In an introduction, Nerburn tells of his meeting of a Native American named Dan following a motorcycle ride through North Dakota. On his trip, he passes a rock with a placard stating that the landmark was a holy site to the Native Americans of the Lakota Tribe. Following this, he receives a call from a woman on the Lakota reservation. He visits the tribe.
He meets an overweight, dumpy kid named Grover with his dog, Fatback. The child warns him that he has been summoned by an elder who is famously unkind to white men. Dan meets the chief and they share a blunt, which is marijuana wrapped in tobacco. They are awkward, but Dan finally explains that he feels he is approaching death, and he wants to tell Nerburn his stories.
Kent copy-writes the stories that Dan gave him and returns. Dan reads the drafts and likes them, but feels they lack something essential. They agree to relay the stories verbally, as they would have done according to custom. Dan tells the stories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. He ends the story with an observation that white men tend to automatically blame the hatred and violence on the Native people, even though it was often the white people who attacked them first.
Dan smokes a pipe and tells Kent about the new generation of Native people, the "reservation Indian." He mourns their lost culture, especially because Dan was drafted to fight in WWII, and he now understands the beauty of the Native American culture and its value in light of traveling throughout the war. He discusses how white people view property, versus how Native people consider themselves as part of nature, like the animals. Kent meets Natives on the reservation, including a severely overweight man named Jumbo.
Kent admits to the reader that he automatically assumed his whole life that white history was the only valid kind of history, but Dan's version of history makes sense, and it also makes sense that historians might have had racist biases. Dan tells him about the dangers of cultural appropriation, but he reaffirms his commitment to treat these issues without negative emotion, from a position of peace. Nevertheless, he has low expectations for the future of diversity in America.
