Over the weekend, Google featured a drawing of Native American author James Welch on its homepage to celebrate what would have been Welch’s seventy-sixth birthday. (Google shares “Google Doodles,” or changes to its logo on its homepage, to celebrate notable events and anniversaries.)

Welch, a poet and novelist, was born to a Blackfeet father and Gros Ventre mother, and grew up on a reservation. He died in 2003 in Missoula, Montana at sixty-two years old. One of his best-known works is Fools Crow (Penguin Books, 1987), an award-winning historical novel that describes the post–Civil War encroachment of Europeans on the land of Blackfeet people.

According to Smithsonian.com, Welch feared that his point of view as a Native American would never be widely appreciated, but continued to write anyway. “I knew that nobody wanted to read about Indians, reservations, or those rolling endless plains,” Welch wrote. “I began to think that maybe ... life on the reservation was hopeless. Nevertheless, I began to write poems about the country and the people I come from.”

Sophie Diao, a filmmaker and animation artist, found her inspiration for the doodle in Welch’s writing, but also in “ledger art,” an art form created by Plains Indians in the 19th century, which involves doodling in the margins of old account books and ledgers.

“It’s a really unique style,” she told Smithsonian.com. “So pretty. It caught my eye and I really wanted to do something around that.”

Diao added that, as a person of color (she is of Chinese descent), “I definitely sympathize with the fears that were shown in [Fools Crow] about your culture being taken away from you or being changed against your will. ... I wanted to strike a balance between being referential of his work and his heritage as a Native American, but also make it easy for the user to look at. I didn’t want it to look like some random person’s idea of tribal art.”

Image Credit: Google/Sophie Diao.