Ravenshadow

In following the white man's road, 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 and stands on the precipice of suicide, his best friend tells him, "You got to go on the mountain." Blue's journey takes him on a torturous path, and as he is guided by a shaman and a spirit bird, under whose wings lay the shadows of the past, he revisits-and relives-the massacre of Wounded Knee, standing beside his people as they fall under the gun and cannon fire.

Win Blevins is an authority on the Plains Indians and the fur-trade era of the West. His rollicking tribute to the mountain man, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, remains in print thirty years after its first publication; his novel of Crazy Horse, Stone Song, earned several prestigious literary prizes; and such novels as Charbonneau, The Rock Child, and RavenShadow have established him as among the best of writers of the West. He lives in Utah's Canyonlands with his wife, Meredith, also a novelist.

Ravenshadow
PART ONEBlue Is LostBlue Introduces Himself 
 
Mitakuye oyasin--We are all related, we are all one. Mitakuye oyasin--those are the words we use to end all our prayers, we Lakota, the ones you call Sioux. I'm telling you this story to teach it to myself.You can call me Blue.My full name is Joseph Blue Crow. It is one of my names. I am the man of many names. I am the man of more than one voice, more than one language, more than one culture. I am the man you do not know, do not want to know, cannot permit yourself to know. To see me is to feel the cold beneath the shadow of the Raven's wing.Look at me. Here I stand before you, a buffalo bull of a Lakota Indian, six and a half feet tall and up toward three hundred pounds. My skin is dark, my hair blue-black, and I wear it in one long braid. I look like I belong in another world, any other world, not yours.Will you listen to my story? You must listen very carefully.I set out on a journey to save my soul.Maybe I will save it.And maybe, as my witness, you can save yours.Copyright © 1999 by Win Blevins