As a child, White Hawk was adopted from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota to non-Native Wisconsin parents. She describes in vivid detail the experience of being torn from her birth parents and being put into a red pickup truck. The title of the book came from her adoption papers, and how they listed her as "a child of the Indian race." White Hawk was adopted into a white family and an early age. In 1988, she returned home to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and to her people, the Sicangu Lakota.