The University of Arizona Press
When: Thursday, August 24
Time: 10:30 -11:30 a.m., CDT
Where: South Dakota Humanities Council, on zoom
Sarah Hernandez will discuss her book, We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition on zoom with the South Dakota Humanities Council (SDHC). The event is part of the SDHC’s weekly Brainstorming The Humanities program. Sarah Hernandez, assistant professor of Native American literature and the director of the Institute for American Indian Research at the University of New Mexico, joins SDHC Scholar Lawrence Diggs to discuss her book. Sarah is also a member of the Oceti Sakowin Writers’ Society, an Oceti Sakowin-led nonprofit for Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers.
The South Dakota Humanities Council featured We are the Stars as their state’s selection for the 2023 National Book Festival’s “Great Reads from Great Places.”
About the book:
Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.
