Jamake Highwater is a master storyteller whose books for young people reflect the Native American experience. His books are researched and documented, though his tales, by his own admission, include anecdotes based upon personal experience, and his characters, explored through the device of the private myth, may be composites of relatives or people he has known.

N. Scott Momaday's general remarks on the art of the storyteller in his Literature of the American Indians (1975) shed a revealing light, one that helps the reader to comprehend better Highwater's view of himself and his function as a writer. Storytelling, Momaday asserts, is "imaginative and creative in nature. It is an act by which man strives to realize his capacity for wonder, meaning and delight. It is also a process in which man invests and preserves himself in the context of ideas. Man tells stories in order to understand his experience...