Sunday, January 04, 2009

Manifest Destiny

Quoting Publisher's Weekly:
Raymond Cross is a Yale-educated attorney and the youngest son of Martin Cross, an American Indian tribal chairman who spent the bulk of his life fighting a losing battle against the construction of a post–WWII dam near the upper Missouri River that would forcibly remove hundreds of families from their ancestral lands. VanDevelder's exhaustively researched book uses the Cross family story — and Raymond Cross's eventual transformation into Coyote Warrior, the term given to a growing group of Ivy League–trained lawyers working on American Indian rights issues — to help trace the century-long struggle of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes to protect their North Dakota homelands.