The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) and The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson (Dahkóta) were first published in 2021. Although very different novels in some respects, they also have some traits in common. Besides the year of publication and being written by Native American women writers, they both feature as the main protagonist a Native American woman living in the late twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Both novels deal with the Native protagonist’s struggles and survivance in geographical areas that were bought or otherwise appropriated by white settlers in the mid-nineteenth century. The U.S.-Dakota war of 1862 is mentioned in both novels, but it figures more prominently in The Seed Keeper where the reader in some of the chapters follows a character who survives the war and who is the protagonist’s great-grandmother.                      

“Unsettling settlers” in connection to the two novels, as I will propose in this paper, should be understood both in terms of the depiction of how white settlers and their descendants have unsettled and still unsettle Native peoples and of how the Native characters, in turn, unsettle characters of European descent and settler colonialism through survivance (Vizenor) and engaged resistance (Rader). In this way, both The Sentence and The Seed Keeper highlight Indigenous histories that have been suppressed or overshadowed by histories of immigration, settlement, and progress. They also contribute to an American cultural imaginary in which Native people take the center stage instead of continually being cast as adversaries, or pushed to the margins.