"That picture leads the story of the modern large wrongs done to the Indian people by the federal government. It (stands for) an accumulated history of injuries."
So says Raymond Cross, law school professor at the University of Montana and the man who, nearly 50 years after the Garrison Dam displaced the village of Elbowoods, at last convinced the government to pay his people for their land.
"A 'Roots'-like story," VanDevelder crows, exuberant after a decade of researching and writing and sleuthing and interviewing hundreds of people including the nine surviving Cross siblings.
"Six generations of a native family, and it started at a place we could all relate to: Lewis and Clark get to the upper Mandan villages on the Missouri River and they were there. It's a gold mine!"
"Coyote Warrior" does indeed hearken back to that historic visit with the Mandan; Cross' ancestor, Cherry Necklace, grew up with Sacajawea as his adopted sister, the book says. The villagers harbored the explorers during a bitter winter and probably saved them from starvation. Their reward: the loss of their beautiful river home, their fertile bottomlands, their berries and game and fish and economy and community.
The government flooded their lands, the book shows, knowing but not caring about the impacts. Nor did they pay attention to warning that the dam was an expensive boondoggle, never accomplishing its intended role as a source of irrigation for upstream (white) farmers.
The lies, the callousness, the alcoholism, the despair - all are portrayed here, as well as the determination and the courage of the Indians to claim what was rightfully theirs.
"Crusoe and I were out for a drive, and that day I asked him, 'How did your mom deal with that? How did that affect her?' " VanDevelder says, talking about the death of one Cross child. "He said, 'She was no different from any of the women in Elbowoods, or men, for that matter. When anything bad happened they just gritted their teeth and turned and kept walking.'
"Because that was survival. They didn't have any other choice. They just had to find a way to live with it, wall it off."
The family member with perhaps the biggest wall of all was Raymond Cross, the youngest. "Raymond was so shaped by the trauma. He was born into that." VanDevelder repeats a description of him from the book: "He could walk through a burning house and not know it was burning. He would walk right through it and not lose his focus."
His memory of Elbowoods and the idyllic life there comes not from memory, but from the stories his elders tell. Those stories, however, had such a powerful impact on Ray Cross that he entered law school, he says, with an eye toward righting the wrongs done to his people.
"I knew the stories of the grievous wrong that persisted for 40, 50 years, the extremely high-handed, the extremely disrespectful, the extremely unfair way in which my home tribe was treated ... not only my home tribe but other tribes.
"One of the things that it forces people to do," he says, "is confront the sad history of power gone somewhat mad, of development without a purpose. The plan was flawed from the start."
And the dam, he says, resulted in "injury not just to the tribes but injury to a whole Great Plains way of life."
Cross left home with his mother when he was still a boy. They moved to California's Bay Area and he attended school there, gained encouragement from teachers and counselors to reach high. With a scholarship from the Bureau of Indian Affairs he attended college and then law school, then practiced law in California, working at first for California Legal Services.
In 1982 he returned to North Dakota to fulfill his destiny. Like Odysseus, he arrived at home to find disorder and disarray. His people were so poor they slept in houses without roofs or indoor plumbing. With no fertile farmland to till, they drank to fill their time, instead, or killed themselves.
Like the Homeric hero, though, Cross made a plan and then began to fight - with words instead of swords. He got the money his people had coming to them, via a trust gleaned from the hydropower receipts off the dam. Every year the people of New Town, as their new home is called, get $40 to $60 million to be invested in their social and economic recovery.
"They're now one of the economically stronger and more resilient tribes - that went through hell to get at where they are now," he says.
Cross was part of the first wave of American Indian lawyers, spurred on by the Nixon Administration and the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. As a UM law school professor, he now nurtures the next wave, part of an effort to make sure the cruelties of the past never happen to America's indigenous people again.
"I think tribes are learning that the price of freedom anywhere ... is vigilance," Cross says. "Therefore, they hire attorneys. Therefore, their leaders are becoming more and more education-savvy. They're becoming coyote warriors themselves.
"There has to be that kind of vigilance on the part of Indian people. Otherwise, this could happen again."
Former Missoulian reporter Sherry Jones is a fiction and freelance writer living in Missoula.
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