i'm gary johnson, president of the history museum, and with us today is our guest author, alson owinings. we meet a wide array of native people, and we hear them discussing their own lives. please begin the conversation. >> thank you very much, gary, and thank you very much for the chicago lit fest. i'm very happy to be herement i think i wrote this book initially because i was so appalled about theignorance of nonenative people about native people including myself. i set out to find out what i could to help destereotype as what i find as a bad problem for centuries and cooptses today, and initially my idea was well, i will just talk to a few native people and find out what they had to say about their own lives, and then the book became stronger and stronger really, far reaching, and i ended up interviewing the indians of maine to the last chapter in hawaii chanter, and my object at the time was to destereo type people and i thought this would be helpful because i think native americans are stilled harmed by the stereo types about them, but on the other hand, the book became an extended