Lois Beardslee

Native American scholar, author, artist, and civil rights activist Lois Beardslee has won numerous awards for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Women’s Warrior Society. Her artwork is in private and public collections worldwide, including the Smithsonian, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. In addition to painting, printmaking, and book illustration, Beardslee practices rare traditional Ojibwe (Chippewa) art forms, such as sweetgrass basketry, porcupine quillwork, birch bark cut-outs and bitings, and beadwork. An adjunct instructor in communications at Northwestern Michigan College, Beardslee also consults and teaches in sociology, social work, education, literature, and fine arts at universities nationwide.

Lois Beardslee divides her time between the family farm on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula and family bush camps in northern Ontario. The Cottage Book Shop has represented her for many years, carrying her prints, traditional basketry, bark work, and quillwork. We also stock her books Women’s Warrior Society, Not Far Away: The Real-life Adventures of Ima Pipiig (AltaMira Press, 2007. pap $27.95), Rachel’s Children (AltaMira Press, 2004. Pap. $19.95) and Lies to Live By (Michigan State University Press, 2003. pap $19.95). 

$16.95
ISBN-13: 9780816526727
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: University of Arizona Press, 3/2008
The Women’s Warrior Society is a remarkable gathering of characters and voices used to expose truths about Native American life. In tightly woven prose, Lois Beardslee tells stories about people from all over North America and from either side of the line between abused and abuser. Both individual and archetypal, Native and non-Native, male and female, her characters take up arms against widely accepted stereotypes about Native people. The women warriors in these tales have lived through a variety of mishaps, experiencing the consequences brought on by misinformation and the misguided efforts of institutions and individuals. Armed with this experience, they gather in unlikely “sweatlodges”—from kitchen tables to public libraries—transforming into she-wolves who, lips curled, snarl at their own victimization and assert that hope for future generations is maintained through creativity, determination, and the preservation of traditional values. This is political writing at its most honest and creative. Beardslee’s style is poetic and lyrical, and her voice, shifting as it does, both grips us with terrible tone and comforts us with familiar assurance. A fierce call to action, this book reads like a song cycle—both singing to us and demanding that we sing in response. Beardslee creates new strategies and measures of success. Her warriors dance, bark, howl, and transform themselves in unexpected ways that invoke tears, laughter, even awe. They are, above all, driven, successful, and eternally hopeful.

Lies to Live By (Paperback)

$19.95
ISBN-13: 9780870136634
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Michigan State University Press, 6/2003
Lies To Live By brings together two selections of stories by Ojibwe storyteller Lois Beardslee. “Lies to Live By,” a series of interdependent tales, reflects the storyteller’s role in interpreting traditional stories for contemporary audiences, while preserving traditions based not in mysticism but in pragmatism. In “Calm Days,” three generations—the narrator, her grandfather, and her son—spend a week together on a remote island during the course of which they demonstrate the continuity of Ojibwe life. Together these stories weave the contemporary and the traditional to show how cultural diversity can be preserved even as cultural boundaries are transcended.

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ISBN-13: 9780759106901
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Altamira Press, 6/2004

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ISBN-13: 9780759111202
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Altamira Press, 9/2007