American Pie

American Pie is dedicated to the author's great-grandfather, John Brant, a descendant of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief who fought against Americans in the Revolutionary War. Otro, American Pie's protagonist, is uncertain about his own genealogy but believes that his father was likely Asian and his mother might have belonged to the indigenous Tarahumara tribe in Mexico's Copper Canyon. What Otro knows for sure is that he's a brown-skinned man who educated himself as he traveled the world and now lives in a remote region of the Pacific Northwest with a Sioux woman known as Loot. Their life together has affirmed the potent truth of a sentence written by British philosopher Bertrand Russell: Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those not regarded as members of the herd.