Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past

This moving narrative recounts Wilson's attempt to trace her Dakota heritage, sparked by her usually reticent mother's story of having been left for two years at a mission boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Though her own family stories have been forgotten or repressed, Wilson relies on carefully researched historical accounts and her own imagination to depict how her Native American ancestors survived the Dakota War of 1862. Rosalie, the wife of a French-Canadian and a mother of seven, exemplifies the anguish of her family members forced to defend themselves from Dakota relatives bent on killing whites and their "half-blood" children. When the conflict ended, upwards of two thousand Dakota people, mainly women and children, gave themselves over to the U.S. government, marching over 150 miles through Minnesota to reach a camp where more than 130 would perish from exposure to cold and disease. In the most moving passages, Wilson returns to participate in a commemorative march in her ancestors' footsteps. Though she can get mired in explaining various familial ties, Wilson convincingly asserts that "our daily lives are only the tip of the mountain that rises above hundreds of years of generations whose experience, acknowledged or not, has everything to do with the people we become." 18 b&w photos. (Aug. 1)