Thomas Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than 50 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.

 

Tom Gannon is an associate professor of English and of Indigenous Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His publications include Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (UNP, 2009) and various articles on the intersection of birds and human discourse (which he has dubbed ornithicriticism). His latest book, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir (OSUP, 2023), is part birding memoir, part cultural critique of the ongoing Christo-Custer colonialism of the Great Plains. Tom is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

 

Join Wachiska on Thursday, April 11, at 7:00 p.m. at the Unitarian Church, 6300 A Street, in Lincoln. This free, public,

in-person talk will also be live-streamed on YouTube at

 

https://youtube.com/live/3GcahJ4njV0?feature=share

 

Copy this link into your browser before the program begins. No registration is needed. Invite family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues to join us in-person or online. This program can also be viewed at a later time. Check Wachiska’s website for links to past programs.

 

“Sing out, my soul, thy songs of joy such as a happy bird will sing beneath a rainbow’s lovely arch in early spring.”

                                                                         -- William Henry Davies