Dakotah: The Return of the Future - Paperback

by Charles Bowden (Author), Terry Tempest Williams (Introduction by)

"[Dakotah] is about hope, disappointment, impermanence and erasure. . . . This is a meditation Bowden fans will not want to miss."--Arizona Daily Star

"Bowden's prose--bleak, fierce, surreal like a swirling sandstorm, like an endlessly ramifying arroyo--provided for me, in its rejection of facile theses and clear-cut answers, an honest mapping of our contemporary predicament."--Leath Tonino, Lit Hub

The fourth installment in Charles Bowden's acclaimed "Unnatural History of America," Dakotah uses America's Great Plains as a lens--sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp--for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.

In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux's forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors' migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the life of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers "Pee Wee" Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

Author Biography

Author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and US-Mexico border issues, Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper's, Esquire, and Mother Jones and also wrote for the New York Times Book Review, High Country News, and Aperture. His honors included a PEN First Amendment Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and the Sidney Hillman Award for outstanding journalism that fosters social and economic justice.