Colton's Folly (Native American contemporary romance) Read Online Free Page A

your support and your patience.”
    She handed the envelope to John Hunter. “These are my credentials. I thought you might want to examine them for yourselves.”
    Just then a short rap shifted everyone’s attention to the opening door. Abby wasn’t surprised to see Cat Tallman enter. After all, he’d promised to attend the meeting.
    It was obvious that he’d come straight from some dirty job and had cleaned up on the run. A jacket was slung over one shoulder, and his shirt was damp at the collar and carelessly tucked into the waistband of his jeans. The hair at his temples was wet where he’d washed his face, and there was a charm about his disheveled appearance that, under other circumstances, might have elicited a smile from Abby. Instead she kept her features expressionless.
    “Sorry I’m late. There was a problem at the building site.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Did I miss much?”
    “Not much,” John Hunter assured him. “We were having a talk about the problems Miss Colton expects to meet. And we were looking at these.” He held up Abby’s certificates and recommendations. “Want to see them?”
    “Pieces of paper to me, nothing more. Her credentials have to be passable, at least, or Arthur wouldn’t have brought her here. That’s not what’s bothering me.”
    Here it comes, Abby thought, and she steeled herself for the attack she knew was imminent.
    The man who had been introduced to her as Luther Eagle leaned forward. “Why don’t you folks sit down. Now, Cat, you ain’t a board member, of course, so you can’t vote. But we respect your opinion, so why don’t you speak your mind?”
    “With all her talk about problems, I’ll bet there’s one she never even thought of, and you’re all too polite to mention it. But I’m not bothered by either convention or blindness. As far as I’m concerned, the biggest problem we have is that she’s a white woman. Her people exiled us to the reservations in the first place, and we were left here to die without dignity. When we somehow managed to survive, her people took our children away from us, to schools where it was hoped they would forget their own culture and adopt that of the white man, where they were punished for speaking their own language, where they were expected to look and behave and live like white people.
    “A century later, when it was obvious that exile hadn’t worked, they lured hundreds of thousands of us to the cities with promises of jobs and a better life, then set us adrift, hoping we’d disappear through assimilation. And many of us did, some to live like the white man, some to live in poverty and isolation, without the strength that our religion and culture could give them.
    “Her people have written textbooks, made movies and aired television shows that depict us as mindless savages without conscience who raped and murdered innocent white people, that insist we are men without honor, and drunkards and thieves. She’s part of the society that refuses to recognize us as humans with dignity and pride, as moral men, as people with rights and justifiable claims to our own homeland.”
    He’d been sitting motionless, leaning forward with his arms on his knees, his hands clasped before him. Now he rose and began to pace slowly, as if physically venting some intense emotion that threatened to explode.
    “That’s the legacy she’s brought with her. And don’t tell me that she’s worked with Indian kids before. I know that. But they were urbanized kids, whose parents are more interested in assimilation than preserving an ethnic identity. We have a whole other set of problems out here that she can’t begin to deal with, because she’s never had to. We’ve got to teach our kids what they need to make their way in the world without sacrificing the Lakota way of life. I don’t see how she can help us do that, especially when she doesn’t know how we think or what we feel. She comes from a different world, a