The Story Teller Read Free Page B

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?”
    Vicky was quiet. The elder had seen the ledger book in 1920.
1920!
NAGPRA required museums to account for artifacts in their posession only as far back as 1991. In her courtroom tone, she said, “There is no legal basis upon which we can ask the museum to account for something it may have owned eighty years ago.”
    Dennis shrugged. “We’re fully aware of that, Vicky.”
    Quiet filled the small room. Vicky sensed the warmth of the elder’s gaze on her. This was not about following the letter of the law. This was about trust. Theelder had seen the ledger book. He wanted to know where it was. She said, “I can inquire about the ledger book, but it may be difficult to get 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 fixedly, 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 a while for scholars to recognize that the drawings on tipis and shields had deeply religious symbolic meanings and that 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 cultural director 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.”
    Vicky interrupted. “NAGPRA doesn’t give us that right, Dennis.”
    “If the museum people won’t tell us what happened to the ledger book, we’ll know they’re holding out on us. They can’t be trusted.” Dennis lifted the folder and slapped it onto the desk.
    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 be a living archive of 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? About what he had seen as a boy? The museum curator would laugh her out