Lyman "Bean" Wilson, a half-breed Nevada Indian and middle-aged professor of journalism at Lakota University in South Dakota, is reassesing his life. The result is a string of family reconnections, sexual adventures, crises at work, pipe and sweat-lodge ceremonies, and—through his membership in the secret Ghost Dancers Society—political activism, culminating in a successful plot to blow the nose off of the George Washington statue on Mt. Rushmore.