Summary

In the prologue, two Native American massacres occurred four years apart at Sand Creek and the Washita River. The massacres were part of “the killing and removing, scattering and rounding up” of Native peoples (viii). In 1875, 71 Native men, women, and children were taken from their Oklahoma homes and imprisoned in Florida at Fort Marion. Richard Henry Pratt was their jailer. Throughout their imprisonment, the Native captives made art to sell to white people. Pratt meanwhile developed the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where the Natives learned that “everything about being Indian was wrong” (x).

In Part One, “Before, 1924, Jude Star, Winter,” Chapter 1, “Young Ghosts,” Bird slept with his grandmother Spotted Hawk when he got scared. Then one night, hundreds of white men stormed their camp at Sand Creek. Spotted Hawk begged a young man to take Bird to safety. Bird and the man...