Now in paperback: in the vein of Killers of the Flower Moon, one of America s greatest storytellers sheds light on an American tragedy: the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the cultural genocide experienced by the Native American children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School . . .

In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt considers himself a champion of Native Americans. His motto, To save the man, we must kill the Indian, is severely enforced in both classroom and dormitory: Speak only English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white.

As the young students navigate surviving the school, they begin to hear rumors of a ghost dance amongst the tribes of the west a ceremonial dance aimed at restoring the Native People to power, and running the invaders off their land. As the hope and promise of the ghost dance sweeps across the Great Plains, cynical newspapers seize upon the story to whip up panic among local whites. The US government responds by deploying troops onto lands that had been granted to the Indians. It is an act that seems certain to end in slaughter.

As news of these developments reaches Carlisle, each student, no matter what their tribe, must make a choice: to follow the white man s path, or be true to their own way of life . . .

Autorentext
John Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996), both of which he also directed. He has written eight novels, the most recent being Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade s Journey (2023), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.

Leseprobe
Muskrat, if you do a decent job with the skinning, scraping, and tanning, will bring you fifteen cents a hide at the mercantile over in La Pointe. Catching them is the easy part.

Antoine sees his father standing on the shore, hands cupped around his mouth to call out.

How d we do?

Antoine lets the canoe drift, grabs one by its excuse for a neck to hold it up.

Got five in the traps!

They carry the canoe from the water, carefully turning it over to rest on an old stump, and lug the chunky rodents by their tails, the footpath through the red pines just wide enough for two.

Antoine s father works something over in his mind before he speaks.

I talked to the government fella about this Dawes Act.

Where they take our land.

Antoine has heard some about it from Père Etienne and some more from the Indian agent himself, a man everybody calls the Swamp because of his foul breath.

They take it from the tribe. And then they give some back to the head of each household. Call it an allotment.

How much?

A hundred sixty acres.

Antoine, always good at numbers, tries to imagine this, but can only see the clearing where their cabin is, see the fishing hole and the bank where they put in to harvest rice. All on what he thinks of as their land. Do we use that much?

His father looks away. How it goes, he says, is from father to son. Least that s what the Swamp tells me

Yeah ?

So if your father was French like mine was, you re not considered part of the tribe unless a man who is has adopted you in.

So?

Nobody ever done that for me, not on a piece of paper.

But you always lived with

They say it don t matter how you live, it s what s on paper. They got people coming up all the way from Milwaukee, look like goddam squarehead Swedes, with papers saying they re Ojibwe and they should be on the roll.

That isn t fair.

That don t matter either.

The muskrats are feeling heavy now, and Antoine shifts the biggest from one hand to the other.

It don t matter that your maman **goes straight back to old Chief Buffalo the government says Jacques LaMere don t qualify for no allotment.

They walk a moment in silence. Antoine s father seems more embarrassed than angry when he speaks again.

But then I was talking to Père Etienne and Sister Ursula, and they say how if you got one of your children at this Indin school back East, it means that according to this Senator Dawes you re an Indin.

Antoine stops in his tracks, looks at his father.

I don t want to go to school in the East. Send Pascal or René.

You re the one I can spare the most. You re the one who s good at school, the one who reads English good and who knows what to say to those people.

Antoine hears a woodpecker hammering, high in a tree up ahead. He waits until his father will look him straight in the eye again and speaks forcefully in Ojibwe.

Does my mother know about this?

At the cabin Antoine s father stays outside, unhappily yanking muskrat hides off their bodies.

Antoine s mother watches a lump of lard melt down in a hot skillet, speaking to him in Ojibwe.

There are too many white people to shoot them all.

It is the closest she comes to cursing, in any language. Antoine stands behind her, awaiting the verdict