The Road to Lame Deer is a very special journey of one man in his effort to understand another culture and his relationship to that culture. The road isn’t easy. Along with a kind of spiritual enlightenment comes the painfully sad reality of life in the Indian community-alcohol abuse, family dysfunction, unemployment, and grinding poverty. That Jerry Mader is able to tell his story with compassion and gut-wrenching honesty is a tribute to his own decency and integrity. The Road to Lame Deer is an important book. -James Welch, author of The Heartsong of Charging Elk. A bittersweet cross-cultural friendship and the richness and melancholy of modern Cheyenne life are unforgettably etched into the pages of The Road to Lame Deer. Many times in the 1970s, researcher and photographer Jerry Mader was drawn to the community of Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. The winding road to Lame Deer allowed Mader to glimpse gradually something of both the pain and continuing vitality of the Cheyennes’ distinctive world. A visit after a prolonged absence to Lame Deer reawakens memories, feelings, and first perceptions about the community and how it, as well as he and the relationships he forged there, have changed over time. Images of the reservation and its people became seared in memory and movingly recalled throughout the work-the hot, dry dust of an afternoon whirlwind, a quest for a stone woman, the haunting melody of a Cheyenne flute, and the desolation and desperation of bars that hovered along the edges of the reservation. At the heart of the book is Mader’s relationship and friendship with Cheyenne elder Henry Tall Bull, which was punctuated by both insight and misunderstanding, and ultimately ended in tragedy. Witty, knowledgeable, and bearing a bitterness that could flare into white-hot anger under the influence of alcohol, Tall Bull guided Jerry Mader through the maze of relationships and obligations that girded and defined the Lame Deer community. The memory of the doomed friendship between researcher and Cheyenne elder haunts Jerry Mader still as he continues to sadly travel the long road to Lame Deer in his dreams. Jerry Mader has been a novelist, poet, musician, and counselor. He currently works as a writer and photographer in Seattle.