1. No two people who belong to a culture experience it in the same way, and
2. If writers felt constrained to write only about their own experience, culture, history, or background … libraries would be full of dull biographies, and a lot of what makes a culture—the variety and vigor of its art—would be lost, and the culture would die.

That said, when you write about anything outside your own personal experience, you need the assistance of other people, whether you get it from books (necessary, if you’re writing about historical situations and events) or from personal stories and advice.

During the last thirty-three years, I’ve had the good luck to come across a number of kind and helpful people who were more than willing to advise me about the details of their own culture (as experienced by them), and consequently, I think the various portrayals of those cultures have deepened and improved over the course of the writing of these books. I hope so.

When this happens, though, naturally details will vary, and as you acquire more contacts and more knowledge, you’ll run into some conflicts between accounts. Given that you really can’t go back and revise major events and characters in an earlier book, the best you can do is to adjust the current writing so far as is possible, and use the improved information when writing the next book.

In the final phases of writing Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, I had the serendipitous honor of meeting kahentinetha bear, an eighty-two-year-old Mohawk activist, who was more than helpful in supplying me with cultural details, as well as Eva Fadden, the Mohawk-language consultant to the Outlander TV show. Eva and her family are the curators of the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center (www.6nicc.com). Both these ladies gave me fascinating information—some of which was at odds with historical accounts (all written by non-Mohawk people) that I’d used in previous books. So I used these ladies’ helpful information to the greatest extent possible, and will continue to apply it (and whatever further advice they and other people give me) in future books.

As a brief example, here is kahentinetha’s description of naming, which doesn’t agree with the naming of Ian Murray’s son in the novels. One could argue that the circumstances were quite different and that the people involved were connected with Joseph Brant and thus not living entirely within the normal cultural environment, and I think that’s valid. But I did want to provide kahentinetha’s information, just as illustration (and in thanks for her very elegant commentary):