The Good Indian

An irreverently funny and deeply moving story of growing up on the Rez and figuring out what it means to fight for your people, in the courtroom as a lawyer, and throughout life as a good relative

When Lakota law professor Elaine Yellow Horse was a kid, her mother told her that her generation—the seventh to live on reservations—was meant to save their people. But Yellow Horse, just a muddy kid running around the Rez with her siblings, could never have imagined how that responsibility would take shape in her life. Raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, just feet from where the Wounded Knee massacre took place, Yellow Horse figured if she ever landed in a courtroom, it’d be because she got busted for getting up to something. 

After studying Tribal Law in college, however, she took a job in the prosecutor’s office, half because she needed the cash, and half because Mariska Hargitay made criminal justice look sexy as hell on TV. Through her legal work, she would ultimately come to better understand her tribe’s history and how it still affects everyone today, and to draw from Lakota traditions to make the courts more compassionate and more effective. And along the way, she’d help bring a notorious, prolific criminal—a white pediatrician working in the federally run Indian Health Service—to justice.

The Good Indian, a title that nods at the colonizer’s ever-present gaze as well as Yellow Horse’s desire to live up to her tribe’s expectations for her generation, is about coming into her own and fighting for her values and her family, despite the weight of history, the pressures of modern life, and the chaos that very family sometimes begets.