After a painful divorce, Mathew, an 11-year-old Lakota Native-American boy, of mixed blood, goes out to eat with his father, Ray, at an all-white restaurant in rural South Dakota when all hell breaks loose. Old wounds rupture, and Ray pushes Mathew further and further away, into the freedom of a new terrain - the Badlands. Finally, desperate acts bring Mathew face to face with his own inner strengths, and with this discovery come the tools to build a kind of home only before glimpsed in dreams.