It has taken me twenty eight years of learning, so that I could finish this book and get the story into the world.  To bring to cognition all that I had experienced and taken in as memory in bone and blood, to somehow extract that experience and bring it into a word-form that would truthfully express the Soul nature of the First People.   It has been a long and profound journey for me, to find within myself the wisdom to bring the truth of another people into the world . . . and at the end of it to see that the truth of the ‘other’ is in effect my own truth . . . and that essentially, is part of what I hope this book will bring to bear in our world.