Bikem Ekberzade has really delved into the dark history of the US, sharing a vast amount of scholarship while interweaving it with current day interviews with the residents and activists of the Lakota reservations. The old betrayals, battles, and massacres resonate even more as they are weaved in and out of these contemporary narratives and the stand off over the Dakota Access Pipeline. A positive aspect is that so many are re-discovering their roots, and bravely transforming these traumas into strengths, and Bikem gives these inspiring leaders their proper historical depth, inspiring leaders for whom time and place has a different kind of meaning.Bikem was one of those who came to fulfill the prophesy of Oglala Chief Crazy Horse, quoted at the start of the first chapter, when the whole earth will become one circle again, with “those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of unity among all living things, and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom.” I had the good fortune to join her as she travelled the area after the main camps had been dispersed, and people were still in a fresh state of trying to make sense of what had happened and what was yet to come. There is so much information in the book, and endless food for thought. One wish was that Bikem might have made more of a connection with her research into the plight of the Native Americans with her years of experience covering war refugees. There seems like there must be some insights into human history, some commonalities between these displaced peoples, the Native Americans being refugees within their own lands. I also say this as towards the end of the book Bikem seems to be trying to justify her right to write this story, stating that as an outsider she might be able to be more objective. And yet she has other qualifications that she does not include. Not to mention that we all have to be students of our past. These sentiments in her concluding thoughts hinted at something else for me who had been with her on the trip— an understandably deep political sensitivity, as well as the fear of actual infiltrators, that I know she encountered— and these states of mind perhaps could also have been an important part of her account, as we need to be aware of them as we all work together.Another thing that perhaps needed a little more attention is the confusing legacy of Obama. The prelude to the book outlines the president’s quest to appear like a green president in his last year in office. He definitely gave the green movement hope for the possibility for change with his announcement of the cancellation of the Keystone Access Pipeline, as well as with many other positive gestures. He did set aside more land and water as national monuments, and yet he also auctioned off over a million acres of off shore waters and thousands of acres of public lands in new online auctions, that were less visible than the previous public ones, and thus under the radar of activists. Despite his cancellation of Keystone, for much of his time as president he had been a pretty vocal cheerleader for natural gas as a way of being energy independent, and as being a more climate friendly fuel, just as he had been with nuclear energy. Eventually Obama modified his views, and introduced regulation of methane emissions in the natural gas process. He tried to revisit the exclusion of the industry from federal oversight of the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Act (which he had voted for as a Senator), but his administration also appears to have influenced the final EPA report that downplayed the risks in 2016. This was also the president who drank from a glass of Flint, Michigan water. But the most important aspect of these issues is the fact that free trade agreements like NAFTA can reverse any president’s veto of any of these infrastructure projects through its Investor State Dispute Settlement structure, where a private multinational corporation can sue a government for lost profits. And so one can’t help wondering, do any of these political maneuverings really make any difference in the long run? With a president who was making a bold statement on Keystone, yet then pushing hard on TPP, it’s hard not to suspect that this type of environmentalism and invocation of climate leadership was just a form of corporate window dressing.These are just some of the tortuous questions that the book inspired in me. The writer maintains a journalistic neutrality that reports what it can with the knowledge that we have, and stays focused on and true to her subject. All these ambiguities are there in the text implicitly because of Bikem's encyclopedic even-handedness. She is attuned to so many aspects of this living history, the book will keep giving with each reading.