Mammoths of the Great Plains

Mammoths of the Great Plains

Eleanor Arnason

“Men never think ahead,” “That’s why they make good warriors.” The council president came back from Korea with a chest full of medals. He has never looked beyond the next hill in his entire life. Well, this hill is the new casino. Let’s wait and see what lies on the other side.”

“I went home and looked at the bank balance and sent out my resume. Del was getting paid well for his mural. But that money wouldn’t last; and our utility bills were high.”

Grandmother shrugged. “Why make a long story longer than it is by nature? The Prairie Lake council voted to set up a foundation. It took another four years, with Marion pushing at every meeting; but it finally happened. By then Del had a job searching at the Minneapolis College of Art, and he’d even had a show in a white museum – not his current work, but the older abstractions. Young Delores was old enough for day care, though she didn’t like it. How your mother yelled the first time I left her!

“The University got the first grant for mammoth research; and I went to work for the research lab. The U had no choice. I came with the money and the mammoth tissue. Did I feel guilt using the tissue and the Prairie Lake band’s clout? Not a bit. It was the 1990s by then, the last great hurrah of capitalism befor the dark days of the early 21st century. The white people were busy grabbing everything they could with both hands. I thought, I could do a little of the same, enough to pay the bills and get myself back into research.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“Of course the people in the lab resented me, a woman and an Indian, who had gotten her job through luck and casino money. How could I be any good? I won’t bother you with the story of my struggles. This story is about the mammoths, not me. But always remember that power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation… want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…”

At the time I did not recognize the quote. It was Frederick Douglass, of course. Odd to hear my grandmother talk about the ocean on the bone-dry Dakota prairie.

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)