by Every book I take on carries some risk, and on most of them the risk is mine alone. If I misjudge a scene or overwrite a chapter, the cost is my own time and my own name, and I can live with that. Beyond the Burial Tree, my new book, was the first in a long while where getting it wrong would cost other people, and a people who have already been wronged about as thoroughly as a people can be. That fact stood over the desk through every page.
The book sets down how this country emptied Native graves and made property of the dead, and how, generations later, that theft is still being undone. I will not lay the whole history out here, since the book exists for that. What I want to put on the blog is the writing of it. People ask about the title, so I will start there. I needed a phrase that marked one exact change, the moment a person stops being held by the people who love them and starts being stored by an institution that does not. From grave to drawer, from relative to record, everything the book documents is a version of that move. The old burial customs of the Plains kept the dead close and accountable to the living, and the title points past them, to what came in their place.
The first rule I set was that I could invent nothing. I hold to that on every project, but here the rule had the force of a debt, owed to people who could no longer object to how they were described. When you are writing about a grandmother whose skull was measured and filed under a number, you owe her the facts exactly as they are. You report what the record holds, you cite it, and you let the plain facts carry the weight a weaker book would hand to its adjectives. So I built this one on documents: the orders and the museum ledgers, the state laws and the court records of how the returns were finally forced, the federal investigation that in 2024 put the documented child deaths in the government’s boarding schools at nine hundred and seventy-three and called even that a floor. I wanted a reader able to check me at every turn, because a book that asks a country to face its record cannot be loose with its own.
Most of the work was reading, months of it, in papers that were never meant to be read for feeling. An accession ledger does not weep. It lists, in a clerk’s steady hand, a number, a tribe, a place of collection, a date, and that steadiness is the worst of it, because the steadiness is what let the thing happen at all. I read a great deal of that kind of paper. The discipline the book asked of me started there, in not turning away from how ordinary the machinery looks once it is written down, and in not making it more lurid than it was, since the truth of it is already more than bad enough.
The hardest single decision was how to put the dead on the page. The museums turned people into specimens, into things a stranger could handle and shelve. A writer can commit a quieter version of the same act, turning a human being into material for a paragraph, a sorrow spent to move a reader and then dropped on the way to the next point. I did not want to buy anyone’s feeling with the dead. So I worked to keep them people. Where a name survived in the record, I used it. Where a name had been lost, I said so and let the gap stand inside the account, since the missing name is one more thing that was done to them.
There is a fair question waiting for any writer who takes up a story like this. Who am I to tell it? I am not Pawnee. I grew up on ground their families were removed from, which gives me a reason to care and no standing to speak for anyone. That left one honest way through, and I took it. The book keeps to what the record will support, what was done to the Pawnee and what they did in answer, and it holds the center of the story where it belongs, with the families and the lawyers and the tribal officers who spent decades making museums and agencies hand their relatives back. They are the ones who acted. I took down the account, and that is the most a writer in my place should claim.
Scale was its own trap. The numbers in this story are large enough to go numb on contact. Tens of thousands of the dead gathered into collections. A boarding-school system run for more than a century. A documented death toll the government itself calls a floor. Lean on a figure like that and it does the feeling for you, while the reader goes hollow instead of awake. I used the large numbers sparingly and kept returning to the single grave, the one lodge, the one child who never came home, because a person is the unit a reader can hold. The harm was done one ancestor at a time, and the only way I trust to account for it is one ancestor at a time.
I write to take responsibility for what I say, and I keep it on myself rather than spreading it around. I do my own research, I make my own arguments, and I put my name on the conclusions. On most books that is a point of pride. On this one it felt nearer to a duty. A work that holds institutions to account for how they treated the dead has no business being careless about who stands behind its own claims. If a fact in it is wrong, that is mine to answer for, and I wrote the whole book knowing as much, which is the only honest way to write anything that matters.
I have written before about grief, about how going to the funeral is one of the ways the living stay human. This book is about grief that was never let to finish. A family cannot complete a burial when the body has been carried off to a drawer in another state, and the law passed in 1990 to let them ask for their dead back is more than thirty years old now, with most institutions still not done answering it. The return is real, and it is nowhere near finished. That unsettled quality is the hardest thing in the book to sit with, and I did not force it toward a resolution it has not earned.
You can find Beyond the Burial Tree at BolesBooks.com now, in print and ebook, with the audiobook coming. I am proud of it the way you are proud of work you were afraid of, which is to say quietly, and with some relief that I did not flinch. If you read it, I ask only that you take it as the account of real people rather than as an argument I am out to win. They were owed the truth, plainly told and carefully kept. Setting that down, and standing behind it, was the whole of the job.
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