“Blood is still blood, honey,” Nelson said ominously. He reached over and patted her knee. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
A week later, Nelson was at his desk checking invoices on several Apache artifacts they had obtained from the University of New Mexico, when Martin White came into his office.
“Nelson, my boy,” he said without preliminary, “I’ve decided to give my niece Naomi a paid internship with us. I want to help her obtain some practical experience to go with that degree of hers.”
“An internship?” Nelson allowed himself a moment to think about it, then said, “We’ve never had a paid intern before. Do you think the board will approve the expense?”
“Approve a paid intern with a doctorate, my boy?” White chuckled. “Why, they won’t think twice about it. Now then, I’m counting on you to give her all the support she needs. You won’t let me down, will you?”
“No, sir. Of course I won’t.”
A paid internship, he thought when White left. One foot in the door.
He told Rose about it that night, when she was staying over at his apartment. She was amazed. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Nelson emphasized. “This is just the beginning.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Martin White saw to it that Nelson took Naomi well under his charge. She moved into a storeroom directly across from Martin’s office that her uncle had cleaned out and redecorated for her into small but comfortable working quarters. And, on a daily basis, Nelson received a list of assignments with the young woman designed to acquaint her not only with the running of the museum but the area around it as well.
One of the first things Nelson was tasked to do was familiarize Naomi with the extended community. Using his car, a modest sedan furnished by the museum as part of his compensation package, he took Naomi on casual driving excursions around Jackson and Shannon counties, introducing her to small towns like Red Shirt, Buffalo Gap, and Owanka, driving in a loose semicircle that skirted the northern and western boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
At one point on one of their excursions, when they stopped for lunch at a little cafe in Hermosa, Nelson asked, “Would you like me to show you some of Pine Ridge this afternoon?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I’m not really interested in the reservation.”
Nelson thought that very odd. Years of studying Native Americans and not interested in seeing a reservation?
“Have you spent much time on reservations?” she asked.
“Yes, when I was studying at Oklahoma State. One summer I worked at the tribal museum on the Osage Reservation. And another time I hitchhiked up across Kansas and spent some time on the Potawatomi Reservation, then thumbed my way up to the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. And of course I’ve spent some time here on Pine Ridge.”
“All of that must have been very enlightening,” Naomi said, somewhat distantly, as if just being polite.
That evening, after having dinner at Rose Blackthorn’s little house on the Pine Ridge res, Nelson and Rose went onto the front porch to enjoy the cooling breeze and the mixed fragrances of the reservation night: the bitter sweetness of a hackberry bush, the pungence of chestnut soil in someone’s modest garden being hopefully watered, wisps of musky smoke from a wood-burning stove heating a cast-iron kettle for coffee. Off in the distance came the occasional bark of a prairie dog.
“I can’t figure her out,” Nelson said of Naomi White. “She seems to be interested in Native Americans only in the abstract. Like medieval history.”
“Do you like her?” Rose asked quietly.
“Like her?” Nelson shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it. How do you mean?”
“Well, you know. White Cloud has you spending so much time with her, you’re bound to form some opinion of her.”
“Well, I don’t dislike her, certainly not like I’m beginning to dislike her uncle. But she doesn’t seem to be at all like him. Not on the surface anyway.”
Somewhere nearby, a woman could be heard calling someone named Teelie to come home at once. Rose spread her knees and drew her skirt partway up to let the evening air cool her thighs. Nelson had earlier removed his shirt and now sat in a sleeveless undershirt.
“I offered to show her some of the res today,” he told Rose. “But she wasn’t at all interested.”
“Maybe,” Rose theorized, “she has a different career path planned for herself. Something in public relations or some other high-profile work where her doctorate title would be impressive. Something entirely apart from your job.”
“Maybe,” Nelson said, his tone more doubtful than hers.
They fell silent for a few minutes, their shoulders occasionally touching as one or the other shifted position slightly. In the three years they had been intimate, they had reached a point where it was not necessary to have an ongoing conversation. Both found it comfortable just being together, theirs being at times a silent love.
After a while, Rose asked, “Are you staying over?”
“I don’t think so. I have to get the car washed and gassed in the morning before I take his niece out for the day.”
The next day, Nelson took it upon himself to drive Naomi White onto the reservation. She did not object or otherwise comment. They drove around, from Potato Creek to Porcupine to Wounded Knee. Along the way, he shared with her many of the things he had learned about Pine Ridge from Rose and his own observations.
“It’s the eighth largest Native American reservation in the country, and also the poorest. Unemployment is rarely less than eighty percent. Half the people here live below the federal poverty level. A large percentage of these homes don’t have electricity or running water. As you can see by the number of outhouses, they have no toilets or sewage systems. The only way they can cook or heat their homes is with wood-burning stoves. The infant mortality rate on Pine Ridge is five times the U.S. national average. The life expectancy of the men is forty-seven, for women it’s fifty-two. That’s the lowest life expectancy of any group in the entire Western Hemisphere.”
“Quite different from what’s depicted at the museum,” Naomi commented, without much feeling.
“Of course,” Nelson said. “The museum is for white people. You never see Indians visiting there.”
The following morning, Martin White summoned Nelson to his office. The expression Nelson encountered was one of obvious displeasure.
“At dinner last night,” he said, “my niece told me about your little excursion to Pine Ridge yesterday. She also related some of the statistics you quoted. May I ask what your purpose was in doing that?”
Nelson shrugged. “I thought some exposure to current conditions of Native American life today might give a little balance to what she’s learned from books.”
“I don’t agree with that,” White said irritably. “I cannot see any advantage in exposing her to the substandard conditions under which some of her own people live today.”
“They aren’t exactly her own people,” Nelson pointed out. “Pine Ridge is a Sioux reservation. You and your niece are Crow.”
“An Indian is an Indian!” White snapped.
Nelson’s mouth dropped open in surprise. The statement was absurd. Anyone of Sioux blood would have challenged it in a heartbeat. The Sioux considered the Crow far inferior to themselves. While the Sioux had been fighting to defend their tribal land, Crow men were wearing blue coats and scouting for the white soldiers.
The curator marshaled control of his displeasure. “At any rate, what’s done is done. But from now on, there will be no more excursions. Instead, I want you to explain in meticulous detail to my niece all of your duties as an assistant museum curator. You can begin with a full inventory and history of our entire collection. After you have done that, I will tell you what to do next. Understood?”