Lear, who already wrote an excellent book on Freud (Love and its Place in Nature), has managed to introduce a Heideggerian conception of world and worldliness into a retelling of the oral history as seen by the last great chief of the Crow. It not only examines the devastation, even if mistakenly well meant, wrought by the white conquest of the native nations but points to a method for examining just how our own civilization is collapsing. This may be the century when the West must say, "after that nothing happened."

Although it was not examined it Lear also notes how the Crow tribe, while complying with the U.S. Governments push to give up the idea of communal property in favor of private property amongst the tribe was turned around making it possible for the tribe to retain communal property in a form.