A fictional reservation that feels real

Amy Frykholm’s High Hawk is an unusual novel in portraying a setting unfamiliar to many people: a Native American reservation. It is also unusual in being a story set in the recent past. In the American mind, Native Americans existed long ago and in faraway places. (I have even seen books dealing with contemporary Native issues cataloged in the “Old West” sections of bookstores.) High Hawk is filled with both the tension and nuance of what could be my own Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota today, even though the story is set in the 1970s. This is a contemporary environment Frykholm understands and a reservation community she portrays with skill.

The setting, the fictional Windy Creek Reservation, is rife with contrasts: environmental beauty and personal suffering, high hopes dashed to despair, a strong Indigenous identity entwined in a struggle for basic rights, and a deep craving to belong frustrated by a sense of profound personal abandonment. The detail and character development easily resonate with me, as I grew up on a reservation and taught Native American studies in the city portrayed in the story. Having worked as a psychologist, I see the tension and ponderings of Frykholm’s Lakota characters as deep and consistent with Native people I have known. The realism she creates fills out the Indigenous characters as real people.

The novel’s central character, Father Joe, is a White Roman Catholic priest who serves on the reservation. This, too, is plausible: the 1874 Quaker Plan assigned the Episcopal Church as the official mission to the Lakota Nation, but later, Roman Catholic missionaries were added. I am impressed with how deeply Frykholm understands Father Joe’s inner world. As he leads his congregation through crises and sharpens his own sense of calling, his thinking and emotions are consistent with those of Episcopal clergy colleagues and Catholic clergy friends I have known on reservations over the years. Frykholm easily crosses barriers of gender and ordination to explore the humanness of a Roman Catholic priest.