For several years now, the Oak Lake Writers Society has held a winter meeting during the Lakota Nations Education Conference that runs concurrently with the Lakota Nations Invitational.

We greatly appreciate Chris Bordeaux and other organizers who have welcomed us, and we have begun to look forward to this annual event as an important part of the OLWS yearly calendar.

This year, on Friday, December 20, 2019, a public presentation on the ‘One Book, One Tribe’ (name subject to change) project with First Nations Development Institute was given, started off with an introduction to the project and the research that went into the development of the idea and the work done by OLWS committee members. This talk by Sarah Hernandez, based in part on her own academic research, gave us the background for why this project is so unique. The data shows that younger generations are even more alienated from the D/N/Lakota literary tradition than previous generations.

Our second presenter was long-time, co-founder and co-mentor of the OLWS, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, herself an author featured in this new project. Listen to her presentation on The Red Nation Podcast, hosted by OLWS’s secretary and new generation co-mentor, Nick Estes. He recorded all these presentations and as they are published, we will be sharing here, as well.

The elder Dakota writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn talks about the politics of Indigenous language, writing, the Dakota literary tradition, and her new memoir In Defense of Loose Translations: An Indian Life in an Academic World. This talk was part of a series of talks celebrating Oceti Sakowin writers of the Oak Lake Writers Society: https://olws.squarespace.com. Subscribe to the Patreon to get access to more shows like this: patreon.com/therednation

Other presenters included Edward Valandra, Nick Estes and Lydia Whirlwind Soldier. Keep checking back to this post for their presentations courtesy of The Red Nation Podcast.