For Tdohasan Chastang Sunray ’27, the summer wasn't about rest — it was about giving back. The English major spent his summer in the realm of creative writing, embarking on a mission to inspire the next generation of storytellers throughout the state of Oklahoma. Funded by a Matelich Summer Challenge Grant, the project was his way of serving a part of his community often overlooked.
Sunray is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma with affiliations to the Ponca and MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians. He has always been passionate about his community and has a history of leading summer basketball camps for kids across the state. But this year, he wanted to try something different. He says he recognized there were young people in his community who needed a different type of support, especially for those not interested in sports.
“What about the kids who aren't athletes or into sports?” he asked, noting that while sports camps are everywhere, arts-focused programs are often hard to find. “The movement of your mind and the creative juices are just as important as physical activity.”
Sunray modeled his workshops after a nonprofit he admired, the NDN Girls Book Club, which provides free creative writing workshops and books to tribal communities. He also drew inspiration from his experience at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, a two-week intensive, interdisciplinary arts camp. Originally planned as a nationwide endeavor, he pivoted his focus to working with the Kiowa, Pawnee, Wichita, and Affiliated Tribes, and Comanche, where his community roots are strong. The Matelich grant allowed him to provide campers with over 100 books and other supplies, such as journals and writing utensils. He felt it was important to make the camp as accessible as possible, giving everything away for free.
“When kids see that you're actually investing in them with something other than just your words, it carries a lot more weight,” he said.
The camps ran for six hours a day for two days and were designed to be anything but a typical English class. Sunray felt he had to overcome a major hurdle of convincing the students that a writing camp could be fun. To accomplish this, he broke up the sessions with games and writing exercises, like the “Exquisite Corpse,” where a group of students writes a story together, building on a single line at a time. This laid-back atmosphere aimed to avoid the serious tone often associated with discussing Native history and culture, focusing instead on joy and empowerment.
The workshops centered on the question: “What does it mean to be a native writer in today's world?” To answer this, he used two books: N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain and Natalie Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning Post-Colonial Love Poem. Sunray says he chose these texts to showcase the wide range of Native American literature and inspire students to find their own voices. The workshops also included a children's book to help pass down oral traditions. The book, Saynday Kiowa Indian Children’s Stories, is a collection of stories written by Modina Toppah-Waters about a Kiowa trickster.
Sunray said the most powerful part of the experience was watching the students take ownership of their own stories and identities.
“I think this whole process was a self-identification thing,” he said. “It's always people telling us who we are or who we aren't. But through this workshop and through the books that we read and the discussions that we had, we kind of made out for ourselves what it means to be native.”
