The third book, Alison Owings’ Indian Voices, is an antidote to these sober (but critical) histories. She listens to native people today, and reflects their stories back, revealing current challenges and hopes. I have to add, many of my friends are profiled in this book, people I consider amazing and wise. One of those remarkable people that’s portrayed in Indian Voices is Emma George. She’s Lemhi Shoshone, the Shoshone band that first encountered Lewis & Clark. The Lemhi reserved a small reservation on the Lemhi River through a treaty signed in 1875, but that document was never ratified, and after the turn of the century her people began their long sad walk to Fort Hall. Yet for George and many other families from the Lemhi band home will always be back in that Salmon River country.

“There’s things you go through in life and they’re hard, but other people have harder lives. It makes you humble and grateful to be blessed with life, no matter what the situation is. To live another day,” George says in the book.

Indeed, history’s harsh accounting is not complete without that one idea on the other side of the ledger. No matter how a court invents law to steal land; or how Congress extinguishes a tribal government; or, even when a homeland remains an project for the future, there still  the blessing to live another day.