Deep within the badlands in the state of South Dakota lies the Pine Ridge Reservation belonging to the Oglala Lakota Nation. Pine Ridge carries a dark history. It is here that the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee took place in December 1890. It is the place where the last of the Ghost Dances was enacted, and later the final engagement of U.S. forces against native Americans. Wounded Knee represented the end of a final frontier. They say that blood is thicker than water, but water can wear away stone. Two adolescent boys, one Metis, and the other white become bound together in a dark friendship beginning in adolescence and enduring into adulthood, until death takes one of them. In 1973, decades of unrest within the Pine Ridge Reservation is escalating into a modern day battle at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Members of the Oglala Lakota Nation, along with members of the American Indian Movement and their supporters, are involved in an armed stand-off that will last 71 days. In the midst of the fray is Rene, a journalist chronicling the events as they are unfolding. Back in Winnipeg, Manitoba is Eric, Rene's best friend. Eric is completing a law degree and learning details of the stand-off through Rene's presence at Wounded Knee. Several years later they would join forces together during Quebec's Oka crisis, and it is here that Eric witnesses first hand, the marginalized and disenfranchised. With Rene's death, Eric is forced to examine and confront life's truths, and in particular, the darkness within himself. It is here that a quest for self-forgiveness and absolution begins.