The headline irritated Catherine. There had been no compromise. She had simply stated the museum’s policy. If an Indian tribe wanted ancestral bones returned, it had only to ask for them and provide some acceptable proof that the bones in question had indeed been taken from a burial ground of the tribe. The entire argument was ridiculous and demeaning. In fact, even dealing with that Highhawk man was demeaning. Him and his Paho Society. A museum underling and an organization which, as far as anybody knew, existed only in his imagination. And only to create trouble. She glanced at the circled paragraph.
“Mrs. Catherine Perry, an attorney for the museum and its spokesperson on this issue, said the demand by the Paho Society for the reburial of the museum’s entire collection of more than 18,000 Native American skeletons was ‘simply not possible in light of the museum's purpose.’
“She said the museum is a research institution as well as a gallery for public display, and that the museum’s collection of ancient human bones is a potentially important source of anthropological information. She said that Mr. Highhawk's suggestion that the museum make plaster casts of the skeletons and rebury the originals was not practical ‘both because of research needs and because the public has the right to expect authenticity and not to be shown mere reproductions.’ ”
The clause “the right to expect authenticity” was underlined. Catherine Morris Perry frowned at it, sensing criticism. She picked up the newspaper. Under it, atop a sheet of brown wrapping paper, lay an envelope. Her name had been written neatly on it. She opened it and pulled out a single sheet of typing paper. While she read, her idle hand was pulling away the layer of wrapping paper which had separated the envelope from the contents of the box.
Dear Mrs. Perry:
You won’t bury the bones of our ancestors because you say the public has the right to expect authenticity in the museum when it comes to look at skeletons.
Therefore I am sending you a couple of authentic skeletons of ancestors. I went to the cemetery in the woods behind the Episcopal Church of Saint Luke. I used authentic anthropological methods to locate the burials of authentic white Anglo types—
Mrs. Morris Perry’s fingers were under the wrapping paper now, feeling dirt, feeling smooth, cold surfaces. “Mrs. Bailey!” she said. “Mrs. Bailey!” But her eyes moved to the end of the letter. It was signed
“Henry Highhawk of the Bitter Water People.”
“What?” Mrs. Bailey shouted. “What is it?”
—and to make sure they would be perfectly authentic, I chose two whose identities you can personally confirm yourself. I ask that you accept these two skeletons for authentic display to your clients and release the bones of two of my ancestors so that they may be returned to their rightful place in Mother Earth. The names of these two authentic—
Mrs. Bailey was standing beside her now. “Honey,” she said. “What’s wrong?” Mrs. Bailey paused. “There's bones in that box,” she said. “All dirty, too.”
Mrs. Morris Perry put the letter on the desk and looked into the box. From underneath a clutter of what seemed to be arm and leg bones a single empty eye socket stared back at her. She noticed that Mrs. Bailey had picked up the letter. She noticed dirt. Damp ugly little clods had scattered on the polished desk top.
“My God,” Mrs. Bailey said. “John Neldine Burgoyne. Jane Burgoyne. Weren’t those—Aren't these your grandparents?”
Chapter Two
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On the last Thursday in August, the doctor treating Agnes Tsosie in the Public Health Service hospital at Fort Defiance told her she was dying and there was nothing he could do about it.
“I knew that,” Agnes Tsosie said. And she smiled at him, and patted his hand, and asked him to call the chapter house at Lower Greasewood and leave word there for her family to come and get her.
“I won’t be able to release you,” the doctor said. “We have to keep you on medications to control the pain, and that has to be monitored. You won't be able to go home. Not yet.”
“Not ever,” Agnes Tsosie said, still smiling. “But you leave the message for me anyway. And don’t you feel bad about it. Born for Water told Monster Slayer to leave Death alive to get rid of old people like me. You have to make some room for the new babies.“
Agnes Tsosie came home from the hospital at Fort Defiance on the last Monday of August—overriding the objections of her doctor and the hospital establishment by force of the notorious Agnes Tsosie willpower.
In that part of the Navajo Reservation west of the Chuska mountain range and north of the Painted Desert, just about everybody knew about Agnes Tsosie. Old Woman Tsosie had twice served her Lower Greasewood Chapter on the Navajo Tribal Council. National Geographic had used her picture in an article about the Navajo Nation. Her iron will had a lot to do with starting tribal programs to get water wells drilled and water supplies available at every chapter house where hauling drinking water was a problem. Her stubborn wisdom had been important for years among her clansmen, the Bitter Water People. On the Bitter Water Dinee she imposed her rigid rules of peace. Once, she had kept a meeting of two Bitter Water families in session for eleven days until—out of hunger and exhaustion—they settled a grazing rights feud that had rankled for a hundred years.
“Too many people come out of these belagaana hospitals dead,” Agnes Tsosie had told her doctor. “I want to come out alive.” And no one was surprised that she did. She came out walking, helped by her daughter and her husband. She sat in the front seat of her daughter’s pickup, joking as she always did, full of teasing and funny stories about hospital behavior. But on the long drive through the sagebrush flats toward Lower Greasewood the laughter died away. She leaned heavily against the pickup door and her face was gray with sickness.
Her son-in-law was waiting at her hogan. His name was Rollie Yellow and Agnes Tsosie, who liked almost everyone, liked Yellow a lot. They had worked a way around the Navajo taboo that decreed sons-in-law must avoid mothers-in-law. Agnes Tsosie decided that role applied only to mean mothers-in-law with bad sons-in-law. In other words, it applied to people who couldn’t get along. Agnes Tsosie and Yellow had gotten along wonderfully for thirty years and now it was Yellow who half carried her into her summer hogan. There she slept fitfully all afternoon and through the night.
The next morning, Rollie Yellow made the long bumpy drive around the mesa to the Lower Greasewood Chapter House and used the telephone. He called the chapter house at Many Farms and left word that Nancy Yabenny was needed.
Nancy Yabenny was a clerk-typist in the office of the Navajo Timber Industries and a crystal gazer—one of the category of Navajo shamans who specialize in answering hard questions, in finding the lost, in identifying witches, and in diagnosing illnesses so that the proper curing ceremonial can be arranged.
Nancy Yabenny arrived Thursday afternoon, driving a blue Dodge Ram pickup. She was a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a yellow pantsuit which had fit her better when she was slimmer. She carried her crystal, her four- mountains bundle, and the other paraphernalia of her profession in a briefcase. She placed a kitchen chair in the shade beside Agnes Tsosie’s bed. Yellow had moved the bed out of the hogan into the brush arbor so that Agnes Tsosie could watch the thunderclouds form and blow away above the Hopi Buttes. Yabenny and Old Woman Tsosie talked for more than an hour. Then Nancy Yabenny arranged her slab of crystal on the earth, took her jish of sacred things out of her purse, and extracted from it a prescription bottle filled with corn pollen. She dusted the crystal with that, chanted the prescribed blessing song, held it so that the light from the sky illuminated it, and stared into it.