Winter Counts

Winter Counts

By David Heska Wanbli Weiden

 

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

I think I've said this before but the hardest books to review are not the bad ones, or the good ones, but the average ones.  What can you say about a book that does a reasonably decent job, but offers neither easy critiques nor glowing commendations? I suppose this scenario is what sets an excellent reviewer from a middling one (like me) - if I were a pro, could I pierce the heart of the book? Well, I'm not, but I'd like to set things down, so here goes:

The setting is the most unique part of the story, which is otherwise a fairly generic "enforcer type goes after hardened criminals to protect/defend his family and winds up uncovering corruption and doling out justice".  It's a good thing, then, that the setting can carry so much of the story.  It influences everything from the circumstances of the crime, to the lack of justice*, and the particular methods of deus ex machina that are used (i.e., the Lakota yuwipi which gives Virgil the insight to discover where the next location is).  

Because the book hangs so heavily on that frame, I think the plot doesn't stand on its own as much as it ought to: both Virgil's initial meeting of cop Dennis at the Colorado bar, and Virgil tracking Rick Crow to the abandoned museum were coincidences that don't make sense on closer inspection.  Dennis just happens to be undercover at the only bar we know Rick frequents in Denver? And Rick is hanging out at the museum after everyone else left... why? Why did they go to the museum in the first place, since it seems like the heroin crew has their own hide-hole? I mean, I assume Rick wasn't just sitting there because he was waiting for Virgil (and then Ben) to drive up and beat the shit out of him.    And I guess we're not going to find out how the heroin crew knew Nathan's cousin was wearing a wire (aside from "it was obvious")? Lol, well, sure, I'll accept that one, I guess.

I liked the main character, Virgil, and I liked Chef Lack, and the way Virgil initially thought he was full of it (uh, yeah, let's forage for turnips) but eventually came around to someone who genuinely wanted better for the reservations and was doing good.  There's nothing I would really point to as being bad or ridiculous, or dumb, or unbelievable, just you know, an okay kind of crime thriller. 

*If all the book does is get more people aware of the shitty and messed up legal system that governs the reservations, then it's been worth it to me.  This country systematically took rights away from native people and destroyed their culture as much as possible, deliberately, and THEN, in an effort to correct the awful mess it made, made even more laws that fucked people over.  The fact that the reservations are basically governed like the Wild West, and criminal prosecutions are subject to the federal whims is not, as the author points out in the afterward, a secret.  After basically undercutting every cultural method of resolving disputes internally, the U.S. government then turned around and said, "Guess we fucked up before, so to make it up to you, we're going to leave you on your own, just like you wanted, albeit two hundred years ago, before we sacked your nations and salted the ground." It's like that saying, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas." Is bringing the nations under state law the answer? Probably not, but man, is the current system not working.  American Indian/Indigenous Peoples law is a hideous hodge-podge of papered over inequities, and we're apparently not going to do anything about it except feel bad.  That money, sitting in an account for taking the Black Hills? That's true.  Anyway, what am I doing about it, except writing angry screeds on book reviews that no one reads? Yeah, I know.