O’Connor mystery series, featuring a Minnesota detective who is part Irish and part Ojibwe.)

A mystery series from Tony Hillerman, and continued by Anne Hillerman, concerns Navajos Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The TV series “Dark Winds,” based on the novels, will have a fourth season next year, but Leaphorn and Chee are famous in their own right. The Hillerman novels are set on the Navajo reservation that sprawls across northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah.

Leonard Peltier, a real-life activist of Sioux and Anishinaabe heritage, was convicted of shooting two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Peltier maintained his innocence, and his sentence was commuted to house arrest by President Joe Biden in early 2025. Peltier’s case was the basis for a fictional account in the movie “Thunderheart,” which starred Val Kilmer as an FBI agent of Sioux heritage.

There are numerous other books and films featuring Native Americans (famed author Louise Erdrich is notably of Indigenous heritage). In an age when many of us grew up with images of Cochise and Tonto, the truth of Native Americans’ treatment at the hands of white people is at times horrifying to learn. But with endless options to read and watch, there’s no excuse not to.

Darrell Delamaide is an author and journalist in Washington, DC.