Sun Thief Press is an imprint of Tauptiquem LLC. We are a small member-owned, member-managed publishing company based in Providence, R.I. We are interested in connecting with other organizations and businesses in New England to promote the literary arts through community events and workshops. If you are interested in collaborating with us, please reach out at tauptiquem@gmail.com!
- LAND & NAME ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Tauptiquem LLC operates on the stolen ancestral lands of the Narragansett, the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag, and the Niantic peoples. We acknowledge the historical and present injustices committed against the Indigenous peoples of North America and acknowledge that state-sanctioned genocide, unjust legal strictures, and systemic machines of oppression have been and continue to be used to remove and to keep these peoples from their lands. We acknowledge the name of Tauptiquem’s small-press, Sun Thief, is derived from the stories and myths of Alaska Native and Pacific Northwest peoples.
- STORY OF TAUPTIQUEM
Tauptiquem was first conceived as an aborted film by four friends roadtripping along the Dalton Highway in Arctic Alaska.
Tauptiquem was as good as Henry could do with a bad Scrabble hand.
We were driving together up from Anchorage to visit Elias’ childhood home near Coldfoot. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, a homecoming for some and an adventure for others. When we pulled over for the night, we all played Scrabble and laughed at a funny word Henry had invented out of rule-breaking desperation, but we also all agreed it had a certain resonant power to it. It felt like an incantation, a message, the music of a drum.
Later that night, we saw the aurora borealis spasming overhead and we hummed tauptiquem reverently in deep voices.
The next day, as we continued our venture further north, we found ourselves recording footage of our journey for a vaguely (read: poorly) conceived eco-horror film called Tauptiquem, as the landscape grew sparser and more Arctic around us. The film’s amateur aspirations never came to fruition, but the name still stuck with us and gradually, in the years since, became a sort of shorthand for the potential of creative collaboration between us.
After Grace and Elias finished their Master’s programs at the University of East Anglia, they returned to the States and reunited with Henry and Nate in Providence, with the proposition to build a small but ambitious literary small-press that would be a home for translators and writers in uncertain times.