Explores the delicate, and tense, relationship between life on an First Nations reservation and life within the exterior world. When Native Canadian Silas Crow is pressured to write down a private essay in an effort to get a much-desired job, he tells the story of the rape and homicide of an Indian woman by a drunken thug. When the killer obtained a lenient two-year sentence for manslaughter, the First Nations group felt shock and anger—and tried desperately to take care of the after-effects of this lack of justice.
