The form of biography really interests me I suppose because I read so many when I was younger and was very familiar. As a kid I remember walking into the new Saratoga Public Library children’s room and saying I’m going to read every book in this place, and I just about did. It took me about seven years, but I just about did. And I loved true stories about people’s lives. But I noticed that so often stories about American Indian people were highly inaccurate, often very biased, did not give the character credit for intelligence or emotional maturity or complexity or humor.
The lack of humor just shocked me because any time I was around other Native people, there was always joking and teasing going on even in some of the most serious situations. So, when I decided to write biography, I wanted to try to bring those elements to the table and to tell things from a point of view that reflected a tribal reality that people in that tribal nation would recognize.
And as I’ve written these books, I’ve never done them in isolation. I’ve never done it with simple research from texts. If I use text, I use primary material, but I go beyond that. I go to the actual tribal nation itself, speak with people, talk with descendants of these people, and try to get an understanding of how they would want the story told. So, if you take a book like my picture book, Crazy Horse’s Vision, I worked very closely with S. D. Nelson who illustrated it because he himself is from Crazy Horse’s people. And in doing his illustrations he and I made changes in my text so that the illustrations and the text would work together in a much more effective fashion.
