John Trudell was a major player in the Native American civil rights movement throughout the 1970s. In '79 he lost his wife, mother-in-law and three children to a fire in their home on a reservation in Nevada, a fire which occurred just 12 hours after Trudell set an American flag on fire on the steps of the FBI building in Washington D.C. Following the tragedy, Trudell turned his activism into poetry and music. Said best in his own words: "My goal is very simple. To communicate the human experience at a level that human beings can recognize and relate to. That may be a personal statement. It may be a political statement. But whatever it is, it all comes from the same point of reference: the experiences we share as peoples of this planet."