The Highway and The River

As the daughter of an evangelical pastor in a rural portion of South Dakota, her young life is spent absorbing a rigid belief system that makes no allowance for creative thinking. She learns quickly to "do as she is told," and to model good behavior as a reflection of her father's ministry. She grows as a very dutiful child without realizing that she could be separate, apart from the expectations that had been put on her. She is taught to believe firmly in the "Power of Satan" and that she was a foot soldier in the "Lord's Army." As she grows into her teenage years, she is first full of questions, and later frustrated by the lack of continuity between what she was taught by her beloved Daddy and the workings of the world outside the doors of his church. Meanwhile, she had formed a close kinship with the Indians who lived across the River. She had been warned about them from her early days as being "unsaved," irresponsible and even dangerous. She found them to be warm, accepting, people who could teach her a lot about spirituality, more than she had known in the evangelical upbringing of her childhood. She had come full circle in her questioning of good and evil.