The Spirit Woman by Margaret Coel Page A

“Laura teaches Western history at the University of Colorado. Lindy and I were just telling her about you.”
    â€œI wouldn’t believe any of it,” he said, shaking the blond woman’s hand. He realized with a start that the dark bruise on the woman’s cheek was the size of a fist.
    â€œI’d say the museum speaks well enough for you, Father.” She gave him a nervous smile and turned away from his gaze.
    Vicky went on, explaining that her friend was here to research a biography of Sacajawea.
    â€œHow can we help you?” Father John swung a chair over and sat down at the end of the table.
    â€œI’ve been telling her about our collections.” Lindy thumped one of the cartons, as if she were leading a spelling drill. She might have come with the building, he thought, one of the teachers a hundred years ago, dressed in a white blouse and navy skirt, black hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She had the dark complexion and eyes of the Arapaho, and the businesslike manner. He hadn’t worried about the museum since she’d taken over.
    She gave the cartons another thump. She was still shelving and cataloging documents. Some oral histories here, she knew. Letters from Arapaho elders in the early 1900s that might refer to Sacajawea. No guarantees, but she’d try to locate them.
    â€œI’d be very grateful.” Laura kept her face tilted sideways. The bruise might have been a shadow. “You never know where an important document might turn up.” A hint of anticipation and excitement worked into her voice.
    Father John smiled. He’d almost forgotten the surge of joy at the smallest possibility of finding something new in the past. This was why he’d fought for the museum—gone to the mat with the provincial—to help the Arapahos preserve their own past so that scholars like Laura Simmons could understand what had really happened.
    â€œThere’s something else.” Vicky turned toward him. “There could be some evidence on the res that proves that the old woman who died here was the real Sacajawea.”
    Father John didn’t say anything for a moment. He’d heard the stories about such evidence as long as he’d been here—the Jefferson Medal given to Sacajawea, which the old woman supposedly gave to her son, Baptiste. He’d never heard that any evidence had been found. “Sometimes”—he hesitated, then plunged on—“there’s a powerful will to believe.” He’d seen it many times among his colleagues—the insistence that one theory or another must be true, regardless of contradictory evidence.
    â€œWhat do you believe, John?” Vicky met his gaze.
    She was always testing him, he knew. Was he really for the people? Or just another white man pretending that the truth of the past was important? The room was quiet, the other women watching him, too. He said, “When I came here I agreed with historians that Sacajawea died in 1812. William Clark himself believed she’d died.”
    â€œAnd now?” Vicky persisted. He might have been a defendant and she the prosecutor.
    Now, he thought, now there were the stories, passed down among both the Shoshones and the Arapahos, stories told by a woman buried in the Shoshone cemetery. He said, “The woman here knew things about the expedition that only someone who’d been part of it could have known.”
    â€œExactly.” Laura seemed to jump in her chair. Her hands fluttered in the air. “My colleagues—our colleagues”—she lifted her chin—“refuse to give oral histories the same importance as documentary evidence. Well, I intend to present them with a document they can’t ignore. Sacajawea’s own memoirs.” The words seemed to hang in the silence a moment. “The memoirs are on the reservation somewhere,” she said.
    Lindy spoke up: “If it’s true, it