Greetings,

Milt and I, (Jamie) live on the edge of the Black Hills in Rapid City, SD. I'm orignally from northern Minnesota and Milt grew up in Vermillion in the eastern part of the state.

We've been married (happily) for almost eighteen years. We like to create and work together but pay a small price for our independence, as in no fancy houses and cars.

Milt was adopted as an infant and his father started the Black Hills Playhouse in Custer State Park. His biological mother. Faye Folster, was Cheyenne River Sioux and his father, George Fields, was a Cherokee from Oklahoma. I'm of mixed European blood but grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation.

All of the works presented on this site are programs we produced together for public radio. It is a flukey, how we got started. Milt had always been into sound; doing slide shows, recording music, playing music. In the early nineties, Milt's buddy was running KILI FM Radio on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Tom asked Milt to produce a program for the station on the Lakota connection to the Black Hills.

It was a much more complex project than either one of us realized it would be. But we liked it. And we liked working together. I'd been writing short fiction and articles for many years. Compared to "flat page" writing, the many layers of sound, voices, music and words in radio was interesting and fun to write.

We chose topics we liked, raised the money ourselves, and began producing full time. To our surprise, several of our programs were given Golden Reels, the highest award offered from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters.

Except for the show, You Got to Have Heart, all the rest of the programs circle around native issues and stories. At some point we had the idea to do a long series on native music and stories and so Oyate Ta Olowan--The Songs of the People was birthed.

I still clearly remember the day Rick Madden from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting told us our project had been funded. We were stunned.

On a more personal note, Milt and I practice a meditation yoga, grow a garden, and work hard to grow both as a couple and as human beings. We are also committed to giving something back.

When we started Oyate, Milt was determined to bring native people out of the 1800's. The pan-Indian movement had dumped all the diverse tribes into one lump race called "Indian". And not only that, the images were frozen with Custer's last stand. We wanted to give native people their own voice in the modern world. We wanted listeners to feel as if they had just been invited in for a cup of coffee and a little chat.

Together, we raised over $400,000 dollars to produce the works featured on this site.  As much as that sounds, we ended the project in debt.  We realized one year we had spent as much as four months in motel rooms and other odd sleeping arrangements.  That kind of roaming takes a lot of money, but never once have we regretted it.  Just listen, and you will know why.

I recently learned how to work on our own websites. (Jamie Lee Online - Many Kites Press - Washaka.com) It is liberating. We've spent thousands trying to have a good, working site full of great content. Now, I'll be here daily adding material and making sure things work. Thanks Dreamweaver.

I have a lot of ideas. So does Milt. Between my writing and his filmmaking and recording, there will soon be lots of good stuff on this site. Be sure to visit our other sites, manykites.com and realrez.com as well.

Come again soon,

Jamie Lee