A School of Their Own (Paperback or Softback)

As an Ivy League student in the 1960s, Michael Gross’s optimistic perception of America was shattered. When appalling social inequality became immediate for him – first in the Deep South and later in the Navajo Nation – it struck a nerve.

In his first case as a cub lawyer at a War-on-Poverty legal services office in Window Rock, Arizona, Gross was assigned to file a lawsuit to reopen a high school in Ramah, New Mexico. He would spend the next fifty years helping tribes achieve self-governance, a dream they chased through centuries of betrayal by the U.S. government.

This is the story of the son of Holocaust survivors who forged an unlikely alliance with his Native clients: to educate their children, preserve their culture and language, and adapt to political and economic realities on their own terms.

Michael Paul Gross was raised by hardworking parents and received exceptional educational opportunities. Deemed ineligible to serve in the military, he felt he owed a debt to his country. He never planned, however, on representing his first clients in a distant Navajo community throughout most of his fifty-year career. From advancing a model for Native-led schools, to providing pro bono legal counsel to the Navajo Code Talkers Association, to winning two major cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, Gross propelled enduring and long overdue change in federal Indian policy for all Native Americans.