In 1833, a young, lightning-scarred oak tree grows near a village of Potawatomi Indians, the Neshnabek. Here, Watseka and her family must fight to save themselves from the onslaught of white migration and disease in the Little Woods. But the mandates of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the atrocities of the Black Hawk War of 1832 serve to undermine the Neshnabek's bargaining position as they relinquish their legacy through the Treaty of Chicago and prepare for their removal to the west. That same venerable oak stands in twenty-first-century St. Charles, Illinois, and bears witness to...