Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Irene pointed to a couple standing at the back. “These are my great-great-grandparents, Seth and Angelique Hopkins. Angelique was Marina Goodside’s niece and the granddaughter of the matriarch, Angela.”

  Erica looked again at the picture. With a puzzled frown she reached for a magnifying glass and silently scrutinized the photo. “This woman is Indian.”

  “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to determine her tribe. I am assuming she would have been a Mission Indian—”

  “Jared!” Erica said suddenly. “Kathleen has a watercolor that Daniel Goodside painted— of a Topaa woman!”

  “Topaa! You think the people in this photo are of that tribe?”

  “It all ties in, don’t you see?” Erica was suddenly animated. “Daniel Goodside was interested in painting members of the Topaa tribe. He married a woman who was half or perhaps quarter Indian. A woman whose last name was Navarro. And then someone buried the deed to Rancho Paloma— Navarro land— in the cave at Topanga— Topanga!” she said suddenly. “No one knows what the word really means. There are several theories. But one thing agreed upon is that ‘nga’ means ‘place of.’ If a tribe named Topaa lived here, then it all falls into place!”

  “Why have we never heard of them?” asked Irene.

  “Maybe the Topaa were among the first to be rounded up and taken to the Mission. They would have been assimilated quickly. That would account for why we know nothing about their existence.”

  She turned to Jared. “With this new information we can stop the Confederated Tribes from taking the bones for reburial. Our skeleton might be the only evidence of a lost tribe. Now that we have a tribal name, we have a better chance of finding a likely descendent.”

  He smiled cryptically at her.

  “What?”

  “Erica, so far you’re the most likely descendent.”

  * * *

  Sam was unconvinced, as were the members of the Confederated Tribes, who had arrived with a coffin and a medicine man. Dr. Tyler’s evidence was too thin, they said, if it could even be called evidence. It was time to lay the medicine woman to rest in Native American ground.

  Erica refused to unlock the security gate to the cave. To Sam’s frustration, he couldn’t find his key and Jared had the only other one. They stood on the cliff above the cave, Erica barring their way, Sam threatening to take bolt cutters to the padlock. Erica looked at her watch. Where was Jared? He had called earlier and told her to stall the Confederated Tribe members until he got back. He had sounded excited although he wouldn’t say why. But that had been hours ago.

  “Who on earth is that?” Luke said suddenly, pointing.

  They all turned to see Jared coming slowly through the camp, escorting two small, brown people, aged and bent, an elderly brother and sister living in East Los Angeles. Jared had found them through the Indian Studies Department at UCLA, where a massive database on California Indians was being compiled. Field anthropologists were going into the inner cities, searching for “hidden” or “forgotten” Native Americans.

  He introduced them as the Delgados, Maria and Jose. “We know there were bound to be Indians who didn’t become Missionized, who stayed in the villages and then later moved into the Pueblo to become assimilated into the Mexican population but marrying among only themselves. These two people claim that they grew up being told they were Topaa, but no one believed them because no one had heard of the Topaa.”

  The old woman spoke: “Many years ago we went to the museum and talked to the people there. They were scholars and very educated. They told us we were mistaken, that there was no Topaa tribe and that we were Gabrielino. When a writer came to our neighborhood to write a history of California Indians, and we told him we were Topaa, he wrote down ‘Tongva’ because he thought we were mistaken.”

  The brother and sister were born in 1915, both widowed now and living together. They had heard stories in their childhood and into their teens from a very old elder who lived to be a hundred. He had been born at the Mission and he had thought it was around 1830. Although the elder had never lived in a village, he had learned about village life from other elders at the Mission, and stories about the First Mother and how her spirit guide, the raven, had led her across the desert from the east. The elder had been the one who had told them to remember that they were not Gabrielino, which was the white man’s name for their tribe. They were Topaa.

  Mention of the First Mother startled Erica. “You heard this on the news or read it in the paper?”

  The old woman laughed. “Papers! I don’t read. And my brother, he don’t either. We don’t watch the news on the TV, always bad news, always guns and killing. My brother and me, we like game shows.” Her grin was toothless.

  Erica turned to Jared. “This is proof that they are really Topaa. There is no other way they could know that this was the cave of the First Mother if they hadn’t heard it from elders.”

  “This man told us about the cave,” the old woman said. “Can we go inside? Can we visit the First Mother?”

  * * *

  They were gathered in the cave, saying good-bye. Sam and Luke were the first to leave, wishing Erica and Jared good luck. They had a lot of work ahead of them. DNA analysis of the bones matched that of the elderly Indian pair, identifying the sleeping lady as a member of the Topaa tribe. Jose and Maria Delgado wanted a museum to be established to teach people about the Topaa. They wanted the First Mother to remain buried in the cave, with her grave protected from feet, but with the cave being kept open for people to visit. “It is what she would have wanted,” the old man said. “People come here to talk to her and to read about her journey.”

  Kathleen Dockstader was the last to leave. She had canceled her six-month vacation to devote her time to searching once again for Monica. “One thing mystifies me,” she said to Erica. “The painting in my living room, the one of the two suns, painted by my mother. You say you’ve dreamed about it all your life.”

  “Since I was very little. Someone probably took a picture of it and used it as part of a Sister Sarah bio and I saw it somewhere, in a book or magazine, and I just forgot.”

  “That’s what puzzles me because, you see, that painting was stolen when my mother disappeared and apparently was found later, and stored away in a police warehouse, waiting for the owner to report its theft. Five years ago, the painting was finally traced to me, I was contacted and that was when I acquired it. Before that, the painting had lain buried and neglected for seven decades. So you see, my dear, you can’t possibly have seen it before two weeks ago.”

  “Well,” Jared said when everyone had left and he and Erica were alone with the First Mother slumbering beneath her transparent sarcophagus, “this is irony for you. My job was to locate the most likely descendant, and she was here all along, right under my nose.” He looked at the blazing suns on the wall. “Why do you suppose you dreamed about them when you had never seen the painting before?”

  She didn’t have the answer, although her speculation was that it could be some sort of race memory. “The suns are really circles, and the circle was sacred to the Topaa, as it is to many Native American tribes today. Perhaps I was merely dreaming of the sacred. Or perhaps it was a prophecy.”

  “A prophecy?”

  She thought of the elderly Topaa couple. “That someday we would complete the circle.”

  Jared took her by the hand and, looking back at the skeleton, said, “Whoever she was, her journey is not done. It’s up to us now to continue it.” And as they left the cave and turned toward the setting sun, a raven swooped down from the sky and flew before them, as if to lead the way.

 

 

 
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