Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ by Rebecca Roanhorse
Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ is the eighth title in Short Stops, a series from Conversation Tree Press dedicated to bringing exceptional shorter works of fiction to life through beautifully bound, letterpress-printed, limited editions that begin shipping immediately upon announcement.
Illustrated by Winona Nelson
“What Theresa doesn’t understand is that Tourists don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies, and who can blame them? Movie Indians are terrific! So you watch the same movies the Tourists do, until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and Stands With a Fist your best girl. You memorize Johnny Depp’s lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker.”
We’re delighted to bring Rebecca Roanhorse’s Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ to our Short Stops series. Told entirely in the second person, it places you inside the headset of Jesse Turnblatt, a Native man who sells packaged “authentic” experiences to Tourists in virtual reality—until one customer starts taking more than he paid for.
Jesse knows exactly what his customers want: the Indian of the movies—buckskin, spirit animals, and vision quests. The Tourists come seeking transformation, and it’s as easy as choosing from a menu. But what begins with naming generators and rehearsed broken English quickly turns into something far more unsettling. Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ is a story about identity, appropriation, and who gets to tell whose story.
The story won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and helped earn Roanhorse the John W. Campbell (now Astounding) Award for Best New Writer that same year.
Edition Information
Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ is a limited edition of 500 unnumbered copies. A brief overview of the edition, with additional details below:
- Artwork: Winona Nelson has contributed three full-colour illustrations, printed separately and individually tipped in by hand.
- Typography: Interior design and typography are by Tony Geer.
- Letterpress printing: Hand & Eye Letterpress printed the edition in London on Munken Pure Rough Ivory 120gsm paper.
- Binding: Quarter-bound in book cloth and custom hand-marbled papers by Jemma Lewis. The endpapers are GF Smith Colorplan with a linen finish.
- Format: The books have a trim size of 6in × 9in and 32 pages including front and back matter.
- Signatures: All copies are signed by the author and artist.
- Publication price: US$110.
- Availability: In stock and shipping from Canada and England.
As with every entry in our Short Stops series, the author’s name and title are foil stamped on the spine for a uniform look on the shelf.
Availability
Copies are now available to collectors who ordered copies of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station that came with publisher’s rights (i.e. Deluxe copies #1–200 and all Lettered copies), or those who had rights transferred to them. An email has been sent with a private link to order, and copies will begin shipping on Thursday, August 20, 2026. If you did not receive an email and you believe you should have, please let us know.
Remaining copies will then be made available to the public on Wednesday August 19th at 10 a.m. ET (this date has been corrected).
Shipping
Copies ship from Ontario, Canada and from England (limited quantity). For US collectors, we are only shipping with Canada Post and paying pre-processing fees on our end. While we do not expect any brokerage or other fees to be charged on shipments, we have no control over US government policy. Please see here for more information for US collectors specifically.
Please note that import duties, taxes, brokerage charges, and any other fees levied by couriers or government agencies are the collector’s responsibility.
For logistical and practical reasons we cannot combine orders for this title. Thank you for your understanding.
Artwork by Winona Nelson
Winona Nelson is another artist whose work we’ve long admired, and we were excited to learn that she already knew the story well.
Each piece is a watercolour painting with beadwork sewn directly through it—slow, patient work. The beads make the artwork impossible to scan since a scanner needs the surface flat against the glass. Instead, the finished pieces were photographed, lit by a single flash turned away from the artwork and bounced off the room. Each bead catches just one point of reflection and casts a soft shadow, so the dimension of the beadwork is visible without obscuring the painting beneath.
Illustration Placement
Each illustration has been printed separately and tipped into the book block by hand. Tipping in by hand gives us complete freedom of illustration placement—each one can sit against any page in the book. This ensures that each interior illustration appears directly opposite the text of the scene it depicts.
About Winona Nelson
Winona Nelson has a wide-ranging 20-year career as a highly-skilled professional creative. She’s worked in illustration, character design, and concept art for video games and film. Credits include concept art for Echo for Marvel Studios and The Last of Us Part II for Naughty Dog; for Wizards of the Coast she’s done Magic card illustration, visual and narrative worldbuilding, and cultural consultation as a writer; in publishing she’s illustrated book covers and picture books for Simon & Schuster, Scholastic, Penguin Random House, and others; and she illustrated the 90-page independent graphic novel Artifice by Alex Woolfson. Her picture book work has garnered starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal.
Since she was a child and felt an acute absence of pop culture depictions of people who look, dress, or act like her, Winona has always been motivated to create empowering representations of women and people from minority backgrounds—Indigenous and LGBTQ2SIA+ characters especially. Winona grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, is queer and Two-Spirit, and is a member of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Ojibwe. She currently resides with her artist husband and two cats in rural Pennsylvania.
Custom Hand-Marbled Paper by Jemma Lewis
The hand-marbled paper for this edition was created by Jemma Lewis, whose work has graced several of our Short Stops.
Working from Winona’s sketches and work-in-progress photographs, Jemma developed a palette of red, black, and white with touches of amber and metallic gold—the gold marbled onto a coloured base paper, where it shows most strikingly.
Typography
The title is set in Klim Type Foundry’s The Future Mono. A monospaced face—every character the same width, as text renders on a terminal—perfectly suits a story built around technology that sells experiences.
The body text has been set in Typotheque’s Lava. Peter Biľak designed it to disappear: the proportions, spacing, and details are tuned so precisely that the reader forgets the typeface and attends only to the text.
Printing
The text of the edition was letterpress printed by Phil Abel and Robert Hetherington at Hand & Eye Letterpress on Munken Pure Rough Ivory 120gsm paper. Hand & Eye has a distinguished history of letterpress-printing its own editions and collaborating with the Folio Society, No Reply Press, Lyra’s Books, and, of course, Marcelo Anciano on their joint Areté Editions.
About Short Stops
Books in our Short Stops series are a little different from our other editions that come in multiple states. They:
- Are announced and offered for sale when they are completely finished and in hand, with shipping beginning on the same day we begin accepting orders. Because of our summer schedule, this one ships a few days later.
- Feature shorter works of fiction.
- Have a trim size of 6in by 9in, slightly smaller than our other 6.7in by 9.5in books.
- Have no rights associated with them and do not include a slipcase.
- Always be offered to current Deluxe and Lettered publisher’s rights-holders first, even though they have no rights attached to them. Rights holders may skip it entirely without losing rights to the next book from the Press, and having a copy of the most recently published book in the Short Stops series does not give any rights to the next in the series.
Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer. She has published multiple award-winning short stories and novels, including two novels in The Sixth World Series, Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, Race to the Sun for the Rick Riordan imprint, and the Hugo Award-winning epic fantasy trilogy Between Earth and Sky. She was the guest editor of America’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy (2023) and a contributor to the New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” She has also written for Marvel comics and games, and her TV writing includes FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, and the Marvel series Echo for Disney+. She has had her own work optioned by Paramount, Amazon Studios, Netflix, and AMC Studios.