Red Shirt, Delphine 1957-

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Red Shirt, Delphine 1957-

PERSONAL:

Born 1957, in Gordon, NE; daughter of Lone Woman; resident of Pine Ridge reservation for Oglala Sioux in SD, 1966-75; married; husband's name Richard; children: three. Education: Graduated from Regis College, Denver, CO; Wesleyan University, M.A., 1995.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Guilford, CT. Office—University of Nebraska Press, 1111 Lincoln Mall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0630.

CAREER:

Freelance writer and educator. Syndicated columnist for Indian Country Today, Canastota, NY, Lakota Nation Journal, Rapid City, SD, and Hartford Courant, Hartford, CT. United Nations Representative for the Four Directions Council: International Indigenous Organization, 1994-97, and chair of United Nations Nongovernmental Organizational Committee on the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People, 1995-96. Has worked as an advisor for Native American students at Yale University, New Haven, CT; adjunct professor of American studies and English, Yale University, 2001, and Connecticut College, New London, CT, 2001-2002. Military service: Served in United States Marine Corps.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Endangered Languages Fund grant.

WRITINGS:

Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood (memoir), University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1998.

Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.

Editor of "Race and Ethnicity in the American West" series, University of Nebraska Press.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and scholar Delphine Red Shirt, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, is the author of the autobiographical work Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood. Born in Nebraska, Red Shirt moved with her family to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1966, where she lived for nine years. "I wrote these stories primarily for the joy of remembering what was good in my life," Red Shirt stated in the book's introduction. "I wanted to remember these things, to write them down, the old Lakota words and my connection to the world around me through them."

In Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, Red Shirt recounts the lives of her mother, Lone Woman, and Lone Woman's paternal grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman. To compile the narrative, Red Shirt recorded a series of interviews with her mother and later translated them from Lakota. According to Washington Post Book World contributor Carmela Ciuraru, Red Shirt "has crafted a memoir that offers a detailed view into the everyday lives of Native Americans before (and after) the era of reservations." Though World Literature Today critic Mary E. Adams felt the work lacked structure, she also noted that it "serves as a rich source of cultural information, showing the folklore, traditions, language, and daily life of Lakotas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." In the words of Karin Oman, writing in the Cultural Survival Quarterly, "Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter is a moving family history that relates the experiences of two Lakota women in a distinctly indigenous way."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Red Shirt, Delphine, Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1998.

PERIODICALS

American Indian Culture and Research Journal, January 1, 2003, review of Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, p. 178.

Choice, January 1, 2003, V. Giglio, review of Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, p. 867.

Cultural Survival Quarterly, June 20, 2005, Karin Oman, review of Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter.

Publishers Weekly, March 25, 2002, review of Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, p. 56.

Washington Post Book World, March 24, 2002, Carmela Ciuraru, "Loveless Marriages, Family Myths, White Slavery and a Feisty Civil War Heroine," review of Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, p. 13.

Winds of Change, winter, 2003, Barbara Sorenson, "Blood Memory: Interview with Delphine Red Shirt."

World Literature Today, July-September, 2003, Mary E. Adams, review of Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter, p. 152.