Kipp, who hails from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in upper Montana, describes his path from belligerent cowboy to thoughtful leader in this slim, straightforward autobiography. Kipp?s journey was far from smooth. He meandered through years of hard drinking, womanizing, an extended Marine tour in Vietnam, and finally, the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee. Beyond the reservation, Kipp discovered an entrenched racism and cultural misunderstanding between the white and Native American worlds he moved between. In a bunker with bullets whizzing a few inches from his head, he writes, ?I realized the United States military was looking for me with those flares. I was the gook now.? His identification with the Viet Cong launched him on a path that ultimately led back to the Blackfeet reservation, this time as an English teacher at the community college and a student of the dying ?old ways.? Kipp reveals the desperation of those on the reservation and looks critically at endemic problems like alcoholism. ?Sadness and depression have become so commonplace that the people growing up today don?t know there was a time when reservation life wasn?t like that,? he says. ?We weep and don?t know what to do to save our children?? Kipp?s alternately combative and discerning prose touches on the wisdom and weaknesses of the beleaguered Blackfeet people, calling readers to value this rich thread of Native American culture. Photos. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kipp's odyssey takes him from Montana's Blackfeet reservation to Vietnam, the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, and back to Montana as a reservation teacher. Born in 1945, Kipp was adopted into a family with one foot in Blackfeet tradition and the other in white American culture. When the family moved to a small town just off the reservation, Woody's basketball skills shielded him from the most overt racism, but after he was mysteriously found one-half unit short of graduation, he joined the Marines, signing on for a sure trip to Vietnam. Haunted by witnessing the racial hatred directed by American soldiers toward the Vietnamese, Kipp feels the same hatred directed toward him as he hunkers down in his bunker at Wounded Knee. Fewer details of his drinking bouts and extramarital dalliances and more on his introduction to the American Indian Movement and its leaders would have better illuminated his concerns, but all in all Kipp's brutally honest story is a thought-provoking chronicle of an underdog finally making good. --Deborah Donovan Copyright 2004 Booklist