“My name is Winona.” This is how the young Indian girl in A Thousand Moons begins her story. “In the past, they called me Ojinjintka, which means rose. Thomas McNulty made great efforts to pronounce this name, but he could not manage it, and so he gave me the name of my deceased cousin, because it was easier for him to say. Winona means firstborn. I was not the firstborn.”
Winona escapes the slaughter of her tribe and, adopted by John Cole and Thomas McNulty, grows up in the chaos of post-Civil War America. The poor farm outside Paris, Tennessee, resembles a utopian refuge in a world still writhing in the throes of war.
In this world, where winners and losers continue to clash rabidly, where brutality and misery continue to kill in countless ways, and basic safety is an unknown word, young Winona seeks her identity and her justice. Because the story she has to tell, the story of her young life, is the story of not just one but many crimes.
It is not just the private crimes: a rape, a rabid beating, a murder. It is also the public crimes: the terrible genocide, the cover-up of violence, the illegality of law. A captivating, painful story of love and redemption for memory, identity, and a woman's determination to write her own future.
