Elatsoe Study Guide

Darcie Little Badger was born Darcie Ryan, and she is an enrolled member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. Though she was born in Texas, she moved around the U.S. as a child because of her father’s job. At age seven, she wrote her first book—which her father helped her submit for publishing, though it was rejected. Upon graduating high school, she changed her last name to Little Badger, following Apache tradition. After completing her undergraduate degree in geosciences at Princeton University, she earned her Ph.D. in oceanography at Texas A&M University, writing her final dissertation on a type of toxic algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico. She briefly worked editing scientific papers, but she quit her job after selling Elatsoe, her first novel, in 2018. Prior to Elatsoe, Little Badger had published several short stories, and she has continued to write novels and short stories featuring Lipan Apache culture and characters.

As Elatsoe notes, the Lipan Apache tribe has lived in Texas and in parts of the Great Plains for centuries. The Lipan lived the furthest east of all the Apache tribes, and when white American settlers arrived in Texas in the 1800s, the Lipan helped the settlers and served as lookouts for the U.S. Army. However, once Texas became a state in 1845, white sentiment toward the Lipan Apache changed, and the Lipan Apache suffered violence from Americans and other tribes, as well as from Spanish and Mexican settlers. While the Lipan Apache are a sovereign Native American tribe, they’re not federally recognized. However, in 2014, Little Badger was a plaintiff in a civil case against the U.S. Department of Interior, which argued for the Lipan Apaches’ right to possess and use eagle feathers (a right only given to members of federally recognized tribes). The tribe won its case. The novel also touches on the long history of European colonialism in North America, which led to the deaths of many Native peoples, as well as their displacement from their ancestral lands.

Following Elatsoe, Little Badger wrote A Snake Falls to Earth, which also follows a Lipan Apache teen. She has also written a prequel following Ellie’s grandmother, Shiene Lende, which is set to be published in April 2024. Little Badger is part of a growing number of Native writers in the U.S. and Canada writing young-adult novels about Native protagonists in the real world as well as in more fantastical worlds. Cherie Dimaline imagines a future where Native people are the only ones still able to dream in The Marrow Thieves, while Angeline Boulley tackles contemporary and real-world issues like drug use in Firekeeper’s Daughter and missing Native women in its companion novel, Warrior Girl Unearthed. Within the novel itself, Trevor quotes from the first book in John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost. Jay and his family are also descendants of Lord Oberon, the fictional king of the fairies who is a historical figure in Elatsoe’s fantastical world. Oberon appeared in a variety of 17th- and 18th-century works but is most famous for appearing in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.