On a Native American reservation in present-day America, a tribal judge investigates the theft of an older Native man’s fiddle. The man, Shamengwa, is named after his disfigured arm. Despite his disability, Shamengwa is a renowned fiddle player on his reservation—until one day his fiddle goes missing. The tribal judge believes it was Corwin, a drug dealer with alcohol and cocaine problems known to get into trouble. As the trial judge follows Corwin, waiting for an opportune time to arrest him, the judge also speaks with Shamengwa about his lost fiddle.  In a one-on-one conversation, Shamengwa opens up to the judge, telling the story of how he got his fiddle when he was a young child. Shamengwa’s mother lost a child to diphtheria and became depressed, leaving the house joylessly silent. One day when his parents are out, Shamengwa finds the fiddle that his mother forced his father to stop playing; when Shamengwa is alone in the home, he slowly teaches himself to play. His parents become so inattentive that, upon breaking his arm, Shamengwa can’t convince them to take him to the doctor to get it fixed. He discovers that putting it up in a sling is the only way in which he can continue to play the fiddle and, as his arm heals incorrectly, he gains the name of Shamengwa—an orange and black butterfly—from his classmates at school. One day, Shamengwa’s parents catch him playing the fiddle, and his father, in a rage, leaves home with the instrument. Shamengwa descends into a depression much like that of his mother—until he has a dream that instructs him to wait by a nearby lake. Shamengwa waits all day at the lake until a canoe comes into view; in the canoe is his fiddle.  The perspective shifts to Corwin, who has stolen Shamengwa’s fiddle and is trying to pawn it off to people for money. In his drugged up state, Corwin begins to pretend to play the fiddle, placing its case in front of him on a busy street with the hopes of attracting spare change. While he feigns playing the fiddle, he hears a symphony in his head—a symphony which is interrupted when the tribal judge arrests him for his robbery. In a twist, the tribal judge decides to spare Corwin a sentencing, instead asking Shamengwa to teach him how to play the fiddle.  The two enter into an unlikely apprenticeship until Shamengwa passes away; at his funeral, Corwin begins to play the fiddle and then, in a fit, smashes it against a railing before placing the fiddle in Shamengwa’s open coffin. The tribal judge, in the front row of the funeral, notices a scroll in the body of the broken fiddle and pockets it. The perspective shifts once more to the author of the scroll, Billy Peace, who writes, in 1897, a history of the violin to his brother Edwin as he sends the fiddle on a canoe out to find him. Billy reveals that he and Edwin had to race in their canoes to win the violin from their father; sabotaging each others’ boats, Billy ends up overturning Edwin’s canoe. He waits on a nearby shore, violin in hand, writing to Edwin that he will send the violin out on a canoe to him, in the hopes Edwin will find the violin. Returning to the tribal judge’s narration, the judge reveals that the canoe made its way to Shamengwa in the end. In a resolute ending, the tribal judge notes that they have married and adopted Corwin as their child, and reminisces on the role they play in overseeing the happenings around them.