Minnesota, 1970s: A snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymn written in English and Ojibwe.
Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old, tough-as-nails Ojibwe woman, sometimes uses her special abilities to help Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, with his investigations.
When Cash sees the hymn, she knows her search for justice for this anonymous victim will lead her somewhere she hasn’t been in over a decade: the White Earth Reservation, a place she once called home.
When Cash happens upon two small graves in the yard of a rural, “speak-intongues kinda church,” she is pulled into the lives of the pastor and his wife while yet another Native woman turns up dead and her newborn is nowhere to be found.
Her name is Renee Blackbear, but what most people call the nineteen-year-old Ojibwe woman is Cash.
She lived all her life in Fargo, sister city to Minnesota's Moorhead, just downriver from the Cities. She has one friend, the sheriff Wheaton. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. Since then, Cash navigated through foster homes, and at thirteen was working farms, driving truck. Wheaton wants her to take hold of her life, signs her up for college. She gets an education there at Moorhead State all right: sees that people talk a lot but mostly about nothing, not like the men in the fields she's known all her life who hold the rich topsoil in their hands, talk fertilizer and weather and prices on the Grain Exchange. In between classes and hauling beets, drinking beer, and shooting pool, a man who claims he's her brother shows up, and she begins to dream the Cities and blonde Scandinavian girls calling for help.
A murdered man in a field. The sheriff needs Cash-a twenty-something tough, smart Indian woman with special seeing powers.
Cash and Sheriff Wheaton make for a strange partnership. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. He's kept an eye out for her ever since. It's a tough place to live-northern Minnesota along the Red River. Cash navigated through foster homes, and at thirteen was working farms. She's tough as nails, five feet two inches, blue jeans, blue jean jacket, smokes Marlboros, drinks Bud Longnecks. Makes her living driving truck. Playing pool on the side. Wheaton is big lawman type. Maybe Scandinavian stock, but darker skin than most. He wants her to take hold of her life. Get into junior college. So there they are, staring at the dead Indian lying in the field. Soon Cash was dreaming the dead man's cheap house on the Red Lake Reservation, mother and kids waiting. She has that kind of power. That's the place to start looking. There's a long and dangerous way to go to find the men who killed him. Plus there's Jim, the married white guy. And Long Braids, the Indian guy headed for Minneapolis to join the American Indian Movement.
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