Book excerpt: "Abandoned by her white father, thirteen-year-old Red Dove faces another lean winter with her Lakota family on the Great Plains now empty of the buffalo that once sustained them. Willful and proud, Red Dove is presented with a difficult choice: leave her people to live in the white world--or stay and watch her family starve. When she breaks a sacred tradition and eats the fruit of the Dead Man's Plum Bush, her wise old grandfather gives her a medicine pouch that allows her to enter the thoughts and feelings of others. With it, she confronts the cruelties of the nun who runs the school, and the horrors of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Accompanied by her beloved pony, Red Dove begins a journey to find her true place in the world, only to discover that her greatest power comes from within herself"--