"Birding While Indian" Reading and Reception

Jul 22, 2023 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

VERMILLION, SD. — Thomas C. Gannon will read from his new book, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir, Saturday, July 22, 2023, at a free reading and catered reception at Outside of a Dog Books & Games, 5 Court Street, Vermillion, South Dakota. Gannon’s book was published by The Ohio State University Press in June 2023.

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s tears when coworkers called her “squaw,” and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the Indigenous humans, animals, and land of the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, of the aftershocks of history, and of human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

Thomas C. Gannon is an associate professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a lifelong birder. He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of South Dakota followed by a PhD in literature from the University of Iowa. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Tribe.

Thomas C. Gannon reads from his new book "Outside of a Dog: A Mixed-Blood Memoir."