Zits is a foster child, having spent the majority of his life moving from one negative or abusive family experience to another.
A new ideology of making white people pay for their historic treatment of Native Americans.
Justice provides the weapons, sending Zits on a mass shooting in a downtown Seattle bank.
Shot in the back of the head by security, Zits is suddenly transported to the past and thrust into the body of a stranger; this is the first of many similar incidents.
The story confronts Zits' feelings of vulnerability as a misunderstood teenager, an orphan, and as a biracial person with Native American ancestry and how forgiveness across multiple generations is an inside job.
Once Justice believes Zits is ready to commit a real crime, he sends him off to a bank.
After opening fire in the lobby, Zits perceives he has been shot in the head, ultimately sending him back in time.
He watches his partner kill an innocent Indian and is forced to shoot the corpse in the chest.
He gets to witness this historical battle and at the end is told by his father to slash a fallen soldier's throat as revenge for his own muteness.
For the past nine years of his life, he has been bounced around from negligent family members to remiss foster homes.
After staying with his Aunt and her sexually abusive boyfriend for two years after his mother’s death, Zits runs away, starts drinking, smokes crack, steals a car, and finds himself repeatedly in juvenile detention.
As Hank Storm, Zits learns that Elk and Horse (IRON’s two figureheads) are in cahoots with the FBI and HAMMER.
Elk and Horse bring Hank and his partner a member of IRON, Junior, to interrogate.
His father talks to a Native American with peeling skin and lightning bolts painted on his body; Zits realizes this is Crazy Horse, the Oglala war leader.
He is then told to cut the throat of a young white soldier but hesitates wanting to give the boy mercy.
His best friend of fifteen years is Abbad, an Ethiopian Muslim and an immigrant, whom he taught how to fly.
After Abbad hijacks and crashes a plane into downtown Chicago, Jimmy feels a number of emotions, mostly betrayal.
As his father, Zits learns that his father endured physical and emotional abuse as a child; after failing to kill an animal on an unsuccessful hunt, Zits' Grandfather forces his son to repeat the lines "I ain't worth shit" over and over again.
Morality In Flight, the main character, Zits learns the importance of the choices made and the effect they have on self and others.
This shame reveals that in the center of this young Indian boy, change from his lifestyle of destruction, mischief, and hatred is desired and possible.
After returning from his "flights" he stands in a bank with the choice to pull out his gun and begin firing or walk away from the consequences and guilt he would forever face.
For example, in Chapter Seven the narrator says, "I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it smells like the Devil dropped a shit right here in the middle of the camp" (61).
Historically there was a major conflict and stand-off between agents of the United States Government and Lakota at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
This historical battle marked one of the last of the Indian wars, and the one in which Native Americans inflicted the highest rate of casualties against United States forces.
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the westward expansion of pioneers created a powder keg in the form of crowded Native American tribes and nervous white settlers.
After Sand Creek, military- sanctioned retaliatory massacres declined and eventually stopped.
Flight also refers to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the first on United States soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Members of Al-Qaeda highjacked four planes on suicide attacks, driving them into major buildings, and killing thousands of Americans.
Abbad shares that he suspected Jimmy feared him as a possible terrorist when he expressed interest in learning to fly.
Jimmy's worst fears, mostly unspoken, are realized when Abbad crashes his plane into a Chicago building.