The Good Indian

By turns irreverently funny and deeply moving, a memoir of growing up on the rez and learning to fight injustice in unexpected ways, and to hold family close even when—or especially when—they make it the hardest

When Lakota Tribal attorney and law professor Elaine Yellow Horse was growing up, her mother told her that her generation was meant to save their people, but Yellow Horse—just a muddy kid running around the rez with her siblings—could never have imagined how that responsibility would take shape in her life. Raised on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, just feet from where the Wounded Knee massacre took place, Yellow Horse figured if she ever landed in a courtroom, it’d be because she got busted for drinking or caught running away again.

After studying Tribal Law in college, however, Yellow Horse was offered a job in the prosecutor’s office. She took it, half because she needed the cash, and half because Mariska Hargitay made criminal justice look sexy as hell on TV. She would ultimately draw from Lakota traditions to reshape the courts into something both more compassionate and more effective, to serve her community, and to bring one of the most notorious, prolific criminals—a white pediatrician working in the federally run Indian Health Service—to justice.

The Good Indian, a title that nods at the colonizer’s ever-present gaze as well as her earnest desire to live up to her tribe’s expectations for her generation, is about coming into your own, figuring out how to fight for your people, and to live in community with your ghosts and your loved ones.