This spring, Newton Public Library presents “Native American Identity from Past to Present,” a three-part TALK (Talk About Literature in Kansas) book discussion series.

Beginning as early as the 1500s, Europeans produced fantastical, exotic images of America’s original inhabitants. Over the centuries that followed, visual and print media reflected and created stereotypes of Native American people. This series challenges the old stories of Native people as living in a mythical past, or as a pure but vanishing race who are isolated to reservations. Instead, the books in this series present Native American identity through the lens of Native writers and Native experiences. These writers speak to the diversity and complexity of Native identity.

Members of the public are invited to participate in any or all of these free discussions. Thanks to a grant from Humanities Kansas, each will be led by a special guest.

Copies of the selected books are available for borrowing. Ask at the public service desk, email library@newtonplks.org, or call 316-283-2890.

• Tuesday, March 4, 6:30 p.m.: “There There,” by Tommy Orange. Discussion leader: Gene Chavez, community activist and historian.

Tommy Orange shows the “there” that is still there for Native people who have moved or been relocated to urban places that are filled with popular media’s fantastical imaginings of Native identity. There There follows a multigenerational cast of 12 characters in and around Oakland, California, as they wrestle with the broken alternatives of identity filtered through stereotypical misconceptions, but with the power of Cheyenne stories and traditions fragilely held together in the urban city. Their lives intersect in various ways until they converge at the Big Oakland Powwow.

• Thursday, April 3, 6:30 p.m.: “Firekeeper’s Daughter,” by Angeline Boulley. Discussion leader: Linda Lewis, professor emeritus, Bethany University.

Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine is a science geek, a hockey star, and an Ojibwe woman. She is strongly connected to her Ojibwe family, but because she is unenrolled, she does not feel that she belongs anywhere. After the death of her maternal uncle, the FBI presents her with an opportunity to investigate the mystery surrounding his death, as well as the recent drug overdoses of young people in her community. As she journeys deeper into these mysteries, she must reconcile her different identities in order to protect her communities, both Native and non-Native.

• Tuesday, May 6, 6:30 p.m.: “The Removed,” by Brandon Hobson. Discussion leader: Tim Bascom, director of the Kansas Book Festival and writing teacher.

This novel follows the Echota family 15 years after the tragic death of their son, Ray-Ray. The mother, Maria, struggles to pull her family from their private grief to prepare for a bonfire marking both the anniversary of Ray-Ray’s death and the Cherokee National Holiday, which is the annual celebration of the signing of the Cherokee Nation Constitution in 1839. As she attempts to pull them together, her family struggles silently. Her husband, Ernest, dealing with mental fog caused by the onset of Alzheimer’s; her daughter, Sonja, is romantically fixated on a man with ties to her brother’s death; her youngest, Edgar, is deep in the throes of depression and addiction. But the introduction of a foster son, who bears a striking resemblance to Ray-Ray and seems to keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay, shifts the family from their grief in startling ways.