by Katy Beem
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Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s literary accomplishments have established her as one of South Dakota’s grandest dames of letters. Since the 1972 publication of her first children’s book, Jimmy Yellow Hawk, she has authored over 30 titles, including the First Americans YA series, which retells the creation stories, cultural ways, and displacement of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Nez Perce and other tribes. In 2016’s Sioux Women: Traditionally Sacred, Driving Hawk Sneve recounts the central role her grandmothers and female elders took in sustaining Sioux values and traditions amidst the intractability of colonial expansion. This fall at the South Dakota Festival of Books, South Dakota Historical Society Press (SDHSP) released a paperback edition of Driving Hawk Sneve’s The Christmas Coat: Memories of My Sioux Childhood. Originally published in 2011 by Holiday House, a venerable children’s book press in New York, The Christmas Coat risked going Learn. Dream. Grow.
out-of-print when Random House took over Holiday House’s sales and distribution. The close call is our gain – SDHSP’s reprint includes an intimate letter from Driving Hawk Sneve, now 86 years old, elaborating on childhood memories of Okreek and the Rosebud Reservation depicted in The Christmas Coat. In the book, Driving Hawk Sneve gives a holiday-time snapshot of 1940s life as the tween daughter of Rosebud’s Episcopal priest, James Driving Hawk, and his wife Rose. Trudging the mucky reservation road to a two-room schoolhouse, Virginia longs for a winter coat long enough to shield bare, freezing wrists as “the frigid gale blew sideways across the South Dakota prairie.” Her younger brother Eddie, overshoe sucked off by sleet-snow “gumbo,” pines for cowboy boots. At school, amidst a U.S. map and a portrait of an Indian chief in headdress, Virginia daydreams of the arrival of “Theast boxes” – shipments of used clothing and shoes from New England
congregations. Coveting a luxurious rabbit-fur coat unboxed from the “Theast,” Virginia is reminded by mother Rose that “others need it more than we do.” Virginia looks on dolorously as a haughty classmate drapes herself in the lavish wrap. Driving Hawk Sneve has written extensively about the hand-in-hand nature of lives interlaced in faith traditions in works like That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota, 1850-1976 (1977) and Completing the Circle (1995). For The Christmas Coat, illustrator Ellen Beier based the book art on photos and descriptions provided by Driving Hawk Sneve, as well as her own research. Save for the color of Virginia’s eyes, (drawn as dark but actually hazel), real-life Virginia says she is very pleased with the results. In a luminous and homey Nativity pageant scene at the guildhall, prayer ties adorn the Christmas tree, boys don headdresses to portray the Wise Men, and baby doll Jesus is swathed in a newborn
