Introduction

Iremember as a kid, sitting on my bedroom floor with a stack of picture books in hand. They weren’t the types of books my friends read; these were special. Instead of talking animals, they had stories of Native American young women, with each book depicting an individual from a different tribe going on adventures and discovering more about themselves. I remember looking at the illustration of the beautiful dresses they wore and reading about their culture, I was fascinated with how they lived. I remember sitting at the table where my mother was sewing my own regalia, to wear at my elementary school’s heritage event, watching her sew shells and beads to the tan fabric. It had stripes of purple and red with lines of gold throughout. Wearing it I had never felt prouder, I felt like the beautiful girls from my books.

I am a member of the Shawnee Nation and my father is member of the Yankton Sioux Nation, both through my grandmother whose mother was Shawnee and father was Yankton.

It was important to me to have a form of documentation of the information we have about these members of my family. I had known for a while that my grandmother was working on genealogy of that side of my family, but I didn’t have a way to organize it as there was too much information and no comprehensive way for me to capture and share it. So, this book felt like a way to tackle this – hopefully a good solution to help me better “know” my forebears. I could use my knowledge about book layout and design, in order to create a book that my family could use to keep these stories and the identities of our Indian relatives around. These are accounts and biographies of my family through stories my grandmother has heard and research she has done about these individuals. Like traditional American Indian families, I learned from an elder in my family about her family and our traditions.

The artwork included in this book was done by me; I wanted to keep an aged quality to the portraits, mimicking the visual elements of old photography. Other illustrations I’ve included

are based off of important symbols in the tribes discussed in this book. I wanted this book to feel real and genuine to the culture, but also reflect my own family and our values.

My experience with these cultures is limited, consisting mostly of stories that I read or that were told to me by my grandmother. It was always important to my parents that I knew where that part of my family was from, and who I was descended from and their experiences. This book documents both of those.