Omakayas, a seven-year-old Native American girl of the Ojibwa tribe, lives through the joys of summer and the perils of winter on an island in Lake Superior in 1847.
Living with their Ojibwe family on the Great Plains of Dakota Territory in 1866, twin brothers Makoons and Chickadee must learn to become buffalo hunters, but Makoons has a vision that foretells great challenges that his family may not be able to overcome.
When recovered alcoholic Landreaux Irons accidently shoots his neighbors five-year-old son, he seeks the advice of an Ojibwe tribe and then offers his own son LaRose in atonement.
Summoned by his grandmother, Lipsha returns to the reservation where he falls in love with Shawnee Ray. He finds himself at crossroads torn between success and meaning, love and money, the future and the past.
In 1866, Omakayas's son Chickadee is kidnapped by two ne'er-do-well brothers from his own tribe and must make a daring escape, forge unlikely friendships, and set out on an exciting and dangerous journey to get back home.
In the early 1930s, Karl and his sister Mary Adare, arrive by boxcar in Argus, a small off-reservation town in North Dakota. Orphaned, they look to their mother's sister Fritzie and her husband for refuge.
A novel of connections in which history, lust, contemporary urban Native American life, hand-me-down names, and legends, as well as sacred myth, combine.
