W.O. Mitchell worked for many years on this book, polishing what was to be his big, serious, and very controversial novel about white-native relations. The book is set in the Paradise Reserve in the Alberta foothills but the Reserve is far from perfect. Carlyle Sinclair, a widower who comes to teach in the one-room schoolhouse, is full of optimism, but he is frustrated in and out of the classroom by the passivity of the people he is determined to...