Waitey McColl is a young adult working as the night clerk of the Sequoyah House hotel, in the Cherokee Badlands of eastern Oklahoma. A Native American of mixed blood, he was born in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, a few years before the region became the 46th state of Oklahoma in 1907. He is smart and ambitious; and, as a direct descendant of riders on the Cherokee Trail of Tears - a pejorative among Native Americans describing the forcible removal of ancestors from the United States - he harbors a deep resentment toward the white society. The angst of his ancestors has been passed...