On a quiet Philadelphia morning in 1906, a newspaper headline catapults Alma Mitchell back to her past. A federal agent is dead, and the suspect is Alma's childhood friend. Asku, as Alma knew him, was a promising student at the "savage-taming" boarding school run by her father, where Alma was the only white pupil. Intended to assimilate the children of neighboring reservations, the Stover School had robbed them of everything they'd known.