Sea of Grass: A Family Tale from the American Heartland

Allan Houser Art Park

Join Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma citizens, author Walter Echo-Hawk and Kevin Gover, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in a lively discussion on historical fiction novel The Sea of Grass: A Family Tale from the American Heartland. Echo-Hawk’s newest novel is inspired by real people and events that were shaped by the land, animals, and plants of the Central Plains and by the long sweep of Indigenous history in the grasslands. Major events are presented from a Pawnee perspective to capture the outlook of the Echo-Hawk ancestors. The oral tradition from ten generations of Echo-Hawk’s family tell the stories of the spiritual side of Native life and give voice to the rich culture and cosmology of the Pawnee Nation. The author will sign books after the reading.

Author, attorney, and legal scholar Echo-Hawk practices law in Oklahoma. He was “The Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals” at the University of Hawaii (2018). He is the author of The Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights In Native America and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2013), In The Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Cases Ever Decided (2010), and the award-winning Battlefields and Burial Grounds (1994).