The Hard Margins

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS PICK FOR (THE REST OF) 2025. —Michael Patrick Brady, Substack
“BEAUTIFUL AND NECESSARY . . . EXAMINES MANY OF THE LIES UNDERPINNING OUR NATIONAL MYTHS.” —Jeffrey Condran, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people. 

Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It’s 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe’s windfall—oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused. 

The town’s sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe—and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.

Morally complex and fully relevant to today’s issues of freedom and land occupation, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire just as fervently to escape theirs.