Overview
"Waskn Mani's grandmother had seen a fire in the eye of her grandson, the same keen joy his mother had once displayed in the good red and blue days of the past. She did not feel his joy. Neither did she understand it because it had a mystery about it and a complexity. This joy did not produce smiles and laughter, but rather a sacred intensity as if he were thinking hard in a foreign language. Such constant thinking made the boy seem almost a man. Almost holy. Waskn Mani did not look at the hills and trees as they traveled. He seemed to look through them. And he breathed with a lunging ferocity as if the air were rich and tingling. Ah, the child had some secret in him, some knowledge so deep that even he might not know it was there. This is what caused his grandmother to say that God might have a job for him to do."Lakota orphan Waskn Mani (Moves Walking), half-child of a star, is a gentle, nature-conscious boy gifted with rare spiritual insight and power. His people are astonished when Moves Walking opposes Fire Thunder, a warrior of great skill and violence whose quest for power will lead to the tribe's spiritual destruction. Only through sacrifice can Moves Walking restore life and hope to his people, and heal their "elemental sorrow -- the anguish of living things when the sacred hoop is broken." Told with extraordinary literary grace and infused with the author's deep love of the Lakota people, this is a timeless tale of good and evil, life and loss, and the transforming relationship that all people of faith can experience with creation and the Creator. Steeped in the culture, history, and legend of the Lakota Sioux, The Crying for a Vision is a novel as majestic as the open plains of the Dakotas.
Waskn Mani, the son of a Lakota woman and one of the stars in the sky, is torn between his devotion to the mystical world and his destiny of confronting the powerful one-eyed warrior Fire Thunder.