Perry County is a county located in the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of Missouri. As of the 2020 census, the population was 18,956. Its county seat is Perryville. The county was officially organized on November 16, 1820 from Ste. Genevieve County and was named after Oliver Hazard Perry, a naval hero of the War of 1812.
Ste. Genevieve is a city in Ste. Genevieve Township and is the county seat of Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri, United States. The population was 4,999 at the 2020 census. Founded in 1735 by French Canadian colonists and settlers from east of the river, it was the first organized European settlement west of the Mississippi River in present-day Missouri. Today, it is home to Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park, the 422nd unit of the National Park Service.
Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr. is a Native American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington.
The Osage Nation is a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains. The tribe developed in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys around 700 BC along with other groups of its language family. They migrated west after the 17th century, settling near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as a result of Iroquois invading the Ohio Valley in a search for new hunting grounds.
James Phillip Welch Jr., who grew up within the Blackfeet and A'aninin cultures of his parents, was a Native American novelist and poet, considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance. His novel Fools Crow (1986) received several national literary awards, and his debut novel Winter in the Blood (1974) was adapted as a film by the same name, released in 2013.
Francis La Flesche was the first professional Native American ethnologist; he worked with the Smithsonian Institution. He specialized in Omaha and Osage cultures. Working closely as a translator and researcher with the anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher, La Flesche wrote several articles and a book on the Omaha, plus more numerous works on the Osage. He made valuable original recordings of their traditional songs and chants. Beginning in 1908, he collaborated with American composer Charles Wakefield Cadman to develop an opera, Da O Ma (1912), based on his stories of Omaha life, but it was never produced. A collection of La Flesche's stories was published posthumously in 1998.
Carter Curtis Revard was an American poet, scholar, and writer. He was of European American and Osage descent, and grew up on the tribal reservation in Oklahoma. He had his early education in a one-room schoolhouse, before winning a Quiz Bowl scholarship for college, subsequently attending University of Tulsa for his BA.
Navarre Scott Momaday is a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blends folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art tradition. He holds 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
John Joseph Mathews (Osage) became one of the Osage Nation's most important spokespeople and writers, and served on the Osage Tribal Council during the 1930s. He studied at the University of Oklahoma, Oxford University, and the University of Geneva-affiliated Graduate Institute of International Studies after serving as a flight instructor during World War I.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a first-person narrative novel by Sherman Alexie, from the perspective of a Native American teenager, Arnold Spirit Jr., also known as "Junior," a 14-year-old promising cartoonist. The book is about Junior's life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his decision to go to a nearly all-white public high school away from the reservation. The graphic novel includes 65 comic illustrations that help further the plot.
The American Indian Library Association (AILA) is an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA), and is a membership action group that focuses on the library-related needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives. The organization's members consist of both individuals and institutions that are interested in improving library services to Native American people in any type of library in the United States.
Daniel C. Swan is an American cultural anthropologist and museum curator whose work has focused on documenting and interpreting the cultural history of the Americas. He has specialized particularly on the histories, social organizations, and cultures of Native North American peoples in Oklahoma, USA. His research on the history, significance, and artistic forms of the Native American Church has led to research and exhibition collaborations with artists and elders in a diversity of American Indian communities, both in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the Western United States. In addition to his work on American Indian topics, he has organized exhibitions and museum catalogs about cultural diversity in the American West and in the Western Hemisphere more broadly.
The American Indian Library Association (AILA) awards are presented every two years to recognize the most outstanding contributions to children's literature by and about American Indians. The awards were established as a way to identify and honor the very best writing and illustrations by and about American Indians. Books selected to receive the award will present American Indians in the fullness of their humanity in the present and past contexts.
Anita Fields is an Osage/Muscogee Native American ceramic and textile artist based in Oklahoma. She is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation.
Ardina Moore was a Quapaw/Osage Native American from Miami, Oklahoma. A fluent Quapaw language speaker, she developed a language preservation program and taught the language to younger tribal members.
Wendy Ponca is an Osage artist, educator, and fashion designer noted for her Native American fashion creations. From 1982 to 1993, she taught design and Fiber Arts courses at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) of Santa Fe and later taught at the University of Las Vegas. She won first place awards for her contemporary Native American fashion from the Santa Fe Indian Market each year between 1982 and 1987. Her artwork is on display at IAIA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philbrook Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.
Tim Tingle is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma an author and storyteller of twenty books.
Georgeann Robinson was an Osage teacher and businesswoman, who used her skill with ribbonwork to preserve the cultural heritage of her people. She was honored as a 1982 National Heritage Fellowship recipient by the National Endowment for the Arts and has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, Museum of International Folk Art of Santa Fe, New Mexico and in the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, Oklahoma. As an activist, from 1958, she was active in the National Congress of American Indians and in the late 1960s, was the executive vice president of the organization.
Darcie Little Badger is an American author and Earth scientist.
Yatika Starr Fields is a Native American painter, muralist and street artist, born in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His artworks were shown at numerous galleries and museums, including the APEC Young Artist Exhibition and recently in the Sam Noble Museum.
