Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun - Softcover

Velma Wallis, author of the award-winning TWO OLD WOMEN, brings forth another story from the Athabaskans of Alaska. In a cold, harsh country where the sun disappears for much of the long winter, Indians and Eskimos struggle against nature and one another to survive. Against this stark landscape, Wallis skillfully interweaves the stories of two rebels. Bird Girl, an independent young Indian woman, defies her family's expectations by refusing to become a traditional wife and mother. Instead she chooses to brave life on her own as a hunter, risking starvation, isolation, and attacks by her people's enemies, the Eskimos. Along the way she meets Daagoo, a restless young dreamer who leaves behind his homeland to journey souht in search of the legendary Land of the Sun. Readers will be captivated by this profound myth about two young people who wander far from their culture's deeply held traditions and eventually must find a way to come home again.

Velma Wallis was born in Fort Yukon, a remote village of about 650 people in Interior Alaska, near where the Porcupine River flows into the Yukon. Wallis was raised in a tradtional Athabaskan family, one of thirteen children. When she was thirteen, her father died and she left school to help her mother raise her younger brothers and sisters. Later, she passed her high school equivalency exam and moved to a trapping cabin twelve miles from the village, where she learned to live off the land by hunting, fishing, and trapping. Wallis based her first two books, TWO OLD WOMEN and BIRD GIRL AND THE MAN WHO FOLLOWED THE SUN, on the Athabaskan stories her mother told her when she was growing up.