Nearly twenty years ago, I read a book about Native life western Montana that shook me with its vivid descriptions of place, its unsettling scenes of poverty and institutional Indian schools. Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red (originally published 2003) was beautiful in its intensity, startling and raw. It captured the harsh conditions of life on the Flathead Indian Reservations in the 1940s. And then it went out of print. Happily, the good folks at Milkweed Editions rectified the situation and Perma Red returned to print in the fall 2022; and I eagerly revisited the story that wowed me all those years ago.