Two First Nation writers were winners this weekend at the annual Saskatchewan Book Awards held in Regina.
Dawn Dumont won the City of Regina Fiction Award for her book, Rose’s Run and Ernie Louttit won the Rasmussen, Rasmussen & Charowsky Aboriginal Peoples’ Writing Award for his book, Indian Ernie:
Perspectives on Policing and Leadership.
Dumont is from the Okanese First Nation and uses her experiences from the reserve to help shape her characters and stories.
Rose’s Run is a supernatural comedy about a women who decides to run a marathon and unleashes a demon on her reserve.
She says the editing of the book was the most challenging part of the year-long project.
“In between submitting the book to Thistle Down there was six months, and in that six months, I kind a forgotten about the book,” she says.
“When I came back to it, I was really scared that it sucked, so it was really hard to get started again. I was scared to read it, like, ‘Oh my God this is horrible.’”
Louttit spent 27 years policing the streets of Saskatoon ending his career as a Sergeant.
When he worked with younger police officers he used stories to make his point.
“Someone would always say, ‘you know Sarge, you should write a book,’”
says Louttit. “So I was just kind a sitting home, my wife was working, I was on my back deck and started writing in notebooks short stories, eventually it became a little monster.”
Both authors plan to continue writing and releasing books.
“Second book is coming, hopefully around the first week in June and we’ll see how that goes,” says Louttit. “And I think I might have one more police book in me then after that I might research and write other peoples stories.”
Dumont says her next book will be a fictional account about a First Nations dance troupe touring Europe.
“It’s about all the things that go wrong,” she says. “Indians connecting with other Indians from around the world in the 1970s.”