In Cloud Chamber (1997), Dorris returns to Ida, Christine, and Rayona, focusing this time on their ancestors, including a shipwrecked Spaniard who washed up on the shores of Ireland and his descendant, Rose Mannion. Rose is the central character in this five-generation epic that covers more than one hundred years.

Paper Trail (1994) is a collection of essays by Dorris written during the 1980s and 1990s on topics ranging from family and Indians to fetal alcohol syndrome and libraries. Of special interest to readers of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water are the articles describing the important adults in Dorris' own life when he was growing up.

Dorris' Morning Girl (1992) is a young adult novel that explores the lives of young Bahamians living in 1492, on the eve of Columbus' discovery of their island. The book was awarded the 1992 American Library Association (ALA) Scott O'Dell Award for Best Historical Fiction for Young Readers and was named a notable book of the year by Horn Book, School Library Journal, ALA Booklist, and the New York Times Book Review.

Tracks (1988), by Michael Dorris' wife Louise Erdrich, is part of a projected quartet of novels by the part-Chippewa novelist that also includes Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986). As a prequel to Love Medicine, Tracks focuses on the crucial moment in the early twentieth century when the Chippewa saw the last part of their centuries-old traditional life vanish. The novel is divided into nine chapters, one for each of the Chippewa seasonal cycles, and uses the same technique of interwoven tales about a complex family group that Dorris employs in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.