Delphine Red Shirt

Delphine Red Shirt (born 1957) is a Native American author and educator, who is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Early life and education

Delphine is a full-blood Oglala Lakota. She spent her earliest years near the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in a small town of Gordon, Nebraska, where she attended public school, learning to speak English for the first time. After her family returned to the reservation, she first attended government schools and later Holy Rosary High School(South Dakota), which became Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic high school in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. She attended Regis College at Regis University in Denver, with a major in Accounting and a minor in History.

Career

Red Shirt has been a member of the United States Marine Corps. She served as the Chairperson of the United Nations NGO Committee on the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People, 1995–96, and as the United Nations Representative for the Four Directions Council: International Indigenous Organization with access to the UN from 1994 to 1997. During this time she also received her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies in Creative Writing from Wesleyan University and was an advisor to Native American Students at Yale University.

Red Shirt has served as an visiting Lecturer of American Studies and English at Yale University in the Fall 2001 term and at Connecticut College during the Spring term in 2001 and 2002. She has maintained an extensive schedule of public speaking and appearances and has narrated film for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. She has given interviews on National Public Radio, and other radio and television stations. She is a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric, and of the Lakota Language at Stanford University. Red Shirt has also been a columnist for Indian Country Today newspaper.

She is a Series Editor for the University of Nebraska Press: "Race and Ethnicity in the American West". The series seeks to bridge the gap between old and new western history, and to suggest an alternative that examines the racial and ethnic experience as a primary factor in the establishment of the West as a region, thus nurturing a dynamic, holistic perception of western history. Books published in the series will explore the dynamic interactions between groups over time, with comparative approaches that showcase this interaction as a primary factor in creating the West's unique regional identity.

Redshirt has been a freelance writer and syndicated columnist for Indian Country Today, the Lakota Nation Journal of Rapid City, South Dakota, the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut and the Native Sun News in Rapid City. She is a resident of Palo Alto California and Tucson, Arizona and has two daughters: Kirsten and Megan and a son, Justin. She is married to Richard Shaw.

Bibliography

• Turtle Lung Woman's Granddaughter. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
• Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8032-8976-6.

See also

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Studies

References

• Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. The American Indian Quarterly. Vol. 26, No. 4. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Fall 2002. ISSN 0095-182X

External links

• "Delphine Red Shirt, official site", URL accessed 07/22/06
• "These Are Not Indians", URL accessed 07/29/07
• "Richard H. Shaw Departs for Stanford Post", URL accessed 7/29/07