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Eagle Song

Kirsten Norrie

A compelling and deeply personal account of Kirsten Norrie's first ever spirit trip: a physical journey to meet the Native American community in South Dakota aligned with her research into her Highland ancestry; evoking questions of roots, identity and belonging. 
Status: Being funded
Book: Signed First Edition Bundle
£30.00
£30.00

Description

In 2017, Scottish artist and writer, Kirsten Norrie meets Ernie LaPointe, great-grandson of Sitting Bull, the political and spiritual leader of the Lakota. Eagle Song: A Spirit Road Trip is inspired by this reunion; a spirit road trip that traces cultural intersections between their ancestral heritages.

Relationships to land, language, and family are something Native American tribal societies and Scottish Highland clans have in common. While both communities were considered comparably ‘savage’, Norrie sifts through prejudice and coincidences to uncover a shared history of seeing stones and eagle feathers, ghost shirts and ghost plaids, clan and tribe visionaries and lunar cattle rustling.

Accompanied by guides from literature, ethnography and image-making, Eagle Song: A Spirit Road Trip is a unique tapestry of interwoven lineage. This is a story of the visionary practices of peoples seemingly miles apart. It’s a book about home too, and ideas of roots, as Norrie’s travels set her on a quest to thin places and the spaces we inhabit in between.

About the Author

Kirsten Norrie

Kirsten Norrie is a writer, artist and musician. Eagle Song: A Spirit Road Trip is her first full-length non-fiction book based on a trip to record the great-grandson of Sitting Bull, Ernie LaPointe, at his home near Deadwood in 2017.

Also forthcoming from Norrie is a debut novel An American Book of the Dead (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and collection of essays: Scottish Lost Boys (Broken Sleep Books, 2025). She is the author of several critically acclaimed poetry collections and a pamphlet under her Highland matrilineal name MacGillivray: The Last Wolf of Scotland (Red Hen Press 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books 2016), The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) and 'The Demon Tracts' (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Her work has appeared in the TLS, Magma and the Scotsman and on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. In 2024-5 she is the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge and was previously an AHRC Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress and a 2019 recipient of a Fondation Jan Michalski writer residency in Switzerland. The MacGillivray archive is held at the Scottish Poetry Library. 

 Her music has appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction and had coverage in Wire magazine, the Quietusand the Guardian for film soundtracks The Whalebone Box, Swandown (Channel 4/Britdoc, 2012) and By Our Selves (in which she appeared opposite Toby Jones) all by British director Andrew Kötting. She has performed internationally with The Fall, Arlo Guthrie, Arthur Brown, Shirley Collins, Michael Moorcock, Vic Godard, Toby Jones, Alan Moore, Jem Finer (The Pogues), Current 93, Gallon Drunk, Iain Sinclair, Trembling Bells, The Incredible String Band, Thurston Moore, and Band of Susans. She was nominated as a PRS/Help Musicians Scottish Performer of the Year in 2017 and received a Paul Hamlyn Composer Award in 2020.

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