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Native American Author Roundtable
2.
AOTW: Which Native American group(s) and geographic region(s) are the focus for your books?
David Matheson: Red Thunder is a coming of age story that spans several generations of Schi'tsu'umsh Indians now called the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in northern Idaho. Schi'tsu'umsh country is a beautiful landscape that in itself is one of the primary characters of the book. The land was alive, and is alive today to our folks of previous generations. They understood life from their relationship to nature, the animals, fish, water, to the land, to the sky and the four winds. They found a great strength in humility and sincerity. They never forgot how to be thankful for each new day. They sang a song with each holy dawn and offered a prayer, for they said that the great Kolunsuten, our creator, never promised anyone a tomorrow. When the new day comes be thankful for it and all the many blessings that you have. Life is a precious and thankful gift.
Margaret Coel: I write about one of the lesser-known Plains Indian tribes, the Arapahos. Anybody who watches old westerns knows about the Cheyennes and Sioux, but I've found that people around the country often don't know much about the Arapahos. Sometimes people think they're part of the Sioux. But they're a completely different tribe, with their own language, culture and history. They were the diplomats, negotiators and peacemakers on the plains, which is why I was drawn to them. My mystery novels are set on the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming, where most Arapahos live today. It's a land of blue sky, wide-open spaces and stark beauty, much like the plains of Colorado where they once lived. The geography speaks to my soul, and it's an important character in my novels.
Joseph Marshall III: The Lakota are the primary focus of my writing but I've written about Native American issues that affect all tribes. The northern Plains are the primary geographic focus.
Penina Keen Spinka: My current adult series centers on the Mohawks of upstate NY, the Algonquin and the Inuit.
David Marion Wilkinson: Cherokee mostly, but also Creek and Shawnee. Most of Oblivion's Altar takes place in the ancestral Cherokee Nation (now Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama) but also in the Indian Territory (modern day Oklahoma).
Aimee and David Thurlo: The Navajo Nation and the Four Corners region provide the cultural and geographic reference for our novels.
Thomas Perry: Jane Whitefield's father, Henry, was a Seneca of the Wolf clan, and the family's roots are in the Tonawanda reservation at the eastern end of Tonawanda Creek near Akron, New York. But like other members of Iroquois nations, she maintains contacts with her father's extended family all over New York and Ontario.
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear: Our books are set all over North America during the last fifteen thousand years and some even are set a thousand years in the future. That's a huge canvas upon which to paint. Not only do our co-authored books deal with Native American themes, so do our individual works.
Michael began with a science fiction series --- the SPIDER trilogy --- that dealt with Arapaho prophets who could see the future. In his historical work Bighorn Legacy Cheyenne mysticism plays a central role in defining Wasatch's character. His polemic, however, is in Morning River and Coyote Summer, novels that deal with the remarkable diversity of the Native American Plains and Rocky Mountain cultures that existed at the time of white contact.
Kathleen's This Widowed Land was a novel of the conflict between the Jesuits and Huron in seventeenth century America. Sand in the Wind came directly out of her work as a federal archaeologist. She was documenting the historic Sawyer's Expedition trail across Wyoming, and became fascinated with the nineteenth century plight of the Cheyenne tribe. The heroine in Thin Moon Cold Mist is part Cherokee and documents women's participation as soldiers in the Civil War.
The PEOPLE series, of course, provides only the most cursory coverage of the development of North America's pre-contact cultural heritage. People have been living in the Western Hemisphere for at least the last fifteen thousand years. Hundreds of different cultures have developed, thrived, and vanished. But the breadth and wealth of that cultural diversity, when the Society for American Archaeology conducted a survey last year asking Americans to name an American archaeological site, ninety-six percent couldn't. Americans know more about the archaeology of France, Egypt, Iraq, or Mexico, than they do about the rich cultural legacy right beneath their feet. By writing the PEOPLE series, we can address a small part of this subject and make it come alive. We always hope that a few of our readers will delve into the bibliographies at the end of each of our novels and start reading more of the nonfiction studies. Writing about North America's rich prehistoric heritage is a monumental undertaking, one that we expect to work on for the rest of our lives.
The Anasazi books, The Visitant, The Summoning God, and Bone Walker, were written as a result of a deluge of fan mail asking us to include more scenes about the modern archaeologists who begin each of our PEOPLE novels. Our goal with these mysteries is to document the religious and social upheavals after the fall of the Chacoan world, around AD 1150. Dr. Maureen Cole, a Canadian Seneca physical anthropologist, is one of the leading characters. Maureen gives us a chance to contrast her Canadian Woodland ancestry with that of the cultures in American Southwest.
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