“The burning of the cities,” I said. “And the Black Panthers and AIM.”
“ ‘The American Indian Movement came a little later. Otherwise you are correct. Even Minneapolis burned a little in this period. It was a modest blaze, compared to places like Detroit.
“Hiram went to Harvard. I went to a small liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. He and I swore to stay in touch, and we did for our first year. After that, circumstances pulled us apart. Hiram’s interest in physics intensified and left him little time for any other interest. I developed an interest in politics. He thought the war was wrong, and he had no desire to go to Vietnam; but he knew he was likely to need a security clearance in order to do his kind of physics. Protesting the war was a risk. He wouldn’t take it.
“I felt sorry for him and a little contemptuous. How could anyone be so careful, in that era when everything was being questioned and the world seemed full of possibility?
“The thing your teachers may not have told you is how full of hope the late 60s were. Yes, there was violence. The police and FBI and National Guard were dangerous. Plenty of people – good people – died in fishy ways; and plenty went to prison for things they almost certainly did not do. But the times were changing, and many of us thought we were building a new world in the shell of the old. As it turned out, we were wrong, at least for the time being. The 60s wound down slowly through the 70s, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan began a long period of reaction.
“I still think Hiram was wrong to be careful. We stopped corresponding, because we no longer had anything important to say to one another. Our friendship ended before the war did, not with an argument, but in silence. I was able to track his later career through the science magazines. It was impressive. I have always been surprised that he didn’t win a Nobel Prize like Sergei.
“After graduation, I stayed in the east and began work on a Ph.D. in biology. I never got involved with AIM, though I read about it in the papers. The occupation of Alcatraz! The battles on Pine Ridge! Why didn’t I come home to St. Paul or Standing Rock? Maybe because I felt more comfortable with political theory than with shoot-outs; and I didn’t feel that much like an Indian; and my issue was peace.
“When I came back to St. Paul for visits, I noticed that Rosa was undergoing a strange transformation. Always cold and increasingly indifferent to her appearance, she wrapped herself in cardigans and throws, which made her like a 19th century Lakota matriarch in a blanket. Her hair, which had always been short and neatly styled, grew long. She wore it in braids wound around her head or hanging down. Her face, wrinkled by age and sunlight, looked like the faces of my great-great-aunts.
“She still went to the Hill Institute daily. Louis W. Hill’s will had mentioned no retirement age for her. This outraged the other scientists. By this time the Institute had a director who’d decided – after consulting several lawyers – that the best thing to do was out-wait Rosa. Louis Hill was a man with a passion for control and an eye for detail. He had micromanaged the building of Glacier Park. Even the trim on the famous lodges and the design of their menus had gone past him for approval. Death might cause him to lose control of Glacier. It belonged to the American people, at least in theory. The Institute was his alone. Living or dead, he would control it. His bequest had numerous stipulations; if these were not followed, his money was to go to Glacier for maintenance of the lodges.
“The director could try to break the will, but he was likely to fail. He could ignore the stipulations, but the Department of the Interior had been coveting the Hill money for decades and was likely to sue. Better to put up with Hill’s eccentricities: the out-of-date Art Deco building with its tile facade of extinct mammoths and the doddering Indian scientist. Let Rosa potter around her office and lab. In the end, she would die of old age, and the space could be put to better use.
“She lived into her 93rd year and kept going to work until the last few weeks of her life. When she died – in 1985 – I inherited her house.
“As she requested, I had her cremated. She wanted to be buried on Standing Rock. I wasn’t sure how my relatives would feel about this, so I didn’t tell them what I was going to do. Remember that I had been living in the white world for a long time. I stopped learning how to be Lakota at the age of ten, and there were big gaps in my Lakota education.
“I took Rosa’s urn to the reservation and borrowed a horse from my second cousin Billy Horn. By this time, Billy was a middle-aged man with a comfortable gut; but he had been a lean and angry AIM activist with long, flowing hair and a feather tucked into the band of his cowboy hat. His hair was in two braids now. He still wore a cowboy hat, minus the feather; and he still had a rifle – he was one hell of a shot – but he didn’t pose with it anymore. Instead, it stayed in his pickup till he needed it. ‘Four-legged varmints now,’ he told me. ‘I gave up shooting at the FBIs. It’s a waste of ammunition.’
“The horse Billy loaned me was an appaloosa with an easy gait and beautiful manners. ‘It’d be easier to fall out of a rocking chair,’ he said. ‘Try to stay on board. You don’t want to hurt Moonie’s feelings.’ He stroked the mare’s lovely neck.
“I rode into the dry, golden hills. Hawks soared above me in a wide, wide blue sky. These were Swainson hawks, not the Redtails I knew from Minnesota. It came to me as I rode that I loved this country. The Missouri was a blue gleam in the distance. One of those damn lakes, made by the damn Corps of Engineers. But from here you couldn’t see the eerie, unnatural pool of water, edged with bare mud flats. Instead, you could imagine the river as it ought to be, full of shoals, edged with willow and cottonwood bottoms. There would be – should be – driftwood floating in the slow, late-summer current, coming to rest on shoals; and mammoths should wade in the shallows, sucking up the muddy water in their trunks and spraying one another.
“I unpacked my shovel and dug Rosa’s grave. After I buried her, I burned some sage. Moonie cropped dry grass nearby. That afternoon I decided I’d come back to Standing Rock, though I wasn’t sure when. I’d finish my Lakota education.
“I returned to Billy’s house at twilight. He took care of Moonie. ‘Didn’t do her any harm that I can see. Did everything go all right? Did you get Rosa settled?’
“I looked at him with surprise. He grinned. ‘You may have a lot more degrees than I do, but that doesn’t make me stupid, Liz. It was pretty easy to figure out what you wanted Moonie for. I’m planning to follow your trail tomorrow, go and talk to Rosa and make sure everything’s okay with her.’
“ ‘I wasn’t sure I ought to do it.’
“ ‘Crazy Horse said his land was where his dead were buried. That’s how we nail all this down.’ He waved his hand around at Standing Rock, hidden in darkness. ‘So long as we can keep the anthropologists from digging everyone up. If I was going to argue about anything, it’d be the cremation. It isn’t traditional. But Rosa always did things her own way.’
“He was joking about the anthropologists. We’d managed to stop them by then and gotten a lot of our ancestors back from places like the Smithsonian. The current problem was people who stole artifacts and fossils from our land. An entire Tyrannosaurus Rex taken and sold to the Field Museum! People have no shame! They will steal anything from Indians!”
My grandmother paused and glared, her blue eyes gleaming brightly. Then she took a deep breath and continued her story.
“I went back to St. Paul and looked at Rosa’s house. I’d visited her regularly, but it wasn’t my home anymore; and there were places – the basement and the attic – where I hadn’t been in years.
“The attic looked ordinary: unfinished, full of dust and boxes. I’d have to go through them all, I thought and groaned out loud. The basement was full of freezers. Not the kind you use for storing your Glacier frozen peas. These were the big freezers you’d find in a lab. Heaven knows how she got them down the stairs. Large men and some kind of hoist, I imagined. A note had been taped on one of the freezer doors. ‘Dear Liza,’ it said in s
haky print. “I don’t trust the director of the Institute, so have moved my tissue here. There are two backup generators. Please keep the temperature constant. Love, your grandmother.’
“I laughed with surprise, though not with pleasure. Rosa must have gotten stranger than I had realized in her last years. Moving mammoth tissue into her basement? How was I going to sell the house in this condition? I laughed again and shrugged my shoulders, then made sure the freezers were running properly. One thing at a time. First I had to clean the house.
“Some people’s lives change dramatically, Emma, in a single moment, through a single decision or event. That has never happened to me. My life has always changed slowly, through a series of small events and decisions.
“I took my first step at Standing Rock, when I realized how much I loved those golden hills. Step two was finding the freezers and making sure they were running properly. Without thinking it through, making no conscious decision, I made the freezers my responsibility. If there is a moral in my story, it’s do nothing lightly. I’m not complaining about the way my life turned out. I have enjoyed it so far. But I wish I’d been more mindful in places.
“Step three was cleaning the house. You may think of that as a tiresome project, like cleaning your bedroom. But I was going over my grandmother’s life, exploring it the way Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains. Like them, I found plenty of mammoths; and like them, I did a lot of hard, dirty work. If I had to decide which I’d rather do – clean another house like Rosa’s or drag a boat up the Missouri River, I’d have to consider a long time before making my decision.
“The closets were not difficult. Rosa had gotten rid of most of her clothing. The woman I remembered as elegant had spent her last years in blue jeans, flannel shirts, frayed cardigans and battered shoes. Nothing was in good enough condition to give to a homeless shelter. It all went in the trash.
“The boxes in the attic were business papers, most of them years old. It’s amazing what otherwise sane people will save! Maybe Rosa became anxious as she aged and afraid of throwing anything out, or maybe she simply became tired of sorting through papers. Almost everything could be burned, which I did on a cold, wet day when rain beat against the living room windows. There is something satisfying about sitting by the fireplace on such a day and watching old tax returns curl and blacken.
“Some of the burden of Rosa’s belongings lifted off me that day, though I knew the hardest work still lay ahead. The house was full of books. There was no way I could fit Rosa’s collection into my small apartment in Massachusetts; and I didn’t want most of the collection. But a book can’t be thrown away, and selling it or giving it away has to be done carefully. The best thing is to give books to friends. Rosa’s friends were gone by then. She had outlived them all. And none of my friends were in the Twin Cities.
“I planned to keep the books on Indians and packed them for shipment east. Then I went in Rosa’s den and looked at the books on mammoths. They lined one wall. Another wall was windows, looking out on Rosa’s garden, which had become a wild mixture of perennials and weeds. She had been such a careful gardener in the past! A third wall had her desk and an antique file cabinet made of oak. Two of the drawers were full of articles on mammoths and freeze drying, many written by Rosa. The other two drawers were full of Rosa’s notes.
“Surely the contents of the den should go somewhere special. This was Rosa’s life work, and she had been a distinguished scholar. I gritted my teeth and called the director of the Hill Institute. I don’t remember his name anymore. It was something that sounded East Coast and English stock: two last names stuck together with a title in front. Dr. Ramsey Sibley or Crosby Washburn. His accent was Midwestern with a trace of East Coast refinement. He was very sorry to hear of my grandmother’s death. A remarkable woman! An inspiration to us all! And no, he wasn’t interested in her papers. ‘We have moved in a new direction here, away from mammoths, Ms. Ivanoff. The university might be interested. I suggest you try them.’
“I mentioned the mammoth tissue. Dr. Sibley chuckled. ‘I’m afraid your grandmother became a bit eccentric toward the end. She decided the tissue would be safer in her basement. We didn’t oppose her decision. As you may know, Mr. Hill’s will required us to keep the tissue in perpetuity. But it belonged to Dr. Stevens; she had the right to remove it. Once it was gone, our lawyers told us, we do not have to take it back.’
“This sounded like shifty law to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. I thanked Dr. Crosby Sibley for his help and hung up.
“There I was, Emma, with a den full of mammoth books and a basement full of frozen mammoth. I could pack the den and put it in storage. But the tissue was a serious problem. I couldn’t put the house on the market until I found a home for it. I spent the next two weeks desperately calling academic institutions. But it was summer. The people who made decisions were not around.
“I was still sorting and packing. Rosa’s sheets and towels were too worn to sell or give away. They went in the trash. The kitchen had a few things I wanted: handmade cups and dishes by local potters. Looking at the rest, I decided on a yard sale.
“At last I reached my childhood room. The elm outside the window was gone, replaced by a silver maple. Otherwise, the room was unchanged. A star quilt covered the bed. One of my cousins on Standing Rock had made it. My favorite stuffed animal, a threadbare mammoth named Mamie, lay on the pillow. One of her glass eyes had been replaced years ago and was blue. Its mate, which was original, was golden brown.
“I had reached some kind of limit. It isn’t easy to sort through the belongings of the person who raised you. If I hadn’t been so busy, I would have realized that I was sick with grief. In addition, I was frustrated. I couldn’t leave the freezers untended; and I wasn’t going to be able to find a new home for the tissue before fall. I’d have to ask for a leave of absence from my job. If my department wouldn’t give it to me, I’d have to resign.
“That evening I sat in Rosa’s living room and drank wine, looking at the objects I hadn’t yet packed: the mammoth figurines on top of Rosa’s ancient TV, the mammoth tusk over the mantel, Ansel Adams’ photographs and most of the books. What was I going to do? Why had Rosa landed me with this mess? Why had she gotten old and died? Didn’t she realize how much I would miss her? Even though I hadn’t been home often, I had drawn comfort from knowing she was there, pottering around her garden and her tissue. I am an elder now, Emma. But I still miss my own elders, Rosa especially.
“I’ve never been much of a drinker. It’s a bad habit for Indians. But that night I had a glass or two too many. I felt a bit hazy when I went up to bed. Instead of going to the guest bedroom, where I had been staying, I went to my old room. I took the star quilt off the bed and folded it, then lay on the clean sheets, which smelled of lavender. Rosa had loved the stuff. I’d found sachets tucked between her threadbare linens and in every clothing drawer.
“I dozed off, lying next to Mamie, and dreamed. I don’t usually remember my dreams, and when I do they are usually fragments of the day’s events, fitted together crazily, like a jigsaw puzzle done wrong – evidence that white psychologists are right, when they say our dreams are simply our minds sorting through recent experiences, as part of the process of storing them in our RAM.
“This dream was different. I was in a house built of bones. The only light was a small, dim fire; and shadows filled the house. Nonetheless, I was aware of the bones. They were huge.
“A tiny, withered woman sat across the fire from me. She wore a hide dress, stained by smoke and spotted with grease. It might have been white once. Now it was dun. Her hair fell over her shoulders, long and loose and gray.
“ ‘I don’t want this problem,’ I said to her. ‘Rosa handed it to me after she died. She didn’t give me a chance to argue or refuse. I don’t belong here. This isn’t my life.’ I waved around at the house made of bones, though what I really meant was Rosa’s house.
‘ “Don’t talk
to me of life,’ the old woman said. ‘My people are dead; and your people are likely to follow. Isn’t that the promise which was made to the Lakota? If they respected the mammoths, the buffalo and the Lakota would survive.’
“ ‘The buffalo have survived,’ I said.
“ ‘Just barely! How many were left at the end of the Great White Killing? A few hundred! All the thousands alive today are descended from those few. I am a spirit, not a geneticist, but surely the species has gone through a genetic bottleneck. It cannot have the genetic variation it had two centuries ago.’
“ ‘The same would be true of mammoths, if they were brought back,’ I said.
“ ‘Rosa saved a lot of tissue, though it did not come from a large number of individuals. It might be possible to find variation among so many chromosomes,’ the old woman said. ‘We mammoths might be in better shape than the buffalo, if we were alive. We could not be in worse shape than we are now.’
“Another voice spoke from the darkness. ‘You have studied biology. You know about the new technologies that are coming into existence. All these white men starting companies to make money out of genes! The technology we need to re-create our people will be invented soon.’
“Now I saw the second person: a solidly built, middle-aged woman. Her long, braided hair was black; and her dress was the creamy color of clouds on a hot summer afternoon, when they shine through the haze above Standing Rock.
“ ‘Biology is a tricky business,’ I said to the second woman. ‘You can’t listen to the men who start gene tech companies. Of course they promise miracles in the next year or two. They’re looking for investors. I have no reason to believe it will possible to re-create mammoths from frozen tissue in the near future.’
“ ‘It won’t be possible at all, if the tissue isn’t there,’ said the crone.
“ ‘There has to be tissue in other places,’ I replied.
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