2011 South Dakota Festival of Books

Native Sun News:  Festival of Books focuses on Indian authors

By Jesse Abernathy and Karin EagleAs the proverbial dust settles from the 2011 South Dakota Festival of Books, the offerings of the authors addressing the event’s thematic focus this year on American Indian cultures remain to unsettle–and tempt–readers.

Featured as the keynote speaker was Joseph Marshall III, who wrote the 2011 South Dakota One-Book award winner The Journey of Crazy Horse, which is the history of Tasunke Witko based on the storytelling Marshall heard growing up in the Lakota tradition on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.And:A panel of six Native American women authors addressed the topic of “Native Voice: A Female Perspective.” It exposed the importance female authors place on the words of their grandmothers, or “the ones who preside over the sacred kitchen table,” as Standing Rock Dakota Sioux panelist Susan Power phrased it.

A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Power received the PEN-Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction for her 1995 novel Grass Dancer.

On the panel with her were Native Sun News columnist Delphine Red Shirt, who is a Native American Studies Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona; longtime author and Rosebud Sioux tribal member Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, whose new book My Christmas Coat reflects reservation holiday experiences; Rosebud native performing artist Larissa Fasthorse; Kansas storyteller and filmmaker Diane Glancy, whose most recent nonfiction The Dream of a Broken Field was published by the University of Nebraska Press; and international award-winning poet Allison Hedge Coke, who punctuated the end of her presentation with an activist slogan: “Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.”Comment:  For more on Native literature, see Indians as Werewolves and Spacemen and Modern-Day Coyote Tales.

Below:  "2011 Festival of Books in Deadwood features authors Diane Glancy, Delphine Red Shirt and Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, among others."