northSun was born in 1951 in Schurz, Nevada to a Shoshone mother and a Chippewa father, legendary Native American activist Adam Fortunate Eagle.

Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a graduate of the University of Montana-Missoula.In 2000 the "Friends of the Library" group at the University of Nevada, Reno honored her with the Silver Pen Award for outstanding literary achievement. Then-Governor Kenny Guinn appointed her to the Nevada State Arts Council that same year.In 2004, she received the "Indigenous Heritage Award in Literature" from ATAYL, an international agency.

She now lives on the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Reservation in Fallon, Nevada and currently works as a grantswriter for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.

Poetry

• Diet pepsi and nacho cheese: poems, 1977
• Coffee, dust devils and old rodeo bulls: poems, 1979 (with first husband Kirk Robertson)
• Small bones, little eyes: poems, 1981 (with Jim Sagel)
• A snake in her mouth: poems 1974-96, 1997
• Love at gunpoint, 2007
• whipped cream and sushi, 2008

Non-fiction

• After the Drying Up of the Water, a tribal history of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone, 1980