What most Americans know about life on the more than 300 Indian reservations comes from the novels of the late Tony Hillerman and his daughter Anne. Dark Winds, the television series based on their novels, contributes, too. But the Navajo Nation in which their stories are set lies on a sprawling reservation that overlaps the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Now, Lakota political science professor David Heska Wanbli Weiden turns our attention far across the country to South Dakota. There, the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations lie along the state’s southern border with Nebraska. In his third novel, Wisdom Corner, Weiden takes us into the hardscrabble lives of the Lakota people who live on the Rosebud Reservation. With unsparing detail, he reveals the abject poverty, crime, and deprivation there, and the continuing clash with the majority population. All in the context of a gripping thriller.
Living and breathing Lakota culture
The Hillermans go to great pains in their novels to highlight Navajo beliefs and customs. But Weiden goes further. His characters live and breathe the Lakota culture. Their language and their behavior reflect it. And much of Weiden’s story hangs on the profoundly sad history of relations between Native peoples, especially the Lakota, and the Europeans who invaded their lands. That history is manifest in the day-to-day lives of the people who live there. And in the course of telling his story Weiden reveals a great deal about the “broken treaties.”
In Wisdom Corner, the story centers on Virgil Wounded Horse, who ekes out a living of sorts by serving summonses and court orders on behalf of a lawyer who practices in a nearby town. But that’s a recent development in Virgil’s life. For years, he had operated as a vigilante, bringing justice to the people of the Rosebud Reservation when the FBI had failed to try. Beating up drug dealers. Confronting abusive and violent husbands. Forcing thieves to give back the loot they’d stolen. But his long-suffering girlfriend, Marie Short Bear, abhorred the violence and forced him to stop.
Wisdom Corner by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (2026) 320 pages ★★★★★
A complex tale, skillfully told
Weiden’s story unfolds through several interlocking subplots. Virgil accompanies the Rosebud’s biggest bootlegger to defend him against a violent gang on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Marie is running for tribal council against an unscrupulous incumbent who seems intent on expelling her and Virgil from the reservation. Virgil learns that a long-dead aunt had died and been buried anonymously at one of the notorious Indian schools established nearby to erase Native culture. A wealthy and powerful construction company is building apartment buildings on the site where his aunt was buried. And Virgil’s mentor and spiritual father, an eminent healer, is brutally murdered. Rose Charging Cloud, chief of the Rosebud tribal police, has gone after Virgil in the past for his vigilante forays but proves cooperative once murder Violence erupts again and again. And Virgil is repeatedly tested to his limits.
Who are the Lakota?
Official figures put the Native American population of South Dakota at fewer than 100,000. That’s less than 10 percent of the state’s total of 900,000 people. But they loom large in the history of relations between Indian nations and the country’s majority population. Because many in the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations we know as Sioux are concentrated there in reservations that hug the state’s southern border with Nebraska. About 30,000 Lakota reside on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations out of a total Lakota population in the US of some 170,000.
And the most celebrated Native leaders in our history are all Lakota: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Red Cloud. Their names, and those of later Lakota leaders such as Russell Means and Dennis Banks, loom large in the major incidents that mark the history of the Lakota people in the US. “Custer’s Last Stand” at the Little Bighorn in 1876. The assassinations of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in 1877 and 1890. The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. The Alcatraz Occupation from 1969 to 1971. Means and Banks led the American Indian Movement, which organized those latter events.
On a personal note
In the middle of the 1980s, Russell Means hired me to help raise money for KILI Radio, the Pine Ridge Reservation’s primary means of obtaining news and disseminating vital information throughout the nearly 3,500 square miles of the reservation. For two years or so, as I recall, I worked with local people, who soon picked up on the fundraising methods I used and set out on their own. I had little direct contact with Means, although I ran into him about 15 years later at a national business conference where he was a featured speaker. (He had become prominent as an actor in Hollywood.) When it came to light there that he had been arrested for domestic violence, we parted ways.
About the author
David Heska Wanbli Weiden is an award-winning Lakota American author of crime and thriller novels and a professor of political science at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He grew up in Denver, Colorado. As an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, he spent summers at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His protagonist, Virgil Standing Bear, is Sicangu and lives on the Rosebud Reservation. Weiden holds a BA from the University of Colorado Boulder and a JD from University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law as well as a PhD in political science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a tenured professor of Native American studies and political science. Weiden lives in Denver with his family.
For related reading
I’ve also reviewed Dance Hall of the Dead (Leaphorn and Chee #2) by Tony Hillerman (Navajo Police investigate a shocking murder) and The Way of the Bear (Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito #26) by Anne Hillerman (Fossil hunters in Utah threaten Navajo police).
You’ll find other great reading at:
- 10 top novels about private detectives
- 20 excellent standalone mysteries and thrillers
- Top 20 suspenseful detective novels
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