The Dream Stalker

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky smiled at the thought. Thousands of books written by people the whites had considered illiterate and uncivilized.

  The cultural director shifted against the desk. “Unfortunately most of the ledger books were destroyed. There’s only a handful of intact books that survived, and they’re in museums. Point is, Vicky, we wouldn’t know about No-Ta-Nee’s book if Grandfather hadn’t seen it. How many other valuable artifacts are the museum people holding back, hoping we don’t know about them?”

  “Wait a minute.” Vicky switched to her courtroom tone. “What you’re implying would be a serious violation of NAGPRA. There must be an explanation. Museums prune out collections all the time.” She was grasping, but she plunged on: “Some curator might have decided the museum had enough objects decorated with Indian art. Maybe the museum sold the ledger book to another museum.”

  “Oh, sure,” Dennis said, tapping a pencil against the edge of the desk. “Museums sell history books by Plains Indians every day.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know the pictographs told of actual events,” Vicky persisted.

  The cultural director stared at her with a fixity, as if he were trying to see into her mind. “You’ve become like them,” he said. “You believe whatever they tell you.”

  Vicky flinched. It was true. She had been away from the reservation for ten years. Had become an attorney, ho:xu’wu:ne’n, like a white woman. Maybe she had even learned to think like white people, but she was still Arapaho. “Come on, Dennis,” she said, making an effort to ignore the insult. “It took awhile for scholars to recognize that the drawings on tipis and shields and a lot of other Indian objects were more than decorative art.”

  “And as soon as they figured it out, they wouldn’t let any objects with pictographs out of their hands,” Dennis said. “No way would they sell a ledger book.”

  “Maybe it was too late. Maybe the book had already been sold.”

  The curator thumbed through the inventory pages, peering at each one, as though the spaces between the lines might tell him what else was missing. “If the museum sold the book, we got the right to know who bought it so we can get it back. If the museum can’t prove it was sold, we’ll know they’re holding out on us. We can file a lawsuit and force them to give us a complete inventory.”

  The old man thrust out both hands, a sign of silence. Turning to Vicky, he said, “You must take care of this, Granddaughter. Your ancestor—the grandfather of your father—was a baby still on his mother’s back when the people left Colorado. It was a hard time. My ancestor wrote it all down so that the younger generations would know, young people like you. You must get our story for us.”

  Vicky could hear the sound of her own breathing in the quiet seeping through the small office. Outside somewhere a car door slammed—a muffled sound, enveloped in the heat. There was no evidence the museum had ever owned the ledger book—only the story of an old man. But Charlie Redman was the storyteller, trained as a boy, just like his father and grandfathers back to the oldest of times, to memorize the people’s history. She had heard him tell the stories many times at tribal gatherings. He could speak for hours, hardly drawing a breath. His memory was prodigious. Prodigious and accurate.

  But an old man’s story in the white world? What evidence was that? Not enough to convince a court to order the museum to open the records. She glanced up at the cultural director still perched at the end of the desk, a look of satisfaction crossing his face. He knew she would have turned him down had he come to her office with such a request. So he had brought her here. How could she refuse the elder?

  A sense of frustration roiled inside her: What they expected was impossible, a waste of time. Yet her frustration was tempered by an odd sense of pride. Maybe the very impossibility of the task was a measure of what her people thought of her.

  She got to her feet and faced the old man. “I can’t promise anything, Grandfather.”

  Charlie Redman held her eyes a moment. “You must do your best for your people,” he said.

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