In this enthralling narrative, professor and award-winning author Jeffrey Ostler recounts the Lakota Sioux's loss of their spiritual homeland and their remarkable legal battle to regain it. Moving easily from battlefields to reservations to Supreme Court chambers, Ostler captures the strength that bore the Lakotas through the worst times and kept alive the dream of reclaiming their cherished lands.

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boardingschool mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood....

Analyzes the characters and contributions of the Plains Indians leader and forefront Union cavalry officer while explaining how the conflict forged a Native American alliance and set the stage for the reservation confinement of major tribal leaders.

"Acclaimed author Kent Nerburn creates an incisive character study of a Native American elder, against the unflinching backdrop of contemporary reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas. Nerburn draws us deep into the world of this elder, identified only as Dan, as we journey to where the vast Dakota skies overtake us and the whisperings of the wind speak of ancestral voices. As this spellbinding story unfolds, Dan speaks eloquently...

Virginia and her brother are never allowed to pick first from the donation boxes at church because their father is the priest, and she is heartbroken when another girl gets the beautiful coat that she covets. Based on the author's memories of life on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.