Books

Bio coming soon!

Tashia Hart is an author and illustrator; her works include Native Love Jams (2023), The GoodberryCookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods (2021), Gidjie and the Wolves (2020) and Girl Unreserved (2015). She was assistant illustrator for Gaa-pi-izhiwebak (2021) and illustrator for Gidjie and the Wolves (2020). Her short works include recipes, essays, poetry, and short stories for various publications. In addition to this title, she has also illustrated several of the books in this series. She is a citizen of the Red Lake Nation and resides in Duluth, MN.

Bio coming soon!

Tashia Hart is an author and illustrator; her works include Native Love Jams (2023), The GoodberryCookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods (2021), Gidjie and the Wolves (2020) and Girl Unreserved (2015). She was assistant illustrator for Gaa-pi-izhiwebak (2021) and illustrator for Gidjie and the Wolves (2020). Her short works include recipes, essays, poetry, and short stories for various publications. In addition to this title, she has also illustrated several of the books in this series. She is a citizen of the Red Lake Nation and resides in Duluth, MN.

Diane Wilson is a Dakota author, educator, and bog steward. Her novel, The Seed Keeper (2021) and her memoir, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (2006), won the Minnesota Book Awards in 2022 and 2007. She has also published a nonfiction book, Beloved Child; and co-authored a picture book—Where We Come From. Her essays have appeared in anthologies including: Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (2021); We Are Meant to Rise (2021); and A Good Time for the Truth (2016). She is the former Executive Director for Dream of Wild Health and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. In addition to this book, she authored the first in the series, Ella Cara Deloria: Dakota Language Protector. Wilson is a Mdewakanton descendant, enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation.

Cole Redhorse Taylor is a Mdewakanton Dakota , enrolled with the Prairie Island Indian Community. He lives and works on his reservation community located within the traditional boundaries of Dakota homelands in Minnesota. He is a multidisciplinary artist, with a BFA in Fine Arts Studio with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting, from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His works include traditional forms of drawing, painting, beadwork, quillwork, and textile work in traditional regalia. He works towards celebrating his people as thriving conduits of his ancestor’s legacies and to solidify their presence.

Staci Lola Drouillard is a Grand Portage Band of Ojibwe direct descendant. She lives and works in her hometown of Kitchibitobig—Grand Marais, on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior. Her first book Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe (UMP, 2019) won the Hamlin Garland Prize in Popular History, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. Her second book Seven Aunts (UMP, 2022) won the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative nonfiction, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award and was a “Minnesota Reads” selection at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. A Family Tree, is her first children’s book and was illustrated by Kate Gardiner (Harper Collins, 2024). Staci is an award-winning radio producer for WTIP North Shore Community Radio and authors the monthly column Nibi Chronicles for Great Lakes Now, a branch of Detroit Public Media.

Tashia Hart is an author and illustrator; her works include Native Love Jams (2023), The GoodberryCookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods (2021), Gidjie and the Wolves (2020) and Girl Unreserved (2015). She was assistant illustrator for Gaa-pi-izhiwebak (2021) and illustrator for Gidjie and the Wolves (2020). Her short works include recipes, essays, poetry, and short stories for various publications. In addition to this title, she has also illustrated several of the books in this series. She is a citizen of the Red Lake Nation and resides in Duluth, MN.

Bio coming soon!

Awanigiizhik Bruce (Mikinaak-Wajiw Anishinaabe, Nehiyaw, Michif) is a Two-Spirit diverse-media artist based on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. Their artistic practice traverses traditional and ceremonial Nehiyaw-pwat forms, mixed media, and multimedia work. Their primary mediums include ledger art, parfleche, quillwork, beadworking, painting, jewelry-making, and computer-coded LED art. Awanigiizhik brings practices from ancestral traditional revitalization to the exploration of Indigenous futurism. They spend much of the year completing site-specific and collaborative projects around the country, like murals in Duluth, MN and Belcourt, ND.

Hema Liesel Erdrich Patel is a writer, artist, dog lover, and lifelong student. She comes from a beautiful blend of cultures – on her mother’s side, mixed German and Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, and on her father’s side, Gujarati Indian. She was raised in both Belcourt, ND and Sisseton, SD, and has called Minneapolis, Minnesota home for most of her years. She is a recent graduate from Yale University with a BA in the History of Science, Health and Medicine and an Education Studies Certificate. Her most recent artistic adventure consisted of a three month bharatanatyam intensive in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Outside of her writing, she is pursuing a path towards medicine as a future pediatrician!

Awanigiizhik Bruce (Mikinaak-Wajiw Anishinaabe, Nehiyaw, Michif) is a Two-Spirit diverse-media artist based on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. Their artistic practice traverses traditional and ceremonial Nehiyaw-pwat forms, mixed media, and multimedia work. Their primary mediums include ledger art, parfleche, quillwork, beadworking, painting, jewelry-making, and computer-coded LED art. Awanigiizhik brings practices from ancestral traditional revitalization to the exploration of Indigenous futurism. They spend much of the year completing site-specific and collaborative projects around the country, like murals in Duluth, MN and Belcourt, ND.

Pauline Brunette Danforth, spent her early years living with her grandmother in the Pine Point community on the White Earth Reservation where she received her Ojibwe name Kewetah-benais-equay, translating to Thunderbird Flying in a Circle. Her family moved to the Cities in the 1950s for economic reasons. She graduated from Bemidji State University with a degree in Mass Communications. She then edited the Leech Lake Reservation tribal newspaper before investigating Ojibwe land claims and doing probate research for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She returned to the Cities to attend graduate school at the University of Minnesota earning a Ph.D. in American Studies.

Over the span of her decades-long higher education career, she advised and taught at both the University of Minnesota and Metropolitan State University while serving on the boards of various American Indian non-profit organizations. In addition to publishing creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry, she has published historical articles about the Minneapolis urban Indian community.

She is a devoted traveler having visited many U.S. states and Canadian provinces plus Mexico, Guatemala, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland and several other European countries. Now retired, she travels, meets regularly with her writing group while also teaching Native Studies at Metropolitan State University.

Tashia Hart is an author and illustrator; her works include Native Love Jams (2023), The GoodberryCookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods (2021), Gidjie and the Wolves (2020) and Girl Unreserved (2015). She was assistant illustrator for Gaa-pi-izhiwebak (2021) and illustrator for Gidjie and the Wolves (2020). Her short works include recipes, essays, poetry, and short stories for various publications. In addition to this title, she has also illustrated several of the books in this series. She is a citizen of the Red Lake Nation and resides in Duluth, MN.