Whirlwind is a Spirit Dancing is an anthology of poems based on traditional Native American songs and stories from different tribes across North America. Collected by the renowned poet, historian, and folklorist Natalia Belting (1915 - ), the poems are rich in vivid imagery, showing how Native Americans creatively interpret the wonders of the natural world. Piquing children's inherent curiosity, the poems encourage an imaginative exploration of the world around them. The lavish, dramatic illustrations and decorative motifs by Leo and Diane Dillon are perfect complements to the fascinating text. The Dillons are winners of two Caldecott Medals and multiple Boston Globe-Horn Book and Coretta Scott King awards.

Anxious to be given a name as strong and brave as that of his father, a proud Lakota Sioux grows into manhood, acting with careful deliberation, determination, and bravery, which eventually earned him his proud new name: Sitting Bull. Being named Slow and growing up in the shadow of a great warrior hardly dwarfed the prospects of this protagonistàBruchacÆs sensitively told history of Sitting BullÆs coming-of-age reassures young boys that success comes through effort, not birth. --Booklist Satisfying for its attention to historical and multicultural issues; stirring in its consummate storytelling. --Publishers Weekly The pictures evoke a sense of timelessness and distance, possessing an almost mythic quality that befits this glimpse into history. --Horn Book

Joseph Bruchac is a storyteller an author whose works drawn upon his Native American background. He grew up in New York near Sarasota Springs where he lived with his grandparents. Those early years provided an opportunity to listen to them and all of their friends telling traditional stories. In the early days tribal story tellers would sit in the center of a circle surrounded by their listeners. Frequently storytelling would begin with a song of greeting accompanied by drums. Storytelling is traditionally a winter event and would stop in the summer and wouldn't start until the first frost. Bruchac reminded his audience that the tales he tells are different than those published in the books, because storytelling is a different art form.

All of his books have been well received and highly praised. Bruchac has a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School and has won numerous awards including the Parent's Choice Award, the American Book Award, the Skipping Stones Honor Award for Multicultural Children's Literature.  More information on Joseph Bruchac can be found at www.josephbruchac.com.

Art the cat is the star character in this feline adventure. Learn the names of beautiful flowers along with an appreciation of a garden's enchantment. Children will discover the animals that Ellen Jean Diederich has woven into the flowerbeds. If you were a cat playing hide and seek where is the first place you would go? In the back of the book is a photo guide to help readers identify flowers.

The artistry and imagination of Ellen Jean Diederich springs from a gifted palette and wanders seamlessly from the poignant and adorned, to soft comforting dreamy fields, rococo settings, and delightful whimsical edges. Her creations suggest a timeless reflection of essential impressions, honed by her extensive travels, and tempered by a sense of visualization that is unburdened, garden fresh, and real.
From the beginning Ellen’s family complimented her on houses, bushes, trees, and farm critters that she drew as a nine-year-old girl. After high school she went on to Minnesota State University Moorhead where she graduated with a B.F.A. in Fine Art and a B.A. in Art Education, going on to win numerous national and regional awards. To help pay for college, Ellen worked as a portrait artist. Not only did this experience help pay the bills; she greatly improved her drawing skills. Soon after college she married Paul and had two girls, Monica and Brittany. She has a signature membership in TWSA-Transparent Watercolor Society of America, and RRWS –Red River Watercolor Society.
In addition to her own art, Ellen instructs her much-acclaimed adult watercolor workshops in North Dakota and many other states. Ellen frequently speaks on the creative process before service clubs, teacher groups, and career fair seminars. 

Her book, the Ben Franklin Award-winning Where’s Petunia?, is a full-color hardcover children’s book. The playful story follows the adventure of two cats, Art and Petunia, featuring Ellen’s original watercolors. In her most recent book Progressive Painting, Your Creative Journey, she shares insightful tips for successful painting. The book is designed to help artists at any level build their creative processing.
Ellen feels her paintings come alive through the comparisons she makes between colors, shapes, shades, and lines. One inspiration for her artistic comparisons came from the playful teasing of her mother who would often say, “Don’t stand next to the Prom Queen and you’ll look better.” While this may not be the most flattering comparison for Ellen, she gained insight. Now she is able pass this insight on in a gentler manner, “Instead of using all the pretty colors, I use many related dull tones to enrich the pallet. My interest is in the relationships between my subjects and the space they are in and very much how the shapes touch each other. I’m not going for perfection–if I find humor I try to share that, otherwise I prefer to show the beauty of these differences.”

When a soldier's work takes him half-way around the world, he enlists the help of the North Star for a nightly game of catch with his son. Night Catch is a timeless story that connects families while they are apart and offers comforting hope for their reunion.

Brenda started writing and dreaming of being an author as a young girl.  And although she has spent years filling notebooks and journals with stories and ideas, Brenda only began to publish her work in 2003.  Her first book, I Want One Too!, was inspired in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Brenda threw in a few ideas from watching her own kids and hit on a universal theme–tagalong siblings.  It has been very popular with children and was student-selected as the winner of the 2005 ELBA award in Grand Forks, ND. 
Brenda’s second book, Night Catch, is the story of a father and son who are apart because the father is a soldier working on the other side of the world.  In it they use the North Star to play a game of catch each night. It was written when her brother was in Iraq, away from his sons, for a year. It struck a chord with families and is in its ninth printing.
Her third publication is a family resource booklet offering tips on building a love of reading in your home.  It is titled Reading at Home A-Z, 26 family reading habits.
Hope Weavers, a second book with military characters, was released in June of 2009.  In it, the daughter of a soldier wonders why her dad has to go away. She finds the answer watching a caterpillar build a protective cocoon.
SOUPer Readers a Teacher’s Guide to Supporting Family Reading is due out this spring.  Later this year Megan and Will from her first book will be back in Me First!
Brenda was a reading and language arts teacher in Ohio and Washington before having children of her own.  Her love of children’s literature was cemented in the classroom reading wonderful books with kids. Brenda visits schools on a regular basis to talk about writing and publishing books.

The mystical and the natural blend superbly in this first children's book by the accomplished literary novelist Louise Erdrich. The eccentric, well-traveled grandmother of two young kids decamps in mid-vacation, riding a porpoise to Greenland and leaving behind a trove of strange treasures and artifacts including a collection of bird's nests and three old eggs which hatch, marvelously, into passenger pigeons. Erdrich wields her Native American ancestry and her worldiness--Grandmother owns an original Klee--to give young readers a sense of the world's wonders and the wisdom of the elders, the old wisdom of the natural cycles that we are losing. A letter from Grandmother, promising to return, winds up this fetching tale. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony. She was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth.

She is the author of a number of award-winning novels, including Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages.

Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. The Blue Jay's Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.

This beautifully illustrated biography of the Shoshone girl, Sacagawea, tells of her life from age eleven when she was kidnapped by the Hitdatsa. At age fifteen she married Charbonneau, a much older Canadian fur trapper, and accompanied him on the journey with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Her skills and knowledge of Native American languages were invaluable assets to the Corps of Discovery. During the expedition she was briefly reunited with her long lost family. The author includes speculation about Sacagawea’s later life about which very little is known. It is known that her son Pomp developed a special bond with Captain Clark and was eventually sent to live with him a few years after the end of the expedition.

Lise Erdrich was born in Minnesota, lives in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and has worked in Indian health and education for over twenty years. A graduate of the University of North Dakota and of Minnesota State University-Mankato, she is the author of the children’s picture books Sacagawea and Bears Make Rock Soup. Stories from Night Train, her first collection for adults, have received many awards including the Minnesota Monthly Tamarack Award, the Many Mountains Moving Flash Fiction Contest, and Best of Show at the North Dakota State Fair, where the story “Zanimoo” was exhibited between a pig and the pickles, jams, jellies and preserves. Erdrich’s essays and stories have also appeared in several journals and anthologies including Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, and Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours.

This authentic Sioux Indian legend illustrates the disastrous consequences when greed destroys the balance between humans and nature.

In the fall, when Heetunka the Bean Mouse gathers earth beans for her underground storehouse, the women from the tipi encampment come to trade suet or dried green corn for beans. One Dakota woman wants some beans to add to her stew. Disregarding the lessons of her grandmothers, she takes every bean. offering nothing in exchange. That night, she dreams of a spirit scolding her for her selfishness; her greediness returns to haunt her when a fierce prairie fire destroys her tipi. This authentic Native American legend is handsomely illustrated with detailed. Evocative color paintings by the award-winning artist Shannon Keegan.

Desta's grandmother is ill in faraway Ethiopia, and her father must return to his native land to help out. As he cuddles his daughter on his lap, he describes the place of his birth. The child pairs his experiences with hers and wonders whether the cowbells he remembers sound like the wind chime on their front porch. The man's love and yearning for home is obvious, and the little girl worries that he may never return to her. Finally reassured that he will come back, she asks him so many questions about his childhood home that when he sings in his native tongue, she begins to see "-a pink cloud of flamingos rippling up from a dark blue lake-." Lewis captures the lyricism and rich imagery of the text with his evocative, realistic watercolors. Soft browns, blues, greens, and pinks predominate in paintings that flow to the edge of pages for scenes set here, and fade off into white for those set in the Ethiopia of memory and longing. Text and illustrations combine to immerse readers in the sights and sounds of the African homeland, and the beautifully crafted whole gives fresh meaning to the terms "family," "separation," and "home”.

Jane Kurtz was born in Portland, Oregon, but when she was two years old, her parents moved to Ethiopia. Jane grew up in Maji, a small town in the southwest corner of the country. Since there were no televisions, radios, or movies, her memories are of climbing mountains, wading in rivers by the waterfalls, listening to stories, and making up her own stories, which she and her sisters acted out for days at a time.

When she was in fourth grade, she went to boarding school in Addis Ababa. Her family left Ethiopia in the late 1970s, but a decade later, first her brother and his family and then her older sister and her family went back to teach in a girls' school in Addis Ababa.
By the time Jane came back to the United States for college, she felt there was no way to talk about her childhood home to people here. It took nearly twenty years to finally find a way - through her children's books. Now she often speaks in schools and at conferences, sharing memories from her own childhood and bringing in things for the children to touch and taste and see and smell and hear from Ethiopia. "It's been a healing and inspiring experience," she says, "to re-connect with my childhood and also be able to help people know just a little of the beautiful country where I grew up."
E. B. Lewis illustrated her first Ethiopian story, Fire on the Mountain. He used photographs that Jane sent him and photographs which he took of Ethiopian families in his home city of Philadelphia to help him create the illustrations in the book.
When Jane's brother came back from teaching in Ethiopia and told her about the street boys who taught him to raise pigeons, she and her brother, Christopher, wrote Only a Pigeon, a book that was published in spring 1997. Earl Lewis and Chris Kurtz traveled to Ethiopia in 1995 so Earl could do the art research for the story.
Floyd Cooper illustrated the second story, Pulling the Lion's Tail, using photographs and his own imagination to make the story of Almaz come to life.
Since the publications of her first books Jane has published a book each year. She has written several more picture books, a novel, and resources for educators. Part of her time is spent visiting in schools. She worked in classrooms with elementary and high school students for over ten years and then for another ten years at the University of North Dakota where most of her students, especially the ones on the UND football team, were bigger than she was...so she is very comfortable working in classrooms.
Jane currently lives in Kansas with her husband, Leonard Goering, and where both of them enjoy visits from their children.  Together they have traveled to Ethiopia, the site of one of the literacy projects Jane supports.

The Star People Book Description
Sister Girl and her brother Young Wolf wander away from their village and soon find themselves far out in the surrounding prairie. They sit down in the grass and watch the clouds passing above billow to form an eagle, horses, and other creatures. Suddenly, animals begin to race past the children, followed by a wall of fire! Fleeing along with the frightened beasts, Sister Girl and Young Wolf save themselves by tumbling into a shallow stream.

The fire leaves behind ash and a barren, forbidding landscape. The children realize that they are hopelessly lost. Night is coming- how will they get home to their parents? And why are the evening stars dancing so?

Drawing upon traditional Lakota art, S.D. Nelson's illustrations bring to life a memorable new legend about the Star People.
 
Black Elk's Vision Book Description
Told from the Native American point of view, Black Elk’s Vision provides a unique perspective on American history. From recounting the visions Black Elk had as a young boy, to his involvement in the battles of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, as well as his journeys to New York City and Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, this biographical account of Black Elk—an Oglala-Lakota medicine man (1863–1950)—follows him from childhood through adulthood. S. D. Nelson tells the story of Black Elk through the medicine man’s voice, bringing to life what it was like to be Native American in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The Native people found their land overrun by the Wha-shi-choos, or White Man, the buffalo slaughtered for sport and to purposely eliminate their main food source, and their people gathered onto reservations. Through it all, Black Elk clung to his childhood visions that planted the seeds to help his people—and all people—understand their place in the circle of life. The book includes archival images, a timeline, a bibliography, an index, and Nelson’s signature art.

S. D. Nelson is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the Dakotas. “My people are known as the Sioux or Lakota. During the 19th century they were renowned as the Horse People of the Great Plains. My ancestors were also the people of the Buffalo, for the Buffalo gave them most of their food, their warm robes, and the lodge skins of their tipis. My people followed great herds of them across the vast grasslands beneath and endless blue sky.” Nelson’s artwork appears on book jackets, greeting cards, and CD covers, and his paintings are held in both private and public collections. He has written and illustrated numerous award-winning children’s books.
S. D. Nelson earned his bachelor’s degree in Art at Minnesota State University at Moorhead. His paintings offer a fresh contemporary interpretation of traditional Lakota images. S. D. has painted extensively on animal skins and bone. He has crafted traditional rawhide drums, beaded on leather and created ledger book drawings. Nelson’s fluid style and traditional Native American imagery combines movement, color, and form into a visual celebration of life.
"On the prairies of Dakota there is only earth and sky. All is grass and clouds, forever. It is a land of brutal beauty, where terrible battles were fought hand to hand, and where at twilight, the song on Sister Meadowlark will make your heart cry. As a boy, my mother told me coyote stories about Iktomi, the Trickster. I learned that the stars were the spirits of my ancestors, that my great-great grandfather, Flying Cloud, still rode his snorting horse along the White Road of the Milky Way. If I looked carefully, Morn said, I would see the Great Bear and the Star That Did Not Turn, The North Star. She told me the Life Force or the Great Mystery is named Wakan Tanka; that all of creation, the four-legged beings, the tall standing trees, even the wind has a spirit and is alive.
I remember one particular summer night... cricket song filled my ears. Then, shimmering overhead, the Northern Lights came dancing, pale green at first, then in ethereal robes of red and gold; spiraling ever upward. Colors vanishing, only to reappear. Although I was staring directly into the heavens, from the corner of my eye, I saw something. The sacred something that Lakota People believe is behind all things. I was only a boy, but I was seeing in a Wakan manner, a sacred way.
My mother, who was a quarter-blood Sioux Indian, taught me at an early age to see the world with both the curious eyes of a child and the wistful eyes of an old man. I learned that morning is the most beautiful time. For at dawn the world is born anew. It is the time when the little flying creatures make their song. The little green growing things are covered in precious dewdrops. At dawn, all is golden. All is beautiful.
I have not forgotten those long ago teachings... `Walk with your vision in your heart. ' The boy with the eyes of an artist was given a gift - to see things in the Wakan manner. In turn, I became a painter and a teller of stories."

Our continuing alphabet journey takes us to North Dakota, the home to such wide-eyed wonders as bison, mosasaurs and the Red River. Every letter in the alphabet is another chapter of a land rich in history, people and nature. Look to the skies for a bald eagle or to the horizon for a Wild Prairie Rose, the state flower. But no matter where children look in P is for Peace Garden, they're sure to find beauty and state pride on every page. This homespun tour of the Roughrider State uses folksy rhymes and in-depth text to share North Dakota's heritage with everyone. One just needs to open its pages to be taken on tour that will take them to Fargo, Bismarck and beyond.

Paying special attention to the flora and fauna as well as the folklore that makes North Dakota a shining jewel in our nation's crown makes this book as important to its people as readers everywhere. Roxane Salonen uses her North Dakota roots to focus on the aspects of the state others rarely hear about. Share in North Dakota's glory and landscape through her glowing prose and illustrator Joanna Yardley's exquisite renderings of a vision rarely seen. P is for Peace Garden: A North Dakota Alphabet is sure to inspire and impress generations of reader for years to come.

Roxane Beauclair was born in Lovell, Wyoming, in 1986.  Shortly thereafter, the family of four moved to Poplar, Montana, on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which provided the main setting for her childhood.
In 1991, she graduated from college in Moorhead, Minnesota, and married her college sweetheart, Troy Salonen. They then moved to the state of Washington, where she worked for nearly five years as a newspaper reporter and editor. She was inspired by her very accomplished co-workers, including a mystery novelist, published poet, and several other extremely talented wordsmiths.
The birth of their first child made the Salonens yearn to be closer to their "homeland," so they relocated back to the Midwest, eventually making their new home in Fargo, North Dakota, where their subsequent four children were born.
In an effort to stay home with their young kids, Roxane took up freelance writing. During this time she also rediscovered children's books and began to revisit her longtime dream of authorship. She met author Jane Kurtz, one of her mentors, at a writing conference at the University of North Dakota in 1999. In the summer of 2002, she attended another conference in Chautauqua, New York, crossing paths with influential children's author and editor, James Cross Giblin, and Clay Winters, president of Boyds Mills Press.
After five years of pursuing publication of her stories, Roxane received a call from Kent Brown of Boyds Mills Press in October 2002 with a request to buy her manuscript, First Salmon, thereby launching her new career as an author.