47. Represent Native Peoples Accurately in Your Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer, Part 2

“The more you do your research and do things like hopefully go to native events or watch 'em on YouTube, powwows and things like that, those things will start standing out.” - Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer

In “Represent Native Peoples Accurately in Your Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer, Part 2” host Beth Barany, creativity coach, and science fiction and fantasy novelist chats with author, writing instructor, and tribal member Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer where they continue their discussion about how to accurately represent Native Peoples and share the reasons why you shouldn’t shy away from representing them in your stories, plus ways you can research Native Peoples.


ABOUT SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Fiction authors who want to write about Native Americans face a challenging minefield riddled with dos and don’ts, and no clear answers. That is why author and writing instructor Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer created the “Fiction Writing: American Indians” digital course.

As a tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, she has written and published 15 historical fiction books with Native main characters, and over 275 non-fiction articles on Native artists and organizations with representatives from dozens of North American tribes. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian honored her as a literary artist through their Artist Leadership Program for her work in preserving Choctaw Trail of Tears stories, and she is a First Peoples Fund Artist in Business Leadership alumni.

Through her in-depth course, authors are equipped to write authentic stories that honor First American history and culture. Discover more at www.fictioncourses.com/americanindians

Free report “5 Stereotypes to Avoid When Writing about Native Americans” http://fictioncourses.com/stereotypes

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fictioncourses

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fictioncourses/


RESOURCES

Free World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

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Get support for your fiction writing by a novelist and writing teacher and coach. Schedule an exploratory call here and see if Beth can support you today: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/discovery-call/


ABOUT BETH BARANY

Beth Barany, an award-winning fantasy and science fiction novelist, teaches novelists how to write, edit, and publish their books as a coach, teacher, consultant, and developmental editor.

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Transcript

Transcript for Represent Native Peoples Accurately in Your Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer, Part 2

Are you looking for a way to dig into your world-building for your story?

Then I recommend that you check out my World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers. Now available.

It's at How To Write The Future.com.

Just head on over there. Click, sign up. Put your name and email, and there you go.

That workbook will be delivered to your inbox straight away.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to How to Write the Future podcast.

The focus of this podcast and the focus of my work is to support writers to create positive optimistic stories because when we vision what is possible we help make it so. And part of that visioning is learning the tools of today that help us become better writers for tomorrow.

WELCOME TO SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER - PART 2

Welcome back to my conversation with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. If you haven't yet, please go back and listen to part one. So you'll be all caught up. And then join us here for part two, while I continue my conversation with Sarah.

Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer is a tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. And she has written and published 15 historical fiction books with Native main characters and has over 275 nonfiction articles on Native artists and organizations with representatives from dozens of North American tribes. You can learn more about her in the show notes.

Please join us for part two of our conversation where we talk about accurate representation of native people in our science fiction and fantasy stories.

Enjoy.

So one of the questions that, you have posed for me to pose to you is-- I'm just gonna read it as you stated it, because it offers some things that I'm not super familiar with, but maybe you can explain.

So you shared with me: "In the face of potential controversy, like what came out of the movie Pan where they cast a white woman to play Tiger Lilly. And that's not the first time that kind of thing has happened, why should authors try to include native cultures in their stories?

I didn't see Pan, so I don't know this particular context.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Mm-hmm. Right. We are just in such a vicious cycle it seems like in our society. With Pan and I have not watched the full movie. I wasn't aware of it until a fellow author, sci-fi author, fantasy author, friend of mine, Molly Reader, who is into that genre, and actually, she hadn't seen it either, but she had been following the controversy and she's like, Hey, let's talk about this.

And so I went and she showed me some movie clips and I was just, Oh my. It was very surprising. It was made in 2015. And the actress, I feel bad for her because she received a lot of personal backlash. And she said she, she really didn't wanna play that role. It's interesting in the newest Peter Pan movie, and I'm trying to think of what they've titled that, but they have actually cast a native woman in the role of Tiger Lily.

So they're coming back around once again. So we went from the animated Disney film with a very highly stereotypical and what today would be considered offensive version of Tiger Lily and the native people that were portrayed in that to this whole opposite swing around with doing Pan, and they cast a white woman in that role to try not to be offensive.

That's why they made that choice. But in doing so, they reverted back to the old Hollywood practices of casting non-native people or white people in the role of natives.

We're swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other.

I like to put it in a way that-- we were in one ditch and we've jumped the road and landed in the other ditch, but we're still in a ditch.

Let's get on the road of telling balanced, accurate, respectful stories in that, if you're a non-native author, it doesn't mean you can't write about native people, and it doesn't mean that you should shy away from it. It is a controversial subject though, and I think a lot of authors are aware of that, certainly a lot of the ones that I've spoken to.

The sad thing that I find is there's a lot of fear. Something that I spoke with Jane Friedman recently. I was a guest on her blog, which was fantastic. She is phenomenal. And so I did a post on there. And it received a whole variety of comments. And she was in there on her LinkedIn page. And she told me it's like, we don't need fear.

Fear doesn't help anyone.

We need to have these conversations and tell all perspectives of it and not be jerking to one side or the other and having knee-jerk reactions.

So, you have those that are very adamant that people who not of that culture shouldn't write about a culture. And then you have the other extreme of authors like, you can write anything you darn well please, that kind of thing cuz we're authors and we should be able to write whatever we want.

And I believe there's a balance to that. There's a balance to being able to do both of those because as authors, and this is going to the question of why you shouldn't shy away from including native people, even though there's controversy around it, and you may face that as an author. If you don't include other cultures, you're writing very stripped down bare.

If I was only writing about white Choctaw, mixed-blood woman living in a country town, and that's all I could write about, it would just be a very dull story. We're just not taking our responsibility as writers to educate other people and to just tell 'em a great entertaining story that has this diverse, vibrant cast of characters.

I'm not saying you always have to have a diverse cast of characters. But we don't need to shy away from it just because there's a controversy. The flip side to that is being careful not to have token characters. So not having that native character in there in a token role, just so you have a diverse cast.

That's what we saw a few years ago. And now we're to the other extreme of "don't write about us at all."

So, a fellow native author that I heard about, I don't have a direct quote from her, but it was told to me by another author who heard her say, "Please write about us. You're in our stories. we wanna be in your stories but in a well-done way."

So we don't want to have stories 10 years from now that don't have native people. That's why I encourage authors to not shy away from that despite the controversy and fear surrounding the subject.

BETH BARANY

Yeah, very good point. What are some of the key things to keep in mind specifically, especially for those of us who are inventing worlds, whether they're fantastical, fantasy inspired or science fiction inspired? And I'm doing both.

What are some key components to think of? Like speaking of character development? Speaking of ways to represent culture that feel wholesome and not a caricature. Yeah. Can you speak to some very specific tactical things that novelists can do?

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

I'll go ahead and bring up a couple more examples.

So going back to Pan, and you could put in that on YouTube and catch clips of Pan and Tiger Lily.

One of the things that I saw with the tribe that she's from is they created this giant hodgepodge of multiple cultures. It looked like there was some Asian culture in there, Native. There's this African. So it's almost like we're going to blend it so much that no one will be able to say they were stereotyping this culture. They were drawing from this culture.

Visually what I was seeing, it created this vision of chaos. And it was this chaotic, conflicting tribe that they were trying to do. So they were trying to be so careful with it, it just came out to be a mess.

And so I would encourage authors in world-building, you wanna think about, like how they dressed.

Just for quick reference, in contemporary terms, we have powwows, which anyone is welcome to attend. There's some protocols that you follow. It's a great place to go and see native cultures and regalia up close. That's just one thing-- is never call it costume. It is regalia or traditional dress.

So thinking about that, thinking about where the people are from.

Are they agrarian?

So a lot of people think of teepees and buffalo. The Choctaw, we were gatherers, we were farmers, and so we were an agrarian society.

And often that's reflected in the clothing that the different tribes wear.

So thinking about in your fantasy world of creating it as a whole where it's all in harmony and working together rather than, like I said, what was in Pan, where it's just this disjointed, there's no connections, there's no rhyme or reason. It's just chaos.

So thinking about the type of society-- were they near the ocean?

You talked about California tribes. And in Washington State, I've interviewed a lot of native artists of that way. And the sea and the ocean, that's a huge part of their culture. It's a part of their art. It's a part of their dress. It's a part of who they are.

And so thinking about geographically-- You're creating this fantasy world. What can you draw from to create this harmonious world that they're living in?

That's a little bit on the big picture side.

I could say about languages too. I'll point out the Mandalorian. That was another one that we assessed that I haven't seen.

There was an episode set in this old west town, this wild west town, and you had the Marshal and you had this conflict between the people groups-- the townspeople and what were representative basically like the indigenous groups. So the classic setup like that.

BETH BARANY

Mmmhmm.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

I think they did a lot of things really well from the clips that I saw. What threw me off just because language and language preservation's been such a big part of the people that I know and talk to is they use a lot of sign language, they quote indigenous people, the warriors, which was fine.

We did use a lot of sign languages. It's been overdone. So again, if you're gonna use that, find a fresh way to do it. But they also incorporated this grunting almost as part of their language and mixed in there. That just threw me off because indigenous languages are so beautiful, and our culture's so interwoven in those. And just having that grunting, almost caveman-like indistinction deal. So that was the only thing that I really faulted from the clips that I saw.

So just being cautious again about stereotypes and things that seem perfectly normal because it's what we grew up seeing on movies and TV shows and cartoons and just really questioning every aspect of that.

The more you do your research and do things like hopefully go to native events or watch 'em on YouTube, powwows, and things like that, those things will start standing out.

BETH BARANY

That's really great. I love what you're saying both about really grounding whatever culture you're being inspired by in the earth, in whatever background those peoples are coming from.

In my young adult adventure fantasy, I have in the third book, my character goes out into this area that's basically desert.

And I based the culture on the Berber culture, which I had been connected to, and knew people and lived with people and went there. And so I felt okay with using words from that culture and using some things from that culture, but then adding in some other things.

And making them a desert people and really thinking through-- well, if you're a desert person, these are the things you know how to do. This is how you treat your animals. This is how you forage. This is how you set up camp.

So that's just one example

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

-- Yeah.

BETH BARANY

To really make sure it's rooted, and that for a writer that requires us to do some backstory and thinking through, and that it's not just this is what they wear just because, but no, that's because of the materials and their environment and the history and all of that.

Yeah, I love that. And language. I love that too. I spent a lot of time as a novelist inventing sayings and words to try and to create a three-dimensionality. Cuz just like in our own cultures, we have a lot of language that comes from before.

Words don't just -- Well, sometimes they come out of the way we mishear or mispronounce, but they come from somewhere, usually from something-- from a profession or from something that has gone before.

I love that level of thoughtfulness. That's really great. And for people to do their research.

So you have a class that people can take.

Can you tell us a little bit more how your course, a digital course called Fiction Writing American Indians, can help science fiction and fantasy authors and all novelists, because it is geared towards fiction writing, right?

How it can help them tell better and more authentic stories?

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

I just had a follow-up about your stories that you've done and the work that you've done on 'em.

BETH BARANY

Yeah. Do you wanna go ahead and address that?

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Yeah. So I do wanna follow up on you, Beth, and the stories that that you're writing and that you're sharing about.

Everyone listening, I haven't read any of Beth's books yet, but just from what I'm hearing, her heart and her research is she's really doing it right.

And I just wanna tell you, Beth, that I appreciate that. You're one of the authors that I've met, similar to authors that I've met, who just have genuine hearts to get it right in the best way they can. Not because they're trying to check boxes or police society or something, but because you genuinely want to tell, one, the the best story that you can entertaining, entertain your readers and respect them, and then respecting the cultures that you're writing about.

So I just wanna give you a Yakoke Again, thank you for doing that.

BETH BARANY

Oh, Thank you.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

I love hearing the amount of work you put into your books.

BETH BARANY

Oh, thank you so much. And just for a little bit of context, I grew up in a household that celebrated other cultures in terms of music and food, and stories. My mom was handed a lot of native traditions from her grandmother. And my mother also lived in Mexico as a child. And then my father loved history and had studied Italian Reformation Renaissance history, and which is so interesting, and loved telling stories. And both of them were avid readers and storytellers.

And then I myself have lived abroad three times -- in Quebec once and in Paris twice. And I've actually, I've been to the Middle East multiple times and North Africa.

I'm a citizen of the world and I feel like we're all part of the human family. And we all have such beautiful, interesting, challenging sometimes traditions.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

I was gonna say that too, when people talk about you can only write your own culture, you have so many options to choose from. You don't even have to go outside of your culture. You have so many wonderful things in your heritage. So I just thought that was a neat little tidbit.

Of course, we can write about all those different aspects, but you're bringing all of that to your writing and to how you're teaching authors. I just think that's wonderful.

BETH BARANY

And it's fascinating to talk to writers about their ancestry and help them see the diversity that exists already in their own families.

I'm deeply inspired by the past and then of course about where we could go as a humanity.

Thanks for listening everyone.

That's it for part two of my conversation with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. Stay tuned for part three coming next week. See you then.

Thanks for Playing!

Thank you so much, everyone, for listening to my podcast. Your interest and feedback is so inspiring to me and helps me know that I'm helping you in some small way.

So write long and prosper.

Are you stuck and overwhelmed by world-building? Then...

Are you stuck and overwhelmed by world-building?

Then check out my new World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers.

Head over to HowToWriteTheFuture.com and sign up for yours today.

Represent Native Peoples Accurately in Your Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer, Part 3

Are you looking for a way to dig into your world building for your story?

Then I recommend that you check out my World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers. Now available.

It's at How To Write The Future.com.

Just head on over there. Click, sign up. Put your name and email, and there you go. That workbook will be delivered to your inbox straightaway. 

Hey everyone. Welcome back to How to Write the Future podcast.

The focus of this podcast and the focus of my work is to support writers to create positive optimistic stories because when we vision what is possible we help make it so. And part of that visioning is learning the tools of today that help us become better writers for tomorrow.

Welcome back to my conversation with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. If you haven't yet, please do go back and listen to parts one and two, so you will be all caught up and then join us here for part three while I continue my conversation with Sarah.

Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer is a tribal member of the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma, and she has written and published 15 historical novels with Native main characters and has over 275 nonfiction articles on Native artists and organizations with representatives from dozens of North American tribes.

Please join us here for part three of our conversation, where we talk about her course on how to create accurate representations of native peoples in our science fiction and fantasy stories.

Enjoy.

Part 3 of Represent Native Peoples Accurately in Your Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer

So, let's talk about your course. You have a digital course called Fiction Writing American Indians.

How can your course help fiction writers?

And since my audience is mostly science fiction and fantasy authors, how can your course help us tell better, more authentic stories?

Maybe tell us a little bit about the structure of what people will learn and, if there's assignments, or how does the course run?

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Oh, I love that. I love the opportunity to share about it. It's a course that I wanted to create for several years.

My mother told me, you need to do it. So I did. Finally.

She really encouraged me to put out all of the information that I've gained and learned over the years and share it with other authors cuz she's like, they need it, they need that help.

And I was hearing that cry at conferences and at writing workshops of people who really lacked resources when it comes to writing about Native Americans or American Indians.

So I created Fiction Writing American Indians.

It's a digital course and it's self-paced. It's about four hours long, but I broke it into bite size videos that you can consume again at your own pace.

And I did that because, as we've already been talking about here, this isn't an easy topic. There aren't quick yes or no answers. There's not do it like this and you're done.

It also gets heavy whenever we're talking about historical trauma and the things that have gone on with my people for all of these years since first contact.

So, I deal with some heavy stuff, but it also again is broken into short videos so that you can consume them just a bit at a time, process 'em. There's no writing assignments. You're taking in the information. I give links and resources, so that you can take it and apply it to your own writing.

I start off with terminology, which we can touch on. And you touched on a little bit about First Nations with Canada.

A lot of people think it's just completely taboo to say the word Indian. it's actually not, but there's certain context and ways of using it because it has been used as a derogatory term for so long.

So I spend about 45 minutes just on terminology because it's such an in-depth and controversial. again creates fear. And I want to alleviate that fear. Also knowing that not everyone is going to agree. I talk about that, just so that authors have that heads up, have that view of how they can approach writing these stories.

Then I go into the practical. I go into how do you actually write and research native people?

This isn't a study on Native Americans. It's not an American Indians course, as in all about all the different tribes because there are over 500 nations here. I'm certainly not an expert in all of them.

And that would take years for you to go through something like that.

So this is more how to find the people who are familiar with the history and culture of the tribe you're wanting to focus on or tribes and how to respectfully approach them; do your homework beforehand; to make contacts with reliable sources, hopefully within the tribe if you can; and learning to distinguish between what is a reliable source and what isn't, and how to vet out those things because there's controversy even among cultural experts.

And so I talk about how to deal with that, and what are the steps you can take, and what their responsibilities are as a writer. Which the short answer I could give is that you're gonna do your research and do the best you can, and then that's sometimes as far as you can take it.

So, I go through all of that.

I talk about stereotypes, which your listeners can go download my free ebook actually on five stereotypes to avoid when writing about Native Americans. You can find that at: fictioncourses.com/stereotypes, and that'll take you directly to the ebook and you can download that.

I've gotten wonderful feedback on it. It's not just a fluff download. it's very short. You can read it in one sitting, but it gives you some very practical views of some stereotypes that we may not think about or a different way of thinking about them, and then what your solution is to avoid those.

So you can go download that again at fictioncourses.com/stereotypes. In the course I go more in depth in each of those five stereotypes, and I also cover seven more. So there's a total of 12 stereotypes in there.

I go through again, resources, archives, tribal experts, and then I talk about how to attend native events such as a pow wow and what the protocols are.

So, cause I know, again, you have that fear element. You have that apprehension of, can you actually approach a native person and ask them questions?

So I believe there's proper ways of doing that and ways that just in general, as authors, that's going to get you the best results.

I say the best results. Sometimes though those are the more difficult aspects. So I go into that in the course and making those distinctions. It's in part three parts.

So the first part is setting up the terminology and the difficulties in the past of the historical traumas of Native people and learning about them in a general sense.

And then I go into the writing and researching phase. That's the big chunk where we're really doing a lot of our work.

I end it with part three, and that's publishing options. So I talk about the publishing journeys of my own books.

Some of the challenges that we're having today in traditional publishing with non Natives who want to include Native characters. There's controversy and there's conflict there. So I talk about some of those issues and how you might address them in your publishing. I did have one of the authors who went through the course. She's hybrid. She's traditional and indie published. Her editor really wanted her to get a sensitivity reader for her Native characters.

She was cautious about that. I understand and I actually encourage authors to not go the sensitivity reader route. We can talk about that if you want. She told her publisher that she had taken my course, and so her publisher felt a lot more comfortable with the research and the work that she had put in to doing her story.

That's not a guarantee that your publisher's gonna be like, oh, you took the course, you get a free pass. But that is something that you're showing people, your editors, your publishers, that you're putting in the effort to do your research.

So in the course there we're talking about publishing options and really helping authors go through that, the complete journey of if they're going to tackle writing about American Indians, of how they can do that respectfully and go through the whole process from the understanding to the writing and research to the final publishing aspects.

BETH BARANY

That sounds wonderful. I love how you've broken that down into three parts.

I would like to talk about Sensitivity Reader because I actually did get some support with that in the current series because I have an important secondary character who uses Spanish.

I had never really done a sensitivity reader and I thought, This person was willing. And I should say also-- caveat, I grew up here in Northern California where Spanish was spoken around me all the time, and my mother, like I said, was in Mexico as a child for six months, and she taught us basic Spanish, very basic, when I was a child.

I had that in the house as well as some other languages. My experience of it was eye-opening in that I was asked not to italicize my Spanish, my foreign words, specifically Spanish because it is so prevalent, so much more prevalent, especially here in California. I took that to heart because it is all around me. It's also a part of my character's life too.

So I realized, oh, this is just part of her every day. I don't need to call it out. And that's just one little switch that I decided to make after thinking about the feedback.

So I'm curious about your take on sensitivity readers. You were saying you don't recommend it and maybe a little bit about that.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Sure. Yeah. That's one of the things is I think it's more coming down to the term and the idea behind it with sensitivity readers. What you did, and I know you probably got other feedback, and what I do encourage authors to do is to have cultural experts or people who are first in the culture, read your manuscript for things like that, for fact checking.

If you know basic Spanish and you use the term that you think's okay. And they're like, oh, that's really just, if you're like really familiar with someone, you wouldn't just use that with a stranger. And you might have used it in that context. So I know whenever I was going through Spanish, that was one of the things with that.

With the italics, I know that's been coming up even with Choctaw, I do still italicize, but typically just with the first instance.

And I mainly do that to let the reader know there's a glossary. And if I can, I put the meaning of the phrase in the actual story so that they have that right there and they're not taken out of the story.

So with sensitivity readers specifically, my concern is that, authors are relying very heavily on them. And I know of some authors who have scrapped their entire book. With that, and it may have needed that. I don't know. I can't judge that. I do know that with sensitivity readers, you're only getting one person's perspective, representing an entire culture and people. That's my concern, is that you have one person who's saying, this is offensive. You can't include this, you should do that.

They're only that one person speaking for an entire tribe, history, race, culture that has so much more. I don't know that it could be contained in one person. And so that's why I caution authors that before they scrap their manuscript or really trying to please one person's perspective, you can get out of balance.

And you can, one, just have an unbalanced perspective in your story of that culture. And then two, end up unbalancing your story for the readers and taking away, some of the aspects that, that would've really impacted your readers in a positive way. So that's my caution with the term sensitivity readers.

But I do encourage authors to, if they can have someone within the tribe read their manuscript, there's a lot of language departments now and cultural departments, historic preservation departments. I work with all of those in the Choctaw Nation and they read my manuscripts before I publish.

I definitely encourage authors to get those eyes on there because again, you may have stereotypes in there that you had no idea it was a stereotype. You didn't even know to ask or to research that.

So if you have the opportunity to have someone read it and point those things out, that is really gold. And I do encourage authors to do that.

BETH BARANY

That's wonderful. What I hear you saying is it's not just one person's perspective you want. You want a multiple perspective. I really love what you said was the culture doesn't reside in just one person.

I think that's a big takeaway too, for people to realize that our cultures are made up of multiple people and the history. There's just so many aspects.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Mm-hmm.

BETH BARANY

Yeah.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Mm-hmm. And sometimes it comes down to the family and how they were raised and there may be things that are specific to their family that's not representative of the entire culture, or they're missing those things from other families that are a part of the culture as a whole.

So, yeah, that's why I encourage getting multiple perspectives#

BETH BARANY

That's wonderful

So as we start to wrap up here, I was curious, can people approach you for coaching or consulting or a read through their manuscript?

In addition to your course, what other ways do you help writers?

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

That's a great question. At this point, I don't do one-on-one consulting, and I don't do sensitivity reading or reading manuscripts because again, I'm, I'm Choctaw and that's what I'm most familiar with is our Choctaw history and culture.

We talked a little bit about Lakota earlier. I do know some things about Lakota history and culture, but if someone came to me and they have a story with a Lakota character. I wouldn't be qualified to give input or to give that kind of feedback.

One thing I am doing though, beyond my course, which I don't know if even gave the address is - fictioncourses.com/AmericanIndians for the course. One of the things that I've added, to that-- an additional training is my Native Reads Analysis Workshops

What I'm doing with those that's being very beneficial for writers is I'm going through novels that have Native main characters. I've highlighted several sections.

This is when I say, someone is romanticizing American Indians. Here's an example of this.

Or typically what I'm doing is I'm more on the positive side of here's how they didn't do that. And it was done really well in that, here's where they don't have that historical-only view, or here's the wise guide, but it's the grandfather and here's the fresh way that they have twig snapping in the forest kind of thing.

So I'm like, here's some good examples of how the author was able to incorporate the Native history and culture into that.

So my hope is to do a fantasy book, a Native reads analysis on that because I know, again, I have so many fantasy and sci-fi authors who reach out and contact me.

People are always free to email me. I do my best to answer questions and again, to alleviate some of those fears that authors have around writing Native characters because we need more people telling stories of hope and accurate stories of our tribal nations, our First Nations here, and first people of the land.

BETH BARANY

That's wonderful. I love that. I'm so grateful that you could come onto my show today, onto my podcast.

As we close, is there any final remarks that you wanna encourage writers, any final pieces that we didn't yet talk about that you'd like to end us with?

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER

Oh, oh. I really appreciate you having out me on Beth.

And I will just leave authors with-- and we think about the culture today and the controversies that surround writing about Native people, I encourage you to do your research, do your best writing, do everything you can. And then ultimately, I believe authors should be judged based on their writing and not on their race.

So regardless of what your heritage is, do your very best writing as you would for whatever story that you're telling. And I hope the best for you. Do reach out to me if you have any questions and Yako key.

Thank you Beth, so much for having me on. This has been so fun.

SARAH ELISABETH SAWYER 

Oh, thank you so much, Sarah. And everyone, please check out Sarah's links.

Thanks for listening everyone.

That's it for the third part of my conversation with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you'll contact Sarah with your questions. And I will see you in the next episode.

***

Thanks for listening everyone.

That's it for the third part of my conversation with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you'll contact Sarah with your questions. And I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you so much, everyone for listening to my podcast. Your interest and feedback is so inspiring to me and helps me know that I'm helping you in some small way.

So write long and prosper.

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