When I returned a few years ago for a reunion of the original population, Pickstown was in a modest renewal as a retirement, hunting and fishing community. . . . I found my schoolboy friend Armand Hopkins at the Yankton Sioux casino and restaurant on the reservation. We laughed about the time we skipped school to go fishing in the river before his father’s farm was submerged by the lake. Now Armand and some other Sioux are petitioning the federal government to get additional compensation for their lands that were condemned. They say they had been paid only $33 an acre at the time, and they figure it’s worth at least twice as much.

Armand knew that 25 years ago I had bought a headstone to mark the grave of my friend Sylvan Highrock, who had died from too much drinking. When I asked about other Indian friends, the answer was a depressing litany. “Elmer Ashes?” “Dead,” he said. “Peter Archambeau?” “Dead,” Armand said. “They’re all dead.”

Survival is a point of pride for Armand and a subject that weighs on Sonny Soulek. . . . Sonny returned from a hellish time in Vietnam with what he calls survivor’s guilt. He’s undergone therapy and returned to the family farm not far from Pickstown, hunting and fishing and reflecting on what it’s been like to grow up in this corner of South Dakota. “There were two kinds of people,” he says, “the tough and the dead.”