Spirits Do Not Rest
Heartbreak at Wounded Knee
Spirits Do Not Rest: Heartbreak at Wounded Knee. When twenty-two-year-old Lauder Ellison finds herself about to be exposed for plagiarism in a national magazine, she flees her teaching position in Omaha for a small Lakota day school on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The year is 1890, and people are fleeing the area due to rumors of Sioux uprisings and Ghost Dancing, both of which have resulted in a massive buildup of army troops. Newspapers across the country are fomenting prejudice and fear. The country waits for war.
Lauder finds a sanctuary and love amongst the Lakota, especially the starving children in her classroom and a man trying desperately to save the children from being torn from their families and shipped across the U.S. to Indian boarding schools. No one imagines the horror rising on the cusp.
Spirits Do Not Rest, explores greed, death, and the power of love and forgiveness during one of our nation’s darkest chapters. The novel also examines the far-reaching roots of injustice and pays tribute to people, who having lived through unspeakable grief, gather the courage to rise from the ashes and forge a future for their children and grandchildren.
Margaret Lukas’ Spirits Do Not Rest is a re-telling of the Wounded Knee massacre in which over 350 Miniconjou were brutally murdered. The novel pays tribute to endurance, self-compassion, and the heart’s search for home.
Margaret’s Other Novels
The Broken Statue
When her father is murdered, a crime that does not interest the law because he was half Native American, she risks her plans to become a doctor, determined to avenge his murder.
River People
In Nebraska in the late 1890s, seventeen-year-old Effie and eleven-year-old Bridget must struggle to endure at a time when women and children have few rights and society looks upon domestic abuse as a private, family matter.
Farthest House
When Willow is born and her mother dies moments later, only the narrator of this spellbinding, debut novel knows the death isn’t from complications of childbirth. Amelie-Anaïs, buried on the Nebraska hilltop where the family home resides, tells this story of deceit, survival, and love from beyond the grave.