Sorceress Read Online Free

exhibits. The Institute was famous for its Native American collection.
    Agnes offered the price of admission to the girl selling tickets and thought to mention her appointment with Alison Ellman, but the girl looked like a grad student or something, and hardly glanced up from the book she was reading. So Agnes just paid her five dollars and went to wander through the rooms marked North American Indian collection.
    A gallery ran around the top of the large wood-panelled room. They had stuff from everywhere, from Mexico to the Arctic, but the exhibits had not been thrown together or mixed up in any arbitrary way, as they might have been at one time, but had been arranged carefully in order. The visitor was invited to enter a twisting labyrinth which showed the history of the Native Peoples from the earliest times to the present. Text panels on the wall explained each era.
    Agnes found she’d stopped to read the boards describing the impact of different waves of European arrivals as they flowed across the country. She could hear her aunt talking in her head again.
    ‘Never mind they pretty near wiped us all out. Never mind that. Just as long as they tell us just how it came about, guess that makes it all right.’
    Aunt M would have some kind of angry comment ready, whatever the curators tried to say.
    Agnes went through, following the exhibition in the direction indicated. This took her past north-east woodlands tribes and artefacts once owned and handled by her own people: clubs and tomahawks, strings of wampum, split ash baskets, birch-bark boxes, cradle boards and canoe paddles. She went on through goods belonging to other nations, past baskets from the Cherokee, shields and painted tipis from the people of the Plains, then to Navaho textiles, Zuni ceramics, until she found herself under giant totem poles from the north-western states.
    Agnes could hear Aunt M sounding off even louder now.
    ‘Most of this stuff has been got by cheating or stealing, or else it’s been looted right out of the ground. They got the remains too, you know, thousands of ’em, all belonging to our ancestors, stored away in boxes for study, just like a bunch of dinosaur bones.’
    There were arguments on both sides. The museums saw themselves as holding and guarding a cultural heritage, raising and widening public awareness, facilitating academic and scientific research. None of this cut any ice with Aunt M. She had taken an active part in various campaigns, putting pressure on museums to return their holdings, and with some success. Human remains were no longer on show. There was a growing trend for them to be taken down from the shelves, to be removed from the indignity of lying around in dusty cardboard boxes, of being stored in compartmentalised trays. The bones of the ancestors were being returned to their homelands for burial, to be put into the earth with proper ceremony.
    Artefacts were also being given back to their rightful owners, particularly those with spiritual significance. Maybe not as fast as Aunt M would like, but the process was happening. Agnes noticed that some sacred objects had been removed from display. There was a little notice explaining the absence of masks and turtle rattles used in the sacred rituals of her own people. A lot of other things were still there, though.
    For instance, there was a whole case of kachina dolls. These came from the south-west and many people said that they were just that, dolls, carved and fashioned to teach Zuni and Hopi children about the special beings they represented. But these were old and powerful. They held spirit. Even looking at them seemed disrespectful. These were fetishes and could form part of a medicine bundle, or they could be used in hunt societies and for ceremonies. They didn’t just represent a god, they embodied one. Agnes backed away, as though the case was surrounded by a force field. She glanced around at the other people wandering through. Didn’t they feel it,