Rod Thompson, Frederick Manfred Centennial and Albert White Hat, Sr.

Dakota Midday - 06/29/2012

Rod Thompson talks about his new book, "The Black Hills." Thompson's debut novel takes place in Dakota Territory and tells the story of young Cormac Lynch. After his family is brutally murdered, Lynch becomes a gunslinger and gains the reputation as a dangerous, quick draw. Thompson was born in Pierre and lived in Ree Heights, Miller, Highmore, Brookings, Huron and Sioux Falls before his family moved to California. He dropped out of high school, never took any creative writing classes or belonged to any writer's groups, and at seventy years old, wrote his first book, which won a contract with a major publisher.

Frederick Manfred's daughter, Freya Manfred, and Gustavus Adolphus Professor Emeritus of English John Rezmerski, author of "The Frederick Manfred Reader," talk about novelist Frederick Feikema Manfred. He was born in 1912 and grew up on a farm near Doon in northwestern Iowa. He is remembered in his fiction for vividly depicting life on the Great Plains, particularly the region for which he coined the expression "Siouxland," including northwest Iowa, northeast Nebraska, southeast South Dakota, and southwest Minnesota. When Manfred died at the age of 82 in 1994, he had written 34 books, including 22 novels, story collections, poems, essays, memoirs and letters. Among his most popular novels are the Buckskin Man series: "Conquering Horse," "Lord Grizzly," "Scarlet Plume," "King of Spaces," and "Riders of Judgment," published in new paperback editions in the last year of his life.

Albert White Hat, Sr. talks about his second book, "Life's Journey-Zuya." Born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, Albert White Hat, Sr. has lived there his entire life, teaching in the Lakota Studies Department at Sinke Gleska University for more than 25 years. As the grandson of Chief Hollow Horn Bear and member of the Aske Glu wipi i tiospaye, he continues to promote education and awareness for his people in the 21st century while maintaining a traditional way of life. In Life's Journey-Zuya, White Hat has collected and translated the stories of medicine men, retaining the simplicity of their language so as not to interpret their words through a Western lens.

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