Compassionate Woman is the biography of a woman of Lakota and Chippewa heritage who was the winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1991 for her work to save tribal languages that were becoming extinct throughout the United States. Locke was the first American Indian to serve as a senior officer on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, and she was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.