She felt that old rage building in her and stifled it.

You can’t just condemn an entire race for things people who weren’t even their ancestors did. That was why she had broken with the more ardent activists back in college. You can’t shove everyone into the same pile just because of their bloodlines. She wanted her rights, and the rights for all of the Native Peoples, just as much as any of them did—they’d all been cheated and lied to for too long, deprived of homes, of religion, of heritage—

Even her family, who had only kept their ways at the cost of hiding them, who had not until her father’s generation been able to be Osage openly.

But she could not take those rights like a thief and an assassin; not at the cost of murder. Not at the cost of the lives of people who had nothing to do with the problem.

Because you couldn’t put all Heavy Eyebrows into the same category, any more than you could every Indian, or even (and this could get her in a world of trouble from some of her own people, or those of other nations, who had their own little sets of prejudices) every member of a nation or tribe. Pawnees weren’t Osage, who weren’t Cherokee, who weren’t Apache, who weren’t Algonquin, who weren’t Mohawk—

There were people of every type in every nation; no one was Noble and Honorable just because he (or she) was Native American. There were people from nations traditionally her “enemies” that she would trust to cover her in a life-or-death situation, and people of her own nation she wouldn’t trust as far as she could throw them. You couldn’t even pigeonhole people by their professions, for not every Indian made a living on the reservation weaving blankets and making jewelry. There were Mohawks who couldn’t stand heights, Navaho physicists, and Algonquin computer programmers.

There were people like Gail, who had tried in her way to right the wrong that had been done by her ancestors, and people like her husband, whose ancestors had never seen an Indian, who had been quite prepared to continue that wrong.

So just because someone’s grandfather did something awful to my grandfather, that doesn’t make him responsible, unless he decides to continue the wrong. Yeah, better me in charge here than someone else. Seems to me that occasionally it was one of the duties of the shaman to play judge and executioner—or at least cop—

“You still didn’t tell me why you were afraid of the box.”

Grandfather’s voice behind her made her jump; she hadn’t heard him come up behind her, and she hadn’t heard the door to her office open, either.