A School of Their Own

As an Ivy League student in the 1960s, Michael Gross's optimistic perception of America was shattered. When appalling social inequality became immediate for him – first in the Deep South and later in the Navajo Nation – it struck a nerve. In his first case as a cub lawyer at a War-on-Poverty legal services office in Window Rock, Arizona, Gross was assigned to file a lawsuit to reopen a high school in Ramah, New Mexico. He would spend the next fifty years helping tribes achieve self-governance, a dream they chased through centuries of betrayal by the U.S. government. This is the story of the son of Holocaust survivors who forged an unlikely alliance with his Native clients: to educate their children, preserve their culture and language, and adapt to political and economic realities on their own terms.