A wife leaves her husband in order to ensure his ultimate salvation after they are rejected from the Christian church for their polygamist marriage.

A young Native American man visits a burial site on a nearby island and must reflect on both his allegiance to his culture and to himself.

A Polish immigrant feels her mind slipping away, as her surroundings and even her own body seem unfamiliar. After she's diagnosed with Alzheimers, she reflects on the importance of her memories and her past.

The body of a sixty-three-year-old Mohawk woman's little brother is uncovered at the construction site of a fast food company fifty years after his death, which prompts her to grapple with questions of assimilation and memory.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

Blood, sweat and bronco balls: a white East Coaster doesn’t know what life is like for Wyoming cowboys and part-Indians until he’s spent a day gelding. That’s castrating stallions, for all you white East Coasters.

On a cold winters morning, post World War I, an older couple works on updating their family memory book with the intention of passing it on to the younger generation.

Following her mother's death, a Chinese American woman relives her childhood days, halved between Catholic school and her parents' disintegrating marriage. She remembers her old ability to make unlikely miracles happen.

An Orthodox Jewish man and his son share a fig tree with their neighbors, several Roman Catholic nuns, and the fig harvest creates an uneasy intimacy between the two houses.

After a terrifying illness, an Indian grandmother drops everything and moves to live with her son and his wife in California. What she finds is a family that has begun to leave behind the traditions she cherishes, and her desperate attempts to save them only intensify her suffering.