American Trail

"Richly detailed and well-researched," this story of one Native American chief's resistance to American expansionism "unfolds like a political thriller" (Publishers Weekly).

If you want to know why American Indians have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group, why suicide is the second leading cause of death among Indian men, why native women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average, and why gang violence affects American Indian youth more than any other group, do not look to history.

It was at Wounded Knee, huddled under a night sky lit by military flares and the searchlights of armored carriers seeking him out, that Vietnam vet Woody Kipp realized that he, as an American Indian, had become the enemy, the Viet Cong, to a country that he had defended with his life. With candor, bitter humor, and biting insight, this book tells the story of the long and tortuous trail that led Kipp from the Blackfeet Reservation of his birth to a terrible moment of reckoning on the plains of South Dakota. Kipp’s is a story of Native values and practices uneasily crossed with cowboy culture, teenage angst, and quintessentially American temptations and excesses.