Billings author David Charpentier visits Elk River Books to read from and discuss his memoir, The Boy Who Promised Me Horses, on Thursday, June 27.
“‘He tried to outrun a train,’ Theodore Blindwoman told Charpentier the night they found out about Maurice Prairie Chief’s death,” notes the publisher of The Boy Who Promised Me Horses. “When Charpentier was a new teacher at St. Labre Indian School in Ashland, Montana, Prairie Chief was the first student he met and the one with whom he formed the closest bonds.
“From the shock of moving from a bucolic Minnesota college to teach at a small, remote reservation school in eastern Montana, Charpentier details the complex and emotional challenges of Indigenous education in the United States. His involvement with the school has extended past 30 years, motivated by the early friendship he formed with Prairie Chief, who taught him lessons far and wide, from dealing with buffalo while riding a horse to coping with student dropouts he would never see again.”
“Not only a lyrical account of the narrator’s friendship with Maurice Prairie Chief, writes Tami Haaland, author of What Does Not Return, “[but] a haunting tragedy, a cross-cultural narrative that explores the mystery of friendship and the impossibility of ever really knowing another person. Charpentier has crafted an indelible and unforgettable story.”
Charpentier is the director of St. Labre Indian School’s Alumni Support Program and executive director of the Bridge Foundation, which provides cultural, leadership, and educational programs for Native American Youth in southeastern Montana. He was published poetry, stories and essays in Spillway, Poems Across the Big Sky, Montana Quarterly, Montana Sporting Journal, and Yellowstone Valley Woman.
Elk River Books is located at 122 S. 2nd St. in downtown Livingston. The free event begins at 7 p.m., and a book signing and reception will follow.
