Free Native American E-Books

We finally got around to exploring e-books and e-publishing recently, and were excited to discover the large numbers of free e-books available for reading online and/or downloading to an e-reader device. Amazon.com has a collection of over 15,000 free books, called “Kindle Popular Classics” available in the popular Kindle format, and you don’t even have to buy a Kindle to read these books. Amazon has a number of free Kindle reader apps for popular devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry. They also have a free app called Kindle for the PC that you can install on your Windows desktop or laptop that lets you read Kindle books right on your computer. 

A number of titles in the “Kindle Popular Classics” are Native American related. Some of these may be of value more from a historical perspective than as factual information, but on the other hand they include works by Native authors such as Charles Alexander Eastman, Marie L. McLaughlin, and Zitkala-Sa, and others that have Native people such as George Bent as primary sources. They’re probably all worth reading, but be aware that most of these were scanned from out of print books originally published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the quality may be degraded. For example, they have James Mooney’s The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, but it looks like the optical character recognition used to convert the book pages into text may have had some problems with a lot of the special formatting Mooney used to render Cherokee words and phrases, replacing a lot of these characters with question marks and rendering them unreadable. So you might want to download a copy as a sample, but we’d recommend buying a newer, edited version of this book if you want to completely understand the material. 

The following isn’t an exhaustive list but here is what we’ve found so far:

1. Myths and Legends of the Sioux – Marie L. McLaughlin
2. American Indian Stories – Zitkala-Sa
3. Indian Boyhood – Charles Alexander Eastman
4. Old Indian Days – Charles Alexander Eastman
5. Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains – Charles Alexander Eastman
6. The Soul of the Indian – Charles Alexander Eastman
7. Blackfoot Lodge Tales The Story of a Prairie People – George Bird Grinnell, George Bent as primary source
8. Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians   – Elias Johnson
9. Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians – Benjamin Drake
10. Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3)   – James Athearn Jones
11. Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) – James Athearn Jones
12. Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) – James Athearn Jones
13. The Mayas, the Sources of Their History Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries – Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
14. History of the Incas – Pedro Sarmiento Garboa
15.  Eskimo Folk-Tales – Collected by Knud Rasmussen 

To read these books you can use one of these free e-reader program:

Amazon.com Free Kindle Reading Apps 

Once you install an e-reader for the platform of your choice, you can follow the links above to download the books. You go through the same checkout process as if you were buying the book but there is no charge for the download – in other words, you’re buying the book but paying $0.00 for it. Also be aware that most of these titles also have carefully formatted and edited versions that Amazon does charge for and if you search Amazon.com for the above books by name these versions will come up in the list. If you want to buy one of these that’s great as they usually look good and may have added material by the editors, such as a bio of the author or explanation of how the book came to be written, and many of them are relatively low cost. But if you follow the links above you should land right on the free version.