Frazier spent years going out to Pine Ridge with his friend Le War Lance, an Oglala Lakota man he met in New York, and the book is what that friendship showed him. Some of it is history — Crazy Horse, the treaties, Wounded Knee twice — and much of it is just riding around: Broken cars, cousins, borrowed money, funerals, the economics of a place with the lowest incomes in the country. The center of it is SuAnne Big Crow, a basketball player who faced down a hostile gym in Lead, South Dakota, by walking to center court and dancing. Frazier is honest about being a white writer who keeps getting things wrong.
On the Rez