1931–1991.  Joseph Eagle Elk was an effective and highly respected traditional Lakota healer. He practiced for nearly thirty years, treating serious physical and mental illnesses among the people of the Rosebud Reservation and elsewhere. In 1990 he began collaborating on his memoir with Gerald Mohatt, a close friend and cross-cultural psychologist.

Debra Earling is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in Montana. She is currentiy a graduate student in English at Cornell University.

1858-1939.  Ohiyesa was born on a reservation near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. He was the son of the Dakota Many Lightnings and his mixed-blood wife, Mary Nancy Eastman, who died at his birth. Mary Eastman was the daughter of the painter Captain Seth Eastman. His name at birth was “Hakadah,” the "pitiful last", because he became the last of his three brothers and one sister when his mother died. In his early youth he received the name Ohiyesa (Winner). During the Minnesota Uprising of Dakota in 1862-63, Ohiyesa was cared for by paternal relatives who fled into North Dakota and Manitoba. When he was later reunited with his father, now using the name Jacob Eastman, and older brother John, the Eastman family established a homestead in Dakota Territory.

Eastman received his medical degree from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1890 and began medical service for the Office of Indian Affairs later that year. Eastman served at Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, and was an eyewitness to both events leading up to and following the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890.

Pine Ridge was located only miles above the massacre site, and Eastman treated Native American victims of the United States Army's attack. Eastman continued work at various posts as reservation physician until 1903. He served as president of the Society of American Indians following World War I, then joining Carlos Montezuma in directing a Society campaign to abolish the Office of Indian Affairs. During the 1920s, Eastman served the government as an inspector of reservation conditions. He died on January 8, 1939.

In both his writing and his life, he was a strong advocate for Native American causes and worked to set up YMCA units for Indians across the country. He spent much of his life trying to reconcile the opposing values and beliefs of white society and Sioux culture.   For his many efforts he was given an Indian Achievement Award in 1933.

Brummett Echohawk was born in 1922 in Pawnee, Oklahoma. He was a World War II combat veteran and served in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. Echohawk studied art at the Detroit School of Art and Crafts in 1945 and at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1945-48. He studied Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. He has had his paintings shown in Pakistan and India, through the Art in the Embassy Program, State Department. As an actor Echohawk has appeared in the role of Sitting Bull in Kopit's play Indians in Tulsa, Fort Worth. He is an authority of the Custer Battle at Little Big Horn.

Roger Echo-Hawk is a Pawnee tribal historian who has worked to gather and preserve recorded oral history and other materials pertaining to Pawnee origins and history.  His books include Battlefields and burial grounds : the Indian struggle to protect ancestral graves in the United States, and Kara Katit Pakutu : exploring the origins of Native America in anthropology and oral traditions.

His poetry has been published internationally in A Nation Within (New Zealand, 1983). He is a founding member of the Northwest Native American Writers Association. His plays have won awards in Oregon and he has written a movie script and wants to write movies and for the theater.

Author of the 1999 novel Madchild running, Keith Egawa is an enrolled member of the Lummi Indian Nation, is a native of Seattle. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington. Egawa currently works for the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.

Demus Elm is an oral historian and Haudenosaunee expert. With Harvey Antone and edited by Floyd G. Lounsbury and Bryan Gick Elm put into record for the first time The Oneida Creation Story the oldest tradition of the Onyota'aka (People of the Standing Stone).  It is considered one of the greatest pieces of oral literature of Native North America. Ancient elements of Iroquoian cosmology rest at the heart of the saga: Sky-world, the fall of Sky-woman, the creation of Earth on the Turtle's back and the creation of mankind and early society.

Anita Endrezze is a well-known Yaqui artist and writer. Raised in California, Hawaii, Washington, and Oregon, she now makes her home in Spokane, Washington. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University in 1975. She has published poems and stories in a number :of magazines and books including Voices of the Rainbow (Viking Press), Carriers of the Dream Wheeil Harpers Anthology of 20th Century Native Amencan Poetry (both cin Harper & Row), and Songs of This Earth on Turtle's Back (Greenfield Review Press). In 1983 she published two chapbooks: Burning the Pields (Confluence Press) and The North Country (Blue Ciouds Press). Anita's artwork has been used to iiiustrate a number of books on Arnerican Indian writing. She has illustrated the cover of Harpers Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (Harper & Row, 1988) and most recently one of her paintings was chosen for the cover of a special American Indian issue of the Wooster Review. Anita is currently working on a collection of short stories that combine straightforward narratives tinged with "the thread of dreams" and stories told from the point of view of the "Dream-Walker." Anita's writing celebrates the "eternal feminine energy" and tries to "balance the dreaminess of the spiritual with the harder lines of plot and language."

A member of the Turtle Mountain band of Ojibwe, she was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Indian boarding school. She co-founded the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop with Louise Erdrich, her sister. Her books have each been nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards and her writing has received numerous grants and honors. Her degrees are from Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins.

A long-time college teacher, Heid Erdrich taught for more than a decade in the English at the University of St. Thomas. In 2007 she will leave full-time teaching to concentrate on writing and working with Native artists.