Cheyenne Madonna

Oklahoma Book Award

One stormy night in 1826, Old Bull, a Cheyenne Indian who had just seen the ocean for the first time, found himself trying to outrace a hurricane. Old Bull was the only one of his party to return, arriving home nearly naked, nearly hallucinating, riding a horse.

Such is the beginning to the life of Jordan Coolwater, a distant relation to Old Bull, whom we meet as a boy in the 1970s, shooting turtles on a summer day, and being raised by his grandparents in the house of his great-great-grandfather, a survivor of the "Trail of Tears." Bearing the burden of his ancestry, Jordan Coolwater - from bored young boy, to thoughtful teenager, struggling artist, escaped convict, and finally, father - is the subject of Eddie Chuculate's collection of linked short stories. This is not only a portrait of a young Native American artist struggling with the two constants in his life, alcohol and art, but also a portrait of America, of its dispossessed, its outlaws, and its visionaries.