In following the white man's road, Joseph Blue Crow has lost his Lakota heritage and is haunted by the loss. After the inexplicable suicide of the woman he loves, and as he sinks into alcoholism and despair and stands on the precipice of suicide, his best friend tells him, "You got to go on the mountain."

Blue's journey takes him on a torturous path, and as he is guided by a shaman and a spirit bird, under whose wings lay the shadows of the past, he revisits--and relives--the massacre of Wounded Knee, standing beside his people as they fall under the gun and cannon fire.