Spanning nearly a century and moving backward in time, A Splendid Indian is a dynamic and inventive collection of linked stories set in the vividly alive world of the fictional Broke Hat rez.

Late one August, Samson, a laconic sixteen-year-old, is spending the summer at the general store, intent on finding his first girlfriend, when his father sends him to retrieve a stolen rowboat. Out on the lake, he meets a talking sturgeon who claims they are ancient lovers. When Samson refuses her, she tells him of a long-ago decision that robbed the men in his line of a crucial inheritance: the power of eloquent speech. To reclaim the long-lost status of a Stexw t'u7 áma ku úcwalmicw—a Splendid Indian—Samson must decide whether to love her, or remain forever at a loss for words.

From there, the mythic, transformational, intergenerational story of Broke Hat moves backward in time: a boy and his poetry-reciting rez dog stand guard against the "Indian killers" he believes haunt the gas station; a rooster rallies the hens and recruits the crows for revolt against the axe-wielding thick-legged ones; a lesbian couple en route to an Elvis impersonation competition pick up a rodeo cowboy on the run from a clown that seems half ghost, half traumatic memory; a bootlegger's six-year-old son begins hearing angels; and a young woman burdened with an excess of beauty learns hard lessons about life, death, sex and wolves on her journey to the city and back.

Told in reverse chronology and blending realism with myth, the comic with the surreal, A Splendid Indian offers a singular vision of kinship, inheritance, language and desire.