American Indian Horror Story with Tiffany Midge

I grew up listening to my grandpa telling my sister and me indigenized versions of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I grew up listening to my mom telling us reservation horror tales about the boy with no eyes; of heyoka spirits playing leapfrog in the cornfields; and about ghosts that haunted the basement. Across these lands, many tribes have terrifying tales of creatures and spirits who come out in the dark – Deer Woman, Slenderman, Skin Walker, Rogarou, Windigo, & more.

A talk on how Indigenous stories differ from westernized notions of horror or terror and what these stories have in common.

Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, and was raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. Her book "Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s" was a creative nonfiction finalist for a Washington State Book Award, and a selection for “Spokane Is Reading”. She’s the recipient of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Indigenous Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Simons Public Humanities Fellowship, and an Eliza So Fellowship. A former columnist for Indian Country Today, she taught writing and composition for Northwest Indian College, and holds an MFA from University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in World Literature Today, First American Art Magazine, McSweeney’s, Waxwing, the Offing, GAY Magazine, Okey-Panky, Lit Hub, Massachusetts Review, and more. Her horror/comic collection of poems, Horns, is forthcoming from Spokane’s Scablands Books.