The stone figures were stolen from a kiva altar by “a person or persons unknown” according to the official report. A ring of anthropologists had been crawling around the Pueblos all winter offering to trade for or buy outright ancient objects and figures. The harvests of the two preceding years had been meager, and the anthropologists offered cornmeal. The anthropologists had learned to work with Christian converts or the village drunk.
The people always remembered the small buckskin bundles with anguish because the “little grandparents” were gone from them forever. Medicine people at all the Pueblos, and the Navajos and Apaches too, were contacted. All those with the ability to gaze into still water or flame to locate lost objects or persons, all those able to gaze into blurry opals to identify enemies sending sorcery, began a search. The gazers had all agreed the stone figures were too far away to be seen clearly. Far, far to the east.
Years passed. The First World War broke out. The elder priests had all died without ever again seeing their “little grandparents.” Fewer and fewer remained who had actually seen the “little grandparents” unwrapped on the kiva altar, smooth stones in the swollen shape of female and of male.
Then a message came from the Pueblos up north. Go to Santa Fe, in a museum there. A small museum outside town. The spring had been wet and cold and only increased the suffering caused by meager harvests. The federal Indian agents didn’t have enough emergency corn rations to go around, and reports came from Navajo country of people dying, starving, freezing. In Santa Fe the state legislature was two years old, and did not concern itself with Indians. Indians had no vote in state elections. Indians were Washington’s problem. A muddy wagonload of Indians did not attract much attention. The Laguna delegation had traveled to Santa Fe on a number of occasions before to testify in boundary disputes with the state for land wrongfully taken from the Laguna people. The delegation’s interpreter knew his way around. A county clerk had told them how to find the museum.
The snow had melted off the red dirt of the piñon-covered hills except for the northern exposures. It was early afternoon but the sun was already weak as it slipped into the gray overcast above the southwestern horizon. An icy breeze came off the high mountain snowfields above Santa Fe.
At the museum, the interpreter for the Laguna delegation left the others waiting outside in the wagon. The old cacique was shivering. They built a small piñon fire and put on a pot of coffee. Museum employees watched out windows uneasily.
“Yes, there were two lithic pieces of that description,” the assistant curator told the interpreter. “A recent acquisition from a private collection in Washington, D.C.” The interpreter excused himself and stepped outside to wave to the others by the wagon.
The glass case that held the stone figures was in the center of the museum’s large entry hall. Glass cases lined the walls displaying pottery and baskets so ancient they could only have come from the graves of ancient ancestors. The Laguna delegation later reported seeing sacred kachina masks belonging to the Hopis and the Zunis as well as prayer sticks and sacred bundles, the poor shriveled skin and bones of some ancestor taken from her grave, and one entire painted-wood kiva shrine reported stolen from Cochiti Pueblo years before.
The delegation walked past the display cases slowly and in silence. But when they reached the glass case in the center of the vast hall, the old cacique began to weep, his whole body quivering from old age and the cold. He seemed to forget the barrier glass forms and tried to reach out to the small stone figures lying dreadfully unwrapped. The old man kept bumping his fingers against the glass case until the assistant curator became alarmed. The Laguna delegation later recounted how the white man had suddenly looked around at all of them as if he were afraid they had come to take back everything that had been stolen. In that instant white man and Indian both caught a glimpse of what was yet to come.
There was a discussion between the assistant curator and the Laguna delegation’s interpreter, who relayed what the delegation had come to say: these most precious sacred figures had been stolen. The museum of the Laboratory of Anthropology had received and was in the possession of stolen property. The white man’s own laws said this. Not even an innocent buyer got title of ownership to stolen property. The Lagunas could produce witnesses who would testify with a detailed description of the “little grandparents” as the people preferred to call them. For these were not merely carved stones, these were beings formed by the hands of the kachina spirits. The assistant curator stood his ground. The “lithic” objects had been donated to the Laboratory by a distinguished patron whose reputation was beyond reproach. As the head curator was out of the office, the Laguna delegation would have to return next week. When some of the members of the delegation raised their voices, and the interpreter had tried to explain the great distance they had already traveled, the assistant curator became abrupt. He was extremely busy that day. The Indians should contact the Indian Bureau or hire a lawyer.
The delegation led the old cacique out the door, but the war captain lingered behind, not to whisper to the stone figures as the others in the delegation had, expressing their grief, but to memorize all the other stolen objects he could see around the room.
Outside, the old cacique acted as if he had drifted into a dream. While the war captain and the tribal governor and the interpreter argued over starting another lawsuit, the old cacique was rocking himself on his heels in a blanket close to the ashes of the campfire. The governor was right. Of course they could not afford another lawsuit.
All of that had happened seventy years before, but Sterling knew that seventy years was nothing — a mere heartbeat at Laguna. And as soon as the disaster had occurred with those Hollywood movie people, it was as if the stone figures had been stolen only yesterday. Each person who had recounted the old story seventy years later had wept even harder than the old cacique himself had, and the old guy had not even lasted a month after the delegation’s return from Santa Fe.
There were hundreds of years of blame that needed to be taken by somebody, blame for other similar losses. And then there was the blame for the most recent incidents. Sterling had already gone away to Barstow to work on the railroad when uranium had been discovered near Paguate Village. He had no part in the long discussions and arguments that had raged over the mining. In the end, Laguna Pueblo had no choice anyway. It had been 1949 and the United States needed uranium for the new weaponry, especially in the face of the Cold War. That was the reason given by the federal government as it overruled the concerns and objections the Laguna Pueblo people had expressed. Of course there had been a whole generation of World War II veterans then who had come home looking for jobs, for a means to have some of the comforts they had enjoyed during their years away from the reservation. The old-timers had been dead set against ripping open Mother Earth so near to the holy place of the emergence. But those old ones had been dying off and already were in the minority. So the Tribal Council had gone along with the mine because the government gave them no choice, and the mine gave them jobs. They became the first of the Pueblos to realize wealth from something terrible done to the earth.
Sterling had not quit his railroad job, as many other Lagunas had, to return to the reservation and to work in the mine. He had no close family there except for Aunt Marie. Once Sterling had got settled into his railroad job, and his life in Barstow, he did not want to go to all the trouble of moving again to work in a uranium mine. So Sterling had avoided being caught up in the raging arguments made by the old-time people who had warned all the people would pay, and pay terribly, for this desecration, this crime against all living things. The few times Sterling had come home to visit at Laguna fiesta time, he had been relieved that his railroad job saved him from being involved in the controversy. Aunt Marie and the old clan mothers in the kitchen used to predict trouble because of the mine. Sterling had listened quietly while they talked on and on. The old ones had stuck to their predictions stubbornly. Whatever was coming would not necessarily appear right away; it might not arrive for twenty or even a hundred years. Because these old ones paid no attention to white man’s time. But Sterling had never dreamed that one day his own life would be changed forever because of that mine. Those old folks had been right all along. The mine had destroyed Sterling’s life without Sterling’s ever setting foot near the acres of ruined earth at the open pit. If there hadn’t been the mine, the giant stone snake would not have appeared, and the Hollywood movie crew would never have seen it or filmed it.