Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun: An Athabaskan Indian Legend from Alaska »

Velma Wallis was born in 1960 in Fort Yukon, a remote village of about 650 people in Interior Alaska. Growing up in a traditional Athabaskan family, Wallis was one of thirteen children. When she was thirteen, her father died and she left school to help her mother raise her younger siblings.

Wallis later moved to her father's trapping cabin, a twelve-mile walk from the village. She lived alone there intermittently for a dozen years, learning traditional skills of hunting and trapping. An avid reader, she passed her high school equivalency exam and began her first literary project—writing down a legend her mother had told her, about two abandoned old women and their struggle to survive.

That story became her first book, Two Old Women, published by Epicenter Press in 1993. As her second book, Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun, went to press, Wallis was living in Fort Yukon with her husband, Jeffrey John, and their two children. The family also spends time in the neighboring village of Venetie.

From the author of the bestselling Two Old Women comes the story of two Native Americans who break the strict taboos of their communal culture in their quests for freedom and adventure in the unknown. For a headstrong young woman, it means defying her family's expectations to brave life on her own. For a curious young man, it means forsaking the safety of his homeland.

West Coast Review of Books

A wonderful read. Wallis's writing is simple yet rich...The story delivers a message of overcoming hardship, of being true to yourself even when it is the most difficult thing to do.