Last Standing Woman

Michael O'Rourke co-founded Actors’ Theatre in Southern Oregon in 1982, producing 100 productions in 13 years, and served as executive director for the capital campaign to purchase and remodel a vaudeville house as the company’s 100-seat black box.

Michael’s collaboration with Lakota actor Robert Graygrass resulted in a one-man show (“Walking on Turtle Island”) that toured internationally for 16 years.

As managing artistic director of Anchorage Community Theatre he co-produced collaborations with the Alaska Native Heritage Center, which resulted in a Native American Music Award for Best Music Video (2005).

Recipient of grants for development of heritage scripts celebrating the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion, he wrote “In the Land Where Acorns Dance,” a screenplay based on a young poet’s life among the Shasta Indians during the Gold Rush in Northern California. The script received the 2015 Grand Prize from the Yosemite International Film Festival. His adaptation of Native American activist Winona LaDuke’s novel “Last Standing Woman” was an Official Selection of the Oaxaca FilmFest Global Script Challenge 2015.

His mini-series adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities” was selected as the Best Global Script of 2017 at Oaxaca, as well as finalist with Jaipur International Screenplay Competition 2018.

O’Rourke’s credits include script consulting on the independent feature “All for Liberty,” earning a “Top 10 Revolutionary War Movie” in the Journal of the American Revolution.
Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. She is also the Executive Director of Honor the Earth, where she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups.

In 1994, Winona was nominated by Time magazine as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the BIHA Community Service Award in 1997, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women's Leadership Fellowship, and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.

A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona has written extensively on Native American and Environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves, as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women's organization. In 1998, Ms Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth.

Praise from Pulitzer Prize winning author Louise Erdrich: “Fidelity to White Earth’s history, love for the Ojibwe language, and joy in the strength of women, mark this enthralling new edition of Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman.”
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