Rodney put the tape recorder beside Highhawk’s possessions on the laboratory table. “I unwired the recorder from the watch. Just in case,” he said. “You want to hear it?”
He removed a pencil from his inside coat pocket, held it over the PLAY key, and glanced up at the sergeant, awaiting a response.
The sergeant nodded. “Sure.”
The first sounds Chee heard sent him back into boyhood, into the winter hogan of Frank Sam Nakai on the west slope of the Chuska Mountains. Bitter cold outside, the cast-iron wood stove under the smoke hole glowing with heat. Frank Sam Nakai, brother of his mother, teaching the children how the Holy People saved the Holy Boy and his sister from the lightning sickness. His uncle sitting on the sheepskin, legs crossed, head back against the blanket hung against the log wall, eyes closed, singing. At first, the voice so low that Cousin Emmett and little Shirley and Chee would have to lean forward to hear them: came the voices of Water Sprinkler, and the male
Chee noticed that both Rodney and the sergeant were looking at him, awaiting an explanation.
“It’s chanting from the Yeibichai,” Chee said. ’The Night Chant.“ That, obviously, explained nothing. ”Highhawk was at this ceremonial the night I arrested him,“ Chee said. ”He was recording it.“
As he said it, the sound of the chanting was replaced by the voice of Henry Highhawk.
There was silence. Chee glanced up. Rodney said: “Well, now—” and then Highhawk’s voice resumed: come to look at this display of masks to look around you in this exhibition, and throughout this museum. Do you see a display of the masks of the gods of the Christian, or of the Jew, or of Islam, or of any other culture strong enough to defend its faith and to punish such a desecration? Where is the representation of the Great God Jehovah who led the Jews out of their bondage in Egypt, or the Mask of Michael the Archangel, or the Mother of the Christian God we call Jesus Christ, or a personification of Jesus himself? You do not see them here. You have here in a storage room of this museum the Tano Pueblo’s representation of one of its holy Twin War Gods. But where is a consecrated Sacred Host from the Roman Catholic cathedral? You will not find it here. Here you see the gods of conquered people displayed like exotic animals in the public zoo. Only the overthrown and captured gods are here. Here you see the sacred things torn from the temples of Inca worshippers, stolen from the holy kivas of the Pueblo people, sacred icons looted from burned tepee villages on the buffalo plains.“
Highhawk’s voice had become higher, almost shrill. It was interrupted by the sound of a great intake of breath. Then a moment of silence. The ambulance crew picked up Highhawk’s stretcher and moved out—leaving only his voice behind. The forensic crew sorted his possessions into evidence bags.
“Do you doubt what I say?” Highhawk’s voice resumed. “Do you doubt that your privileged race, which claims such gentility, such humanity, would do this? Above your head, lining the halls and corridors of this very building, are thousands of cases and bins and boxes. In them you find the bones of more than eighteen thousand of your fellow humans. You will find the skeletons of children, of mothers, of grandfathers. They have been dug out of the burials where their mourning relatives placed them, reuniting them with their Great Mother Earth. They remain in great piles and stacks, respected no more than the bones of apes and…”
Rodney hit the OFF button and looked around him in the resulting silence.
“What do you think? He was going to broadcast this somehow with that mask display he was working on? Was that the plan?”
“Probably,” Chee said. “He seems to be speaking to the audience at the exhibition. Let’s hear the rest of it.”
“Why not?” Rodney said. “But let’s get out of here. Down to Highhawk’s office where I can use the telephone.”
The items from Highhawk’s pockets were in evidence bags now, except for the recorder.
“I’ve got to get moving,” the sergeant said. “I still have some work to do on the Alice Yoakum thing.”
“I’ll bring in the recorder,” Rodney said. “I’ll clean up here.”
“I’ll need to talk to—” The sergeant hesitated, searching for the name. “To Mr. Chee here, and Mr. Leaphorn. I’ll need to get their statements on the record.”
“Whenever you say,” Leaphorn said.
“I’ll bring them in,” Rodney said.
In Highhawk’s office, Rodney put the recorder on the desk top and pushed the PLAY button. Rodney, too, was anxious to hear the rest of it.
“—antelopes. Their children have asked that these bones be returned so that they can again be reunited with their Mother Earth with respect and dignity. What does the museum tell us? It tells us that its anthropologists need our ancestral bones for scientific studies. Why doesn’t it need the ancestral bones of white Americans for these studies? Why doesn’t it dig up your graves? Think of it! Eighteen thousand human skeletons! Eighteen thousand! Ladies and gentlemen, what would you say if the museum looted your cemeteries, if it dug up the consecrated ground of your graveyards in Indianapolis and Topeka and White Plains and hauled the skeletons of your loved ones here to molder in boxes and bins in the hallways? Think about this! Think about the graves of your grandmothers. Help us recover the bones of our own ancestors so that they may again be reunited with their Mother Earth.”
Silence. The tape ran its brief miniature-recorder course and clicked off. Rodney pushed the REWIND button. He looked at Chee. “Quite an argument.”
Chee nodded. “Of course there’s another side to it. An earlier generation of anthropologists dug up most of those bones. And the museum has given a few of them back. I think it sent sixteen skeletons to the Blackfoot Tribe awhile ago, and it says it will return bones if they were stolen from regular cemeteries or if you can prove a family connection.”
Rodney laughed. “Get those skeletons in the lineup,” he said. “Get the kinfolks in and see if they can pick their grannie out from somebody’s auntie.” About a millisecond before he ended that jest, Rodney’s expression shifted from amused to abashed. In the present company, maybe this was no laughing matter. “Sorry,” Rodney said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Now Chee looked amused. “We Navajos aren’t into this corpse fetish business,” he said. “Our metaphysics turns on life, the living. The dead we put behind us. We avoid old bones. You won’t find Navajos asking for the
