Off the Reservation

Nathan Yellow Tail wakes in a hospital after an accident that should have killed him. His best friend, Sebby, lies in a room a few doors down, barely alive. Five years earlier, Nate survived the revenge murders on the Blackfeet reservation, and his life has not steadied since.

An offer arrives: a chance to reset things, and possibly to save Sebby. Nate takes it. He climbs into a camper van as worn out as his body, joined by three older Blackfeet.

Their mission is to recover the remains of a Blackfeet boy, the only one of his people to die at Carlisle, a boarding school where many Indigenous children suffered abuse. They mean to carry him home. The trip is a repatriation, carried out by a small band of activists with little to go on.

The bones come with a cost. Something terrible leaves with them. This is a horror novel set on and around the Blackfeet reservation, a return to the world of The Only Good Indians and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. It moves between dread and grief, and asks what people will do when they are cornered.