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Good Friday on the Rez introduces readers to places and people that author, writer, and entrepreneur David Bunnell encounters during his one day, 280-mile road trip from his boyhood Nebraska hometown to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to visit his longtime friend, Vernell White Thunder, a full-blooded Oglala Lakota, descendant of a long line of prominent chiefs and medicine men.
This captivating narrative is part memoir and part history. Bunnell shares treasured memories of his time living on and teaching at the reservation. Sometimes raw and sometimes uplifting, Bunnell looks back to expose the difficult life and experiences faced by the descendants of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and Sitting Bull while also illuminating their courageous resiliency.
Substantive and at times disturbing, Bunnell reflects back to his time on the rez during the violent 70s when he smuggled food to radical Indians at Wounded Knee. Peppered with Vernell White Thunder’s spellbinding stories of growing up in a one-room log house with his medicine man grandfather, Bunnell’s begs the reader to join in on the poignant conversations about present-day Native Americans.
Good Friday on the Rez is a dramatic page-turner, an incredible true story that tracks the torment and miraculous resurrection of Native American pride, spirituality, and culture—how things got to be the way they are, where they are going, and why we should care.
