(This event was rescheduled from the previous date of 4/14/2025)
Ursula Pike in conversation with Sara Calvosa Olson
City Lights and Heyday books present
Ursula Pike
discussing her new book
An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir
published by Heyday Books
A gripping, witty memoir about indigeneity, travel, and colonialism.
When she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, ‘knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.’ In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to boiling point, she began to ask: what does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn?
An Indian Among Los Indígenas, Pike’s memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. It is also the debut of an exceptionally astute writer with a mastery of deadpan wit. It signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.
Ursula Pike is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work won the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest in the memoir category, and her writing has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, World Literature Today, and Ligeia Magazine. She has an MA in economics, with a focus on community economic development, and was a Peace Corps fellow at Western Illinois University. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 1994 to 1996. An enrolled member of the Karuk Tribe, she was born in California and grew up in Daly City, California, and Portland, Oregon. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.
Sara Calvosa Olson is an indigenous Californian, editor, writer, storyteller, community development expert, and the author of the book: Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen. She is a Karuk asiktávaan (woman) and táat (mother) of two teenage sons. She grew up in Salyer & Hoopa in Northern California, and is living in Marin with her husband (who is also from Hoopa.)
Heyday is an independent, nonprofit publisher founded in 1974 in Berkeley, California. We are a diverse community of writers and readers, activists and thinkers. Heyday promotes civic engagement and social justice, celebrates nature’s beauty, supports California Indian cultural renewal, and explores the state’s rich history, culture, and influence. Heyday works to realize the California dream of equity and enfranchisement.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.