Genre Allegory, Poetry Name David Seals | Role Writer Movies Powwow Highway | |
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Born 29 April 1947 (age 76)
Denver, Colorado, United States ( 1947-04-29 ) Occupation Novelist, Author, Screenwriter People also search for Jonathan Wacks, Gary Farmer, Toyomichi Kurita, Jan Wieringa Books The Powwow Highway, Sweet Medicine: A Novel, The Seventh Generation, Chiefly - & a Trifling Tale, Thunder nation | ||
David Seals (April 29, 1947 – February 12, 2017) was an American writer.
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Publishing and film career
Seals' 1979 novel, The Powwow Highway was made into the film Powwow Highway starring A. Martinez and Gary Farmer. It was produced by George Harrison's Handmade Films, and featured appearances by Wes Studi, Graham Greene and Mr.Seals' son, Sky Seals, and then-wife Irene Handren-Seals. Parts of the film were shot on location on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, with a number of tribal members playing small roles in the film.
Along with fellow filmmakers William McIntyre and David Ode, Seals was a 1990 winner of the Bush Artists Fellowship, from the Bush Foundation in Minneapolis, for their 6-hour "poetic documentary", With Visible Breath I Am Walking.
His other published works include the novel Sweet Medicine, a sequel to The Powwow Highway, which Booklist called "a comic masterpiece". In Sweet Medicine, the story continues where The Powwow Highway ended, but with the added device of the characters also commenting on the success of the previous book and film. In an ironic and self-deprecating incident, the protagonists have the chance to see the movie, but choose to see a Hollywood blockbuster instead. Later they also encounter a commune of yuppie newagers, and are tempted with the promise of fame and money, if they would only choose to sell out their vision. The New York Times said, "The book is full of adventure, humor, love and sex, and occasionally some eloquent rage about the way Indians have been treated in America."
Seals' essays have appeared in The Nation, LA Times, Newsday, and 3 scholarly anthologies.
His family memoir is entitled The Roswell Trilogy - Abduction at Roswell, Roswell Theogony, and Confessions of the Gods.