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Contact: Bruce Conley
Associate Director of College Relations
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
www.augie.edu
March 23, 2006
SIOUX FALLS - Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve is the keynote speaker for Education Symposium Day at Augustana College. Her presentation, Still a Teacher, begins at 8:00 a.m. on Friday, April 7, in Kresge Recital Hall.
She will also be speaking at two breakout sessions during the morning, and will be signing books in the afternoon on the second floor of the Madsen Center.
A noted educator and writer, she was born and raised on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. She attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs Day School at Oak Creek and St. Mary’s School for Indian Girls at Springfield.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and history from SDSU in 1954, and a master’s degree in education and guidance from SDSU in 1969. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters degree from DWU in 1979.
She began teaching at White High School in 1954. During her career she taught in reservation and public high schools, later moving into a counseling position in the Rapid City school system. From 1988 until her retirement in 1995, Driving Hawk Sneve held joint appointments as an English instructor at Oglala-Lakota College and as a counselor at Rapid City Central High School.
During the 1970s she began publishing prose fiction and essays based on her Lakota heritage. Her book, Jimmy Yellow Hawk (1972) won an award from the Council on Interracial Books. Her fiction has focused on the lives of contemporary Lakota youth, and has been praised for addressing issues such as the stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans in films and the continuing value of Native traditions in the modern world.
Her 1995 work, Completing the Circle, is a documented history of the lives of the women in her family and her tribe and is the winner of the 1992 North American Indian Prose Award. She is the first South Dakotan to wear the National Humanities Medal awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Other awards include the 1996 Author-Illustrator Human and Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association for book and stories that have helped readers dismiss stereotypes and appreciate Native American culture. She received the 1984 Writer of the Year Award from the Western Heritage Hall of Fame, and the South Dakota State Counseling Association presented her with the 1996 Human Rights Award. She received the 1996 Spirit of Crazy Horse Award from Black Hills Seminars, Youth at Risk, for creating courage in discouraged youth.
Virginia and her husband, Vance Senve, live in Rapid City. They have three children and four grandchildren.