From Publishers Weekly (September 24 Issue)

The Uwharrie of North Carolina came up against the controversial Indian termination policy of the 1950s and '60s, which sought to mainstream Native Americans. Warren Eubanks, whose Uwharrie name means “the Seed,” grew up under the care of his grandparents in the 1950s, and narrates troubled reservation life as an older man looking back at his childhood and Vietnam-era younger adulthood, witness to a besieged community that has had to figure out how to “continue to be Indian.” Warren moves back and forth between different periods in the past, telling of conflict between the old ways, as followed by elders such as great Aunt Ida, who could read minds, and Grandmother, a weaver and singer, and the ruinous ways of the Kowache, or white people, to which Chief Billy Farmer is drawn. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the American Indian Movement and various corporations all play in as Warren slowly narrates how the reservation lands are handled, all the while staying close to people like the motorcycle riding Joe Bad Crow and Sun Susie, a horse trainer daughter whose mysterious death haunts these pages. In channeling Warren, Cook's beautifully modulated, speech-like cadences give his debut novel a quiet power.

From ForeWord Magazine (Nov-Dec 2007 Issue)

The protagonist and narrator of Reservation Nation doesn’t live in a foreign land or speak a foreign tongue. In fact he lives right in the middle of the United States, but because of the conflict between his Native American heritage and the white man’s lifestyle, he’s a man of no place or time. Author David Fuller Cook writes, “When Joe Bad Crow and me were growing up the Reservation was not a happy place. There were some ways out, like the bottle, or the needle, or suicide. Somebody could move off the Reservation and find themselves a job in a city somewhere, but there was some part of them that died when they did that.”
     Narrator Warren, his Aunt Ida, his cousin Sun Susie, her husband Joe Bad Crow, Chief Billy Farmer, Thomas Matoas Paint—they’re all trying to find their way in, or out; to find a way to bring the universe in balance. There are unexpected successes, like when Joe Bad Crow buys a motorcycle, and the two of them feel the “spirit moving in the wildness as it was before, something a white man would never teach us. There was nothing to be free of until the white man came.” Failure is useless death.

     Reservation Nation is a small masterpiece of time
and story and man’s place in it.

About the Author

David Fuller Cook lives near the Eno River, North Carolina, and his love for the river has led him to preserve its Oral History in stories and songs. As a naturalist and educator David co-founded, in 1989, the bio-regionally based Schoolhouse of Wonder, an environmental education organization with programs for children. He taught for several years in the field of gifted education, recently returning to the Schoolhouse of Wonder as its program director.

David is the author of Piedmont Almanac: A Guide to
the Natural World. Reservation Nation is his first novel.