What drew you to write about the Oglala Sioux, and specifically Le War Lance and SuAnne Big Crow?
I just think the Oglala are really cool — buffalo-hunting, semi-nomadic Plains warriors on horseback have always appealed to me deeply. Of the Indians of the Plains the Oglala were in my opinion the best fighters, the toughest, the smartest — I just loved them. And I loved Crazy Horse, who was the great Oglala. His intransigence, his determination to be himself — even though they ended in his death — gave us a different kind of person that we could choose to be. And Le and I had been friends for so long. I was friends with Le in New York because he was so different from everything else about New York. He was the one guy I knew in the city who liked country music. And he loved Westerns. So I could talk about my favorite thing in a Western, and he would know about it — well, he’s a full-blood Oglala. I never thought I’d be talking about Westerns with somebody from the other side of the western story. All of that combined to draw me to the Oglala. I didn’t know about SuAnne Big Crow
