Based on a true story, Daughter of Warriors follows a young Osage woman whose journey is marked by family devotion, forced assimilation, oil wealth, violence, and the enduring search for safety. What inspired you to build the novel around her story?

I grew up in Kansas City where my mother’s best friend – and my Godmother – was a beautiful, generous Osage woman. I adored her. Because of the oil found on the Osage reservation, she was very rich. As an Osage woman she was the target of racism. As a wealthy woman she was the target of fortune seekers. As an orphan and only child, she was alone trying to fight both. When she died in her early forties, I was a typically dramatic — and completely devastated — teenager, and promised her that one day I would write her story. When that time finally came and I started doing research, one of my early discoveries was a newspaper story in the Milwaukee Sentinel, “America’s Richest Indian Heiress Dies of Too Much Money.” It was as racist as it sounds. It was about her mother, Mary. I knew then that I had to write Mary’s story first. Mary is my protagonist, Lucy, in DAUGHTER OF WARRIORS.

The novel vividly portrays Osage life, the oil boom, and the Reign of Terror. What kind of research did you undertake to ensure those events were represented with care and authenticity?

I did research for years. I went to Pawhuska, the capital of Osage County, Oklahoma, and spoke to many. I went to Kansas City (I live in LA now) to revisit the places where the story takes place. I ran everything past my Godmother’s daughter, who is active in Osage and Indigenous issues generally. I spent a very long time online following any thread I could find. And I am now the owner of dozens of books I ordered and read about the Osage, about Native American Boarding Schools, about this country’s First People, and, of course, the Roaring Twenties in Kansas City, where I first encountered the woman who was to become my narrator, Loula Long Combs.

A word about Loula: I fell in love with this indomitable Kansas Citian at about the same time I was learning how strongly many Indigenous People object to the idea of others telling their stories. Loula became my narrator to make it clear that while the story is written by a white woman, I don’t pretend to understand what Lucy— or any other Native American — experienced. But history, as it’s taught in most schools and written in most books, doesn’t truthfully tell the colonization story — or how completely prejudice continues today. And truth is important. It’s the only way we can change the future.

If readers finish the novel remembering one idea or emotion, what do you hope it is?

That, contrary to what we’ve been taught — and seen in most movies and TV series — Colonizers and Settlers weren’t the good guys. Native Americans were here first. They believed God was in everything: rocks and mountains, seas and rivers, all living creatures. They honored everything accordingly. They had sophisticated trade systems with other tribes and Nations. They had a sophisticated culture that worked well for them — but it wasn’t OUR culture. We took their land and killed nearly all of them as we took it. Yes, they fought back. Of course they did. But arrows are no match for bullets. I want readers to realize that colonization was cruel. That white people considered the First People less than human and treated them accordingly. That the way we treat Indigenous People still is unconscionable.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m now writing my Godmother’s story and calling it, at least for now, COYOTE’S EYES. Her mother, frightened for her child’s safety, sent her to a Catholic Boarding School in California. She lived in California for nearly twenty years, allowing me to tell stories of the Tongva tribe and of old Hollywood before she returns to Kansas City. It should be available by the middle of next year.

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