'Walking the Rez Road' contains forty short stories and poems featuring Luke Warmwater as a central character. Luke is a Vietnam veteran who has survived the war but is having 'trouble surviving the peace' on a reservation where everyone is broke and where the tribal government seems to work against the interests of the reservation folk. Throughout 'Walking the Rez Road', it is humour that holds the people and their community together.

Since 2001 Indian Country has seen great changes, touching everything from treaty rights to sovereignty issues to the rise (and sometimes the fall) of gambling and casinos. With unsparing honesty and a good dose of humor, Jim Northrup takes readers through the last decade, looking at the changes in Indian Country, as well as daily life on the rez.

The topics of the day fly fast and furious over Jim Northrup's moccasin telegraph:

The game wardens were playing catch and release with the Anishinaabeg spearers. one Shinnob went back for seconds. He got two tickets. . . .

The powwow was great. I'd like to thank all those who worked to make this happen. as a Vietnam vet, I felt honored, but still think we should quit
making veterans. . . .

Hell just froze over because Fonjalackers got a per capita gambling payment. after almost fifteen years of high-stakes bingo and gambling casinos, we got a check for $1,500 each. . . . Now Mom can get that operation and I can send my kids to Harvard. I can also get that Ferrari I've always wanted. I'll decide on the color after my round-the-world vacation. . ..

Between 1989 and 2001, Indian Country saw enormous changes in treaty rights, casino gambling, language renewal, and tribal sovereignty. Jim Northrup, a thoroughly modern traditional Ojibwe man who writes a monthly syndicated newspaper column, the Fond du Lac Follies, witnessed it all. With humor sometimes gentle, sometimes biting, sometimes broad, these excerpts tally the changes, year by year, as he spears walleye, raises a grandson, harvests wild rice and maple sugar, fixes rez cars, attends powwows, and jets across the country and across the ocean to tell stories.

Jim Northrup is an award-winning journalist, poet, and playwright and the author of "Rez Road Follies "and "Walking the Rez Road." Margaret Noori is the director of the Comprehensive Studies program and a lecturer in the Native American Studies program at the University of Michigan.

The Rex Road Follies captures storyteller, poet, and performer Jim Northrup at his shrewdest and funniest. He tells of the key events of his own life: his childhood in a government boarding school, combat in Vietnam, confronting family tragedies, and becoming a grandfather -- or, as he says, "almost an elder." Northrup writes with equal candor about the reservation's poverty and racism on one hand, and its kinship and traditions on the other. The Rez Road Follies, filled with keen observations and feisty opinions, is an entertaining feast with a core of hard-earned wisdom.