August 9, 2026 · H.L. Delaney

Why We Publish the Source Register

Every book we publish that touches real history ships with a public list of what the history actually is. It is a small amount of extra work and it changes the relationship between the book and the reader.

The problem with "based on a true story"

The phrase does a lot of quiet work. It tells a reader that the events are real without committing to which events, and it lets a book borrow the authority of history while keeping the freedom of fiction. Most of the time nobody is harmed by that and the reader enjoys the book.

In the material Basalt Sea Press publishes, that arrangement fails. Our books concern Indigenous history in the American West, which is contested, actively misrepresented, and connected to legal and political questions that are open right now. A reader who cannot tell the documented parts from the invented parts will repeat whichever they remember.

So we publish the register. For every title where it applies, there is a public page listing the documented history the book is built on, and where it came from.

What a source register is

A source register is a plain list. It states a claim the work makes, and it names the public source that claim rests on. It lives on the open web rather than in the back matter, so it can be checked by someone who has not bought the book and updated when better sources surface.

It is deliberately boring. There is no argument in it and no interpretation. The interpretation belongs in the novel, where a reader can weigh it. The register exists so that the weighing is possible.

Two of them, live

The Record sits behind Captain Jack & The Original Renegades. It covers the Modoc War, the bounty era, the trial and the hangings, and the exile to Indian Territory, with the documented basis for each.

The Return of the C'waam source register does the same job for a children's game. Every factual claim the game puts in front of a student is listed with the public source it is drawn from, including federal fish and wildlife material, state curriculum, and Klamath Tribes material. Teachers can check it before they put the game in front of a class, which is the entire point.

That second one matters more than it looks. A game aimed at seven-year-olds is exactly the kind of object that gets trusted without examination. Publishing the register is how we make it checkable by the adults responsible for the room.

What it costs

It costs time, and it costs some authorial comfort. Writing down the source for every claim means finding out, occasionally, that a claim you liked has thinner support than you assumed. That is unpleasant and it is the useful part. Several details have come out of our books because building the register showed there was nothing solid under them.

It also removes an escape route. Once the register is public, the book can be checked against it by anyone, including people who would like to find us wrong. We think that is the correct exposure for a press publishing this material, particularly a Native-owned one publishing about Native history. The standard belongs higher here.

How it fits the rest of the editorial practice

The register is one part of a set of habits described elsewhere: marking invention plainly, naming colonial violence in direct language rather than the softened vocabulary the archives prefer, and keeping Indigenous terms and framings intact instead of translating them into more comfortable English. How We Edit Indigenous Historical Fiction for Accuracy covers the editorial side of that work.

All of it points the same direction. A reader should finish one of our books knowing more about what actually happened, able to find the evidence, and clear about where the novelist was working in the gaps.

Basalt Sea Press is a Native-owned press publishing land-rooted fiction and Indigenous stories from the American West. More on what we publish and why in Notes from the press.