In the high desert cliff-dwelling city of Puye, a young astronomer apprentice named Blue Water is about to become a mother. In the Tewa society in which Blue Water lives, women are the keepers of power, property and wisdom. The collective belief system is one of reverence and awe for nature and her many circular cycles. Here, in the warmth of a hardworking philosophical community concerned with balance and beauty, the arid mountainous land provides-corn, beans, and squash from the farmers; deer, elk and buffalo from the hunters; wild onions, chokecherries and more from the gatherers.

But this balance is fragile. Drought forces the 1500 people of Puye (whose name means Where Rabbits Gathered) to leave the cliffs of the massive butte that has been home for 100 generations. Blue Water journeys with the others to Big River, where they build Singing Water Village, a stable adobe farming settlement. Here, Blue Water's daughter North Star is raised. Wild-hearted, curious, and bold, North Star is a natural biologist, drawn to the creatures that inhabit the land-the reptiles, especially, and the snakes most of all. She dreams, explores, and is free.

But in 1598, everything changes. The arrival of a massive caravan of Spanish invaders-led by the unforgiving Juan de Oñate-brings with it the unfathomable and inflexible brutality of the Inquisition. North Star's infant daughter Butterfly is separated from her mother during a brutal Spanish raid, and the path that once lay open before her is lost. Raised briefly among the Hopi and later in a Catholic orphanage, Butterfly's identity is shaped by forces that seek to erase her and her ancestors.

What follows is an epic family saga of resilience and survival, traversing the first 100 years of Spanish colonization of the land now known as New Mexico, told through the lives of Blue Water, North Star, Butterfly and three more generations of Tewa women in the same family line. Each is born into a world rapidly shifting beneath them. Each is bound to the land, to each other, and to the unbroken chain of their grandmothers' heart-call towards freedom.