Coyote Warrior
Subtitle: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Little, Brown
Published: August 25, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780316896894
Subjects: Legal History; Native American; United States - State & Local - Midwest; Social Science / General; History - General History; Government policy; History; Indians of North America; Legal status, laws, etc; North Dakota; Relocation; Three Affiliated Tribes; History: World
First sentence: We are a comet without a tail, streaking across the desert at one hundred five miles per hour in a rented Buick.
Description: "The last battle of the American Indian Wars did not end at a place called Wounded Knee. From White Shield to Washington, D.C., new Indian wars are being fought by Ivy League-trained Indian lawyers called Coyote Warriors - among them a Mandan/Hidatsa attorney named Raymond Cross." "When Congress seized the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara homelands at the end of World War II, tribal chairman Martin Cross, the great-grandson of chiefs who fed and sheltered Lewis and Clark through the bitter cold winter of 1804, waged an epic but losing battle against the federal government. As floodwaters rose behind the massive shoulders of Garrison Dam, Raymond, the youngest of Martin's ten children, was growing up in a shack with dirt floors and no plumbing or electricity, wearing clothes made from flour sacks. By the time he was six, his people were scattered to slums in a dozen distant cities. Raymond ended up on the West Coast. Far from the homeland of their ancestors, he and his siblings would hear that their father had died alone and broken on the windswept prairie of North Dakota." "At Martin's graveside, Raymond discovered the solitary path he was destined to follow as a man. After Stanford and Yale Law, he returned home to resurrect his father's fight against the federal government. His mission would lead him back to the Congress his father battled forty years before and into the hallowed chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. There, the great-great-grandson of Chief Cherry Necklace would lay the case for the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, treaty rights, and the legal survival of Indian Country at the feet of the nine black robes of the nation's highest court." "Coyote Warrior tells the story of the three tribes that saved the Corps of Discovery from starvation, their century-long battle to forge a new nation, and the extraordinary journey of one man to redeem a father's dream - and the dignity of his people."--BOOK JACKET.