"Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a family like everybody else's. Her Swedish American father managed stores for Sears and her mother drove her brothers to baseball practice and went to parent-teacher conferences." "But when she reached her thirties, she began to wonder why her mother spoke so rarely about her past. Diane traveled to South Dakota and Nebraska, searching out records of her relatives through five generations and hungering to know their hidden stories. Using the clues that she found, she started writing haunting vignettes of the lives of her Dakota Indian family, trying to re-create the oral history that was lost, or repressed, or simply set aside as gritty issues of survival demanded attention." "When the Dakota War broke out in 1862, her great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Marpiya Mase or Iron Cloud, fled with her French fur-trader husband and their children to Fort Ridgely for shelter. Diane imagines Rosalie tending her children's needs, avoiding the gazes of other refugee women - and watching as her husband and oldest son took up arms to defend her against her own relatives. In the 1930s, when Diane's grandparents could not afford to feed all their children, they sent their older daughters to boarding school on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

She interviewed her mother and aunts, recording their stories of privation and small joys: harsh discipline, racial taunts from other students, apples roasted on a wood-burning stove, rare visits home." "A counterpoint of memoir and carefully researched fiction, Spirit Car illuminates the difficult history of the Dakota people and the indomitable spirit that has allowed them to survive. Diane found her family's love and humor - and she discovered just how deeply our identities are influenced by the forces of history."--BOOK JACKET.