Delphine Red Shirt (born 1957) is a Native-American (Oglala Lakota) writer.
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Red Shirt spent her earliest years off the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in a small town in northern Nebraska where she attended public school, learning to speak English for the first time. After her family returned to the reservation, she first attended government schools and later Red Cloud High School, a Catholic high school in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.[1] She attended Regis College at Regis University in Denver, with a major in Accounting and a minor in History.
Red Shirt has been a member of the United States Marine Corps. She served as the Chairperson of the United Nations NGO Committee on the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People, 1995–96, and as the United Nations Representative for the Four Directions Council: International Indigenous Organization with access to the UN from 1994 to 1997. During this time she also received her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies in Creative Writing from Wesleyan University and was an advisor to Native American Students at Yale University.
Recently Red Shirt has served as an Adjunct Professor of American Studies and English at Yale University in the Fall 2001 term and at Connecticut College during the Spring term in 2001 and 2002. She has maintained an extensive schedule of public speaking and appearances and has narrated film for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. She had given interviews on National Public Radio, as well as other radio and television interviews.
She is now Series Editor for The University of Nebraska Press: "Race and Ethnicity in the American West. The series seeks to bridge the gap between old and new western history, and to suggest an alternative that examines the racial and ethnic experience as a primary factor in the establishment of the West as a region, thus nurturing a dynamic, holistic perception of western history. Books published in the series will explore the dynamic interactions between groups over time, with comparative approaches that showcase this interaction as a primary factor in creating the West's unique regional identity.
Redshirt has been a freelance writer and syndicated columnist for Indian Country Today, the Lakota Nation Journal of Rapid City, South Dakota, and the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. She is now a student in the doctoral program in Native American Studies at the University of Arizona and also has 2 daughters: Kirsten, Megan & 1 son named Justin and has a husband named Richard who is the dean of Stanford