Thirty-two-year-old mixed blood John Strobaw, known to the Sioux as Medicine Hair, returns to his Turtle Crick Farm after a six-year exile on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Grief-stricken at the loss of his mate and lover Matthew Brand, known as Shambling Bear, at the Battle of Wounded Knee, he struggles to become a farmer again while fighting an internal battle to let go of the past and face his future. Will that future be with his best friend Winter Bird or with Pretty Face, an outrageous flirt who hasn’t yet decided who he is?<br><br>But before he can come to grips with this, John faces several battles. Will his former friends and neighbors accept him now the Indian War has come to an end? Can John forgive those same friends and neighbors after the murderous ambush of the Sioux by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee? Or survive the hostility of an Indian-hating sheriff named Charles Landreth and protect himself against the mindless fear and loathing for Two Spirits, men who love men?

Wastelakapi…Beloved

“You weren’t guilty because you—we—were at war. And soldiers killing soldiers or warriors killing warriors during a war isn’t murder. They were bound on hanging you, but their own law got in the way and saved you from the noose.”


“That’s what those law-talkers said.” He shrugged. “So when they let me go, I started for home.” He paused and looked in my direction. “But first, I wanted to come find you.”


Horses dropped his head onto arms folded over his knees for a long moment. At length, he straightened. “I didn’t want to go to the white man’s school over there in Pennsylvania, but they sent me anyhow. I stayed there for five years. I had thirteen summers when I got there and eighteen when they let me go. And when I got home, I found out I wasn’t Indian no more.”


“And you weren’t a white man, either,” I said. “You didn’t fit any longer.”


Chapter 12