Monday, March 19, 2012

New Pow Wow Highway

Wounded Knee... Leonard Peltier... The poorest people in America with a chronic 80% unemployment rate... Descendants of Crazy Horse, Sacajawea, Geronimo, Pocahontas, Ira Hayes, Jim Thorpe...

These are some of the historic and modern names, places, ideas, and epochal events in America covered in "The New Powwow Highway" (in paperback and kindle on Amazon), by David Seals, the author and producer of the underground classic film "Powwow Highway," produced by George Harrison for Handmade Films in 1989. Widely known and even beloved by Native Peoples, the film received rave reviews when it opened to a limited release, spawning other successors like "Dances With Wolves" and "Incident at Oglala."

"Irresistible ... inspired ... Deeply satisfying," wrote the Los Angeles Times.

"The book is a comic masterpiece," wrote Edward Hower in the New York Times, Nov. 1992, about the sequel novel "Sweet Medicine" (Crown/Random House, NY, 1992).

"Seals gives readers a rare glimpse of some genuine Indian humor while presenting issues important to Indian America today... lots of fun to read... highly recommended." - Library Journal

"Seals takes us into places where Indians live. Not yesterday, but today." - Denver Post

"Outrageous, imaginative, and very funny." - Leslie Marmon Silko, Native author of "Almanac of the Dead," and "Storyteller"

"The New Powwow Highway" supplements the rollicking comedy and adventures of the first novel with a more factual, non-fiction journey with the author who personally experienced some of the most important historical events in the history of the American West from 1971 to the present, as a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

He helped run supplies and supporters into the Wounded Knee encampment in 1973, and was there when the police tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed peaceful marches for religious indigenous rights in Colorado, Mexico, Hawaii, and Canada. His friends numbered the genius Kiowa artist T.C.Cannon, actors John Trudell and Irene Bedard, legendary activists Steve Robideau, Nilak Butler, Winona LaDuke, Wolverine, Pedro Bissonette, and many others.

As an actor he played Sitting Bull at the Third Eye Theatre in Denver, and met great spiritual elders like Chief Frank Fools Crow who came to see the play 5 times, with many Lakota elders and spiritual leaders, who invited him to Sweat Lodge and Sundance and Pipe Ceremonies on many Reservations around the country. He was welcomed into Native Councils as a descendant of the Huron Nation in Quebec.

StagePeaks is proud to announce the development of this phenomenal book into an open-ended TV mini-series, with chapters at famous AIM Conferences in Chihuahua, Mexico, dealing with border disputes and druglords assaulting peaceful Native communities; AIM urban patrols in Minneapolis and Santa Fe protecting women from abuse; esoteric Apache dances to Spirits in Texas and Oklahoma, and Arizona; the jubilant reaction of Wounded Knee warriors when Marlon Brando refused his 1973 Oscar because of the hundreds of racist Hollywood movies; and so many other hilarious and tragic episodes in Nebraska, Wyoming, Nicaragua (where Ward Churchill and Russell Means betrayed the Native peoples), and the shootout with the RCMP at Lake Gustafson in British Columbia in 1995.