Wolf fell silent. His soliloquy suddenly turned inwards against himself. The most deafening war within him was being fought because Wolf was a mixed breed. The rape, pillaging and slavery brought to his people by what Wolf called Little Brother meant that he, like so many other Natives, had both the victim and the villain in his veins. Many of his suicidal downswings were initiated by the fact that he had turned against his own blood. The white man was once a demon that had come to them. Now, he and his people faced new demons. Most of them, the kind that resided within. Wolf wanted the earth and its people to return to what it was before those demons had landed. The brawl against the modern way of life was a varnish covering the fact that he knew deep down that life would never be that way again. To Wolf, every rock and tree and animal and stream was not only family, it was himself. He dreamed of coexistence. He dreamed of Tribe. But he could not seem to create it. He screamed against the sickness that they had been infected with. That sickness was not smallpox. It was separation.

Aria and Taylor said nothing and just let Wolf’s words wash over them. Both of them knew that Wolf was right about everything he said. But at the same time, neither of them felt that it was fair to be resented to such an obvious degree for crimes that they themselves had not committed. Nor did it feel fair to be expected to pay the price for what their forefathers had done. Especially given that they never asked to be related to them in the first place. Even if there was a way for someone to repair the damage done, Aria and Taylor were in no position to help themselves, much less sew together the patchwork of a fragmented past. The crimes of those who came before them, who bore the same skin color as their own, were like a yoke around their neck that they were born with. They would forever be seen as the villain for what their ancestors had done to people of other races, colors and creeds. Both Aria and Taylor knew that the resentment would immediately convert to both fury and ridicule if they were to say anything about the mutuality of pain inherent in being just as incapable of changing the color of their own skin. They were both aware that expressing the pain of the unwelcome inheritance of the stigma of being white was taboo. And so, they kept silent.