From the River's Edge

Seeing the Missouri River country of the Sioux is like seeing where the earth first recognized humanity.... Yet the white man s humanity is forcing wrenching change upon the land: the time is the late sixties, and the Missouri River Power Project, just completed, is unleashing water on the lands that have nourished the Sioux, physically and spiritually, for countless generations. It is a new world, and this is called progress.


John Tatekeya, a Dakotah and a cattleman, has one of the best herds on the reservation. A man in his early sixties, he has prudently nurtured his herd through the years, till it numbers 107 horned Herefords. Now, however, his land is partly under water. Doubtless he could survive that, but one night, forty-two head of his cattle are stolen. John finds himself in the white man s court of law. He wants fairness and justice. And he wants his cattle back. To him they are the same thing. Or are they? The endless round of white man s rhetoric that ensues angers John, leaving him with a sense of betrayal and failure. The colorful voices of Old Benno and Gray Plume, fictional repositories of culture and history, mingle with those of Smutty Bear and Struck-by-the-Ree, historical signatories to Sioux treaties who say, I must become an American.... I will not beg for my life.


John searches for a way to reconcile the unavenged thefts of culture and honor, land and religion the legacies of his people with the seemingly contradictory ways of the white man. Increasingly alone, John Tatekeya nonetheless resists the temptation to fall into the pit of cynicism and despair, defeat and sorrow. As his search leads him forever from the bed of his young lover, Aurelia, he discovers with renewed clarity what it means to be a Dakotah.