Dancing with Shadows

My sister is going to be famous. She's going to be famous thanks to me. We found the Eastern Woodland People. Thought to be long gone, I mean they are ancient after all. If you never met my sister, you'd never know how obsessed she was with knowing everything that needed to be known about the indigenous people of North America.

When she was little she actually wrote a 22-page letter to Disney about the inaccuracies of Pocahontas and how they should be ashamed. She then wrote an even longer letter about Pocahontas II. Not about the inaccuracies but the fact that the movie sucked.

From there she continued to study. She made friends, learned languages and even visited reservations. She had in fact met a girl named Enemene. She was part of the Cheyenne. Sweet girl. They have been friends for almost 15 years now. Enemene told my sister, Aiya about the Eastern Woodland People and the things they used to build. But the reason for their conversation at the time was because Aiya was doing a research project on astrological discoveries of all ancient peoples that may have gone unnoticed by history.

Enemene was instrumental in giving my sister all of these thoughts. So much so that we decided to go down to the Mississippi River Valleys. I only went because I needed her to be safe and because she needed a photographer. And that was of course my profession. For over a week we searched. We visited people. We asked questions and we stopped into libraries to look up information.

At one point it felt as if we weren't going to be getting anything done. Every piece of information was old or just part of the history books at that time. So it was only regurgitated information that we could have easily looked up on Google or in our own library. I was ready to go home, but Aiya wasn't having it. She wasn't leaving here with nothing. As it turns out, while we were panicking and scrambling for evidence, evidence found us. Enemene.

She couldn't bare the thought of her best friend being down here searching for some evidence without a guide, so she flew down immediately. It was a bit odd that she found us so fast. But I left it alone. I was just glad my sister had someone who could ACTUALLY assist. Again, I'm just here for moral support and pictures. While we sat at lunch in a little diner, Enemene was being stared at. Weirdly. It was like the whole restaurant had seen a ghost. I don't like when people stare and she was the same. I took note of her face, filled with anxiety. So I took the opportunity to engage her in conversation.

She started to tell me about the brothers I've never met, mother I've never seen and father I didn't even know she had. She talked about them in great detail and it seemed to lighten her mood. She had a smile on her face when she spoke about her uncle and all her cousins. She started talking about the movement of stars, the mapping of lands and being allowed to hunt when her father and brothers when out to specifically get deer. She didn't like staying home with her mother. Not that she didn't love her mother but she craved adventure, and she was never denied.

We sat in the diner for hours. People came and went. Uncomfortable silence befell us when a group of men came in and looked at Enemene directly. They stared at the back of her head so long and intensely that you would have thought she had a third eye back there. Finally, we decided to leave. She was excited to go, she told Aiya that now was the time.

We didn't go back to the hotel. But we ended up driving out to the valley. The sky was so clear, it looked like a stained glass painting. Once we got more than half way into the valley, Enemene told me to take a left instead of a right. It was off-road and took us deep into a wooded area that I don't remember seeing. We drove for a while, it was so dark. It seemed like the path was laying itself out for us because she didn't give a single direction after that but we somehow knew where we were going.

After about an hour, I came to a stop. There was a fire and it looked like a village. A small one. Intimate. Enemene jumped out of the car with Aiya not far behind and they raced to the village entrance. I grabbed my camera. It was as if this place had been trapped in a timeloop that was about 1200 years ago. I took as many pictures as I could. Mothers carrying their children. Men and women of the tribe dancing and singing around the fire. Kids playing games. Some of the younger but still mature men were just coming back from hunting. And there were the elders, drawing maps of the stars.

They didn't seem to mind me taking pictures and they seemed to embrace Aiya as one of their own. She was able to understand them, she was asking them questions and she played with the kids as well. Fully indulged. She looked back at me with a smile and tears in her eyes. She was going to be famous. Because of me and these pictures she was going to be able to share this with the world. We stayed until dawn.

When we finally woke up, we were on the side of the main road. It was just me and Aiya. She woke up in a panic, looking for Enemene. I tried to remember where we drove so I could make the left turn instead of the right, but my memory of it had completely faded. We decided that maybe if we walk to it, we could remember. No such luck. She tried calling Enemene's phone, only for it to be a non-working number. She looked at me confused. She pulled up the pictures she took last night, only to be the only one in them.

I ran back to the car and grabbed the camera. Confusion covered my face as all that was in these photos was Aiya, and what looked to be only shadows. Even the star map she helped draw last night, was only a blank piece of paper. We sat in disbelief. The men from the diner drove by and looked us up and down. The driver smirked and only said,

"So she got you to bring her back."

It was then, watching them drive away, that we realized, Enemene was only a shadow of a people that once existed, trying to get back home. And no one here, wanted to help her.

No one wanted to go dancing with the shadows.