The conquest of Native America is usually told as two thefts, the theft of the land and the killing of the people. Beyond the Burial Tree adds a third, harder to see because it left no acreage and no body count: the seizure of a people's authority over its own dead. The right to decide how the dead are mourned, where they rest, and whether they remain present to the living was carried off along with the ground and the lives, and that taking is the subject of this book.

David Boles tells it through the people whose river raised him. He grew up in the Loup valley of central Nebraska, on a river the French named for the Wolf People, the Skidi band of the Pawnee, who had been marched south to Indian Territory before the valley filled with the settlers who replaced them. From their graves on the prairie the Pawnee dead were carried to historical societies and university shelves and to the medical collections of the Army, where skulls were measured in the service of a racial science long since discarded. The book follows that traffic in the dead across more than a century, and the long fight, led by the Pawnee themselves, to bring the ancestors home.

The return came slowly. A Nebraska statute in 1989 and the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act a year later gave the dead a road home, and many have traveled it, reburied at last in the country they were taken from. Many more wait in boxes still. Written close to the ground by an author raised in the valley this history is set in, Beyond the Burial Tree asks a plain question with no easy answer: what does a nation owe the people whose ancestors it dug up, and why is the work of return still unfinished?