Anyone who thinks America's past was greater than its present should read David Hugh Bunnell's memoir Good Friday on the Rez, which definitively puts to rest that notion.

Bunnell grew up in the 1950s in Alliance, Nebraska. The town that could have inspired a Norman Rockwell painting with its two quaint hotels, three ice cream stands and mom-and-pop shops. "People in Alliance felt prosperous and safe; they seldom bothered to lock house or car doors," Bunnell writes.

Good Friday on the Rez, by David Hugh Bunnell

"I could pedal anywhere — the swimming pool, school, the movies, friends' houses, the soda fountain ... I wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as a bicycle lock, much less a bicycle thief."

But Bunnell also recalls that this feeling of freedom and safety was not shared by all. He was white, his middle-class family accepted. The largest minority group in Alliance were the 400 to 500 Native Americans, largely Lakota, who were relegated to "Indian town," a squalid tent city kept apart from the white people's houses by railroad tracks.

Signs stating "NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED" were ubiquitous: "They were displayed in the hotels and café windows, above cash registers, and even used as neon signs outside the bars."

While growing up, Bunnell was urged by white friends and neighbors to "ignore the ugliness" or "turn the other cheek," but while working for his father's newspaper, he came to see racism as something that should be exposed and fought against.

As a young man in the early 1970s, Bunnell and his first wife, Linda, moved to South Dakota to teach on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There, he relates, he made friends, a few enemies and witnessed some of the most important moments in the 20th century indigenous civil rights movement.

Bunnell's searing memoir begins as a 280-mile round-trip trek from his hometown in Alliance back to Pine Ridge where he visits with his "blood brother" and former student, Vernell White Thunder. He recounts local history of the colonization of Nebraska and South Dakota, the many battles fought between U.S. government troops and Native American tribes, and the history he witnessed as a young man when members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee, S.D.

He also reports upon contemporary Lakota tribe members, including local entrepreneurs. He meets one couple selling buffalo-meat burritos from their car.

"We butcher [the buffalo] ourselves, usually in the winter when the coat is full because my cousin is a buffalo hide painter," one woman tells him. "We boil the meat for burritos, donate leftovers to the elders or for ceremonies and powwows."

And then as Bunnell expresses surprise, she retorts, "Don't you think us Indians can be entrepreneurs? ... I went to college."

It is to Bunnell's credit that he reports such encounters, even when prickly, and does not portray himself as a savior but rather a curious and open-minded observer.

Good Friday on the Rez is also filled with stories of warmth and humor. Bunnell made many friends on Pine Ridge, and the mutual affection they feel for each other is palpable on the page.

As they barrel across Vernell White Thunder's ranch at one point, Bunnell shouts for his friend to slow down, "but instead of hitting the brakes, he stomps on the gas and hollers, 'Hoye! Hoye! Time to wake up, Bunka Dude!'"

Bunnell eventually left the midwest for California, where he helped create PC Magazine, Macworld and other technology publications. At one point he was the director of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union. He died of pancreatic cancer last year. The diagnosis had inspired him to finish this memoir.

Good Friday on the Rez is a gripping read and tells an important story, not just of the tragic history of racism against Native Americans, but also of the resilience of the Lakota and other Midwestern tribes. Ultimately, it's a story of friendships and possibility, a reminder that we don't have to keep repeating the racism and violence of the past.

May-lee Chai is the author of the memoir Hapa Girl, which takes place largely in South Dakota in the 1980s.

Good Friday on the Rez

A Pine Ridge Odyssey

David Hugh Bunnell

(St. Martin's, $26.99)