Growing up Indian - not Native American - in Wyoming

Writer Nina McConigley has a tattoo of a covered wagon on her back and a stuffed Jackalope mounted on her wall. The mythological Western creature isn't real - it is just a jackrabbit with antlers glued on - but McConigley's love for Wyoming is.

She grew up under the Cowboy State's vast blue sky and snow-capped peaks but was born in Singapore to an Indian mother and Irish father. Her family relocated to Wyoming soon after.

McConigley's collection of short stories, Cowboys and East Indians, explores the experience of immigrant outsiders living in white, rural Wyoming through characters like a kleptomaniac foreign exchange student and a cross-dressing cowboy.

She won the PEN Open Book Award in 2014 for her work.

Produced for the BBC by Leigh Paterson.

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