Spirit Car: Overview

Spirit Car is a memoir that blends fiction and carefully researched history. This book retraces my family’s Dakota heritage across five generations.

Spirit Car was inspired by my mother’s story of having been left for two years at a mission boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Spirit Car recreates stories that are based on real people whose lives have been reimagined on a bedrock of facts. The story begins with a vivid account of the 1862 Dakota War in Minnesota. My great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Marpiya Mase (Iron Cloud), took refuge at Fort Ridgely with her French-Canadian husband and their seven children. Rosalie felt the anguish of seeing her family members forced to defend themselves from Dakota relatives bent on killing whites and their “mixed-blood” children.

From this pivotal moment in history, we follow the family’s nomadic travels across South Dakota and Nebraska as they struggle to survive. In 2002, the story comes full circle with the first-ever Dakota Commemorative March. This event honored the 1,700 Dakota who were forcibly removed from Minnesota following the 1862 war.

These stories were written to recreate a family history that has been lost over time. They may have been repressed as too painful or simply set aside as the gritty issues of survival demanded attention. Recreating certain moments in history and reliving them through my own imagination has allowed me to know earlier generations of my family. In the process, I discovered just how deeply our identities are influenced by the forces of history.

The painting on the front cover of the book is Manifold Destiny, an oil painting by Jim Denomie, 2000. To see more of Jim's fabulous artwork, visit his website.