It was at Wounded Knee, huddled under a night sky lit by military flares and the searchlights of armored carriers seeking him out, that Vietnam vet Woody Kipp realized that he, as an American Indian, had become the enemy, the Viet Cong, to a country that he had defended with his life. With candor, bitter humor, and biting insight, this book tells the story of the long and tortuous trail that led Kipp from the Blackfeet Reservation of his birth to a terrible moment of reckoning on the plains of South Dakota. Kipp’s is a story of Native values and practices uneasily crossed with cowboy culture, teenage angst, and quintessentially American temptations and excesses.

As a boy, Kipp was a passionate reader and basketball player, always ready to brawl and already struggling with discrimination and alcoholism in his teens. From his tour of Vietnam as a Marine to his troubled return, from his hell-raising as a violent, womanizing, hard-drinking horse breaker to his consciousness-raising as a college student and foot soldier in the American Indian Movement, Kipp’s memoir offers a unique, firsthand view of the enduring power—and the vulnerability—of Blackfeet culture, of the difficulties inherent in cross-cultural understanding, and of the urgent necessity of overcoming these difficulties if the essential heritage of Native America is to survive.

Woody Kipp is an English instructor at Blackfeet Community College on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.

"Kipp's brutally honest story is a thought-provoking chronicle of an underdog finally making good."—Booklist

"This is a distinctly new kind of Native autobiography. . . . Kipp's book is about taking back the abiliity to determine one's own destiny and ultimately decolonizing a people through the reclamation of identity. . . . I am looking forward to the rest of Kipp's life story."—Tom Holm, Great Plains Quarterly

"Kipp's sophisticated analysis of the power relations that constructed and constrict the lives of Native Americans includes a clear statement of the problems remaining in the colonized and pillaged Native American world and offers a road map for our journey out."—Patricia Penn Hilden, Western Historical Quarterly

“Kipp’s memoir is both a warning of the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding, and a call to overcome these difficulties if the essential and unique culture of individual Indian tribes is to survive. . . . For the sake of both cultures, everyone should read this memoir.”—Roundup Magazine

“The impact of Kipp’s growing self-awareness casts an interesting light on Native Country. He is not naïve about each individual’s complicity in substance abuse or turning violently on one’s neighbor, and his epilogue is a troubling revelation about domestic violence and pain, but he manages to make a general call for individual rebirth that may contribute to a rekindling of tribal spirituality and commitment.”—Clark Whitehorn, Montana Magazine

“A biography laced with keen observation and opinion. Kipp’s style is clear and direct with no punches pulled, as he recounts his life’s journey through critical turning points and encounters with racism and alcoholism.”—Chip Clark, Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education

“An unyielding, unflattering, and sharp-witted (at times absolutely hilarious and entertaining) self-portrait. But it is more—much more—than simply autobiography. [It] is an insightful, brutally forthright masculine-centered effort to identify white privilege and racial oppression of non-whites in the lingering residue of conquest and colonization.”—American Indian Quarterly

“Woody Kip, a Blackfoot Indian from Northern Montana, travels through and shares many different stages of his life with the audience. We see his life as a full circle – how it begins and how he returns to his beginning.”—Mosaic

“A rich narrative of the life of a common Native man’s experiences of moving beyond the reservation and between the indigenous world and a white world that is entrenched in racism and cultural misunderstanding.”—Multicultural Review