RavenShadow

Win Blevins

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RavenShadow won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers award. Before he was born, Joseph was chosen to carry the sacred ways of his Sioux people. But instead of walking the good Red Road of his people, he put his feet on the White Road of basketball and booze, women and the blues. In following the white man's road, a road that was not his, Joseph Blue Crow has lost his Lakota heritage and is haunted by the loss. After the inexplicable suicide of the woman he loves, and as he sinks into alcoholism and despair, he stands on the precipice of suicide—a train roaring to his car on the railroad tracks. His best friend tells him, "You got to go on the mountain." Blue's journey takes him on a torturous path. As he is guided by a shaman and a spirit bird, under whose wings lay the shadows of the past, he revisits—and relives, going from the present world to the past—the massacre of Wounded Knee, standing beside his people and family as they fall under the gun and cannon fire. Will Blue find redemption and healing? That is the center of this extraordinary story.