Sophie kept her office hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in a narrow room on the third floor of an older building on the north end of campus, and most weeks nobody came, and she used the quiet to grade or to look out her one window at the students crossing below her between the classroom buildings and the big glass library, twenty thousand of them now, more every fall, a river of them that ran across ground her own family had walked when there was nothing here at all. So when the knock came that Thursday in the fall of 2019 she almost did not know what to do with it, and she had to move a stack of blue books off the second chair before she could tell the young woman standing in the doorway to sit down.
She was forty-two. She had finished her doctorate at this university fourteen years back, a dissertation on Washoe land and how it had been taken, and she had gone away to teach and then come home, because home was the point, because there had been almost no one who looked like her at the front of a classroom in this valley and she had decided a long time ago to be one of the ones who fixed that. Her people had been in this country longer than the country had. Her great-great-grandmother Tona had stood on the riverbank as a girl in 1868 and watched the railroad men drive the town into the ground of her family’s winter valley, and her father Raymond had helped pour the freeway that cut the same town in half a hundred years later, an Indian man building the road that erased other people’s neighborhoods on land that had been his people’s first, and Sophie had spent her whole working life trying to hold both of those facts in one hand where students could see them.
The young woman was a freshman in her big lecture, the survey, two hundred kids in a raked hall three mornings a week. Sophie did not know her yet by face, only that she sat somewhere in the middle and had turned in a proposal for the term paper that had made Sophie stop grading and read it twice.
“You wrote about the Chinese quarter,” Sophie said. “The one the town burned.”
“I wanted to make sure I could, before I got too far in.” The girl had a folder, and a nervousness she was trying to sit on. “It’s kind of a family thing. I didn’t know if that counted, for a history paper. If it’s too, I don’t know. Close.”
“What’s the family thing.”
“My great-great-great-grandfather laid the track,” the girl said. “The first railroad. Eighteen sixty-eight. He stayed after, he had a laundry down on Commercial Row, and then there was a Chinatown down by the river and the city just, they razed it. Twice, actually, there was a fire and then later they tore the rest down on purpose. My dad has all the stories. We’ve got a restaurant now, down in Midtown, and my dad’s always saying it took the family a hundred and fifty years to get to own a door on this street instead of just working behind one.” She stopped, embarrassed by the length of it. “Anyway. That’s the paper. If it counts.”
“What’s your name,” Sophie said. “I have you on the roster but I want to hear you say it.”
“Grace,” the girl said. “Grace Ah Lum.”
Sophie sat with that for a moment. Outside the window the river of students went on across the campus, and somewhere down the hall a colleague of hers was teaching, that very fall, the first Northern Paiute language class the university had ever offered in its whole hundred and forty years of existence, an old man from Pyramid Lake up at the board writing his own words down for young people who had almost lost them, and Sophie could hear, faintly, the sound of a language coming back into a building that had once been built to take languages away. She thought about Grace Ah Lum’s ancestor driving spikes into the valley floor in 1868, and about her own ancestor Tona on the riverbank the same year watching him do it, the two of them there in the same season on the same ground, the railroad man and the girl whose people the railroad was displacing, neither of them able to imagine that a hundred and fifty years on their descendants would sit in a room together on a hill above that river and try to write the whole thing down.
“It counts,” Sophie said. “It’s the only kind of history that ever actually counts. The rest is just what got printed.”
She got up and went to the shelf behind her desk, the one that sagged under the county histories and the oral-history transcripts and the thin bound theses nobody but her ever read, and she found the two she wanted, the survey of the old Chinese quarter and the collection of railroad-era testimony, and she held them a second before she handed them over, because she was aware, the way you are aware of a thing while it is happening and not only after, that she was passing something across more than a desk.
“These’ll give you the streets and the dates,” she said, laying them in the girl’s hands. “The bones. But your father is the source, you understand me. The stories he has, the ones with no footnote, those are the paper. Get them down. Record him, this winter, on your phone if that’s all you’ve got, because there is going to come a day when he is the last one who has them and then a day after that when nobody does, and a family that keeps its own record is a family that cannot be told it was never here.” She heard her own voice do the thing it did in the lecture hall when she meant something all the way down, and she did not soften it. “My people learned that the hard way. Learn it the easy way. From me.”
Grace Ah Lum looked at the two books in her lap and then up at Sophie, and something passed over her young face that Sophie recognized, having felt it once herself at about that age, the moment a person stops being embarrassed that their history is personal and starts to understand that personal is the strongest thing history ever gets to be.
“Come back next week,” Sophie said. “Bring me an outline and one story he tells that isn’t in either of those books. We’ll build it from there.”
The girl gathered her folder and the two books and stood, thanking her too much the way freshmen did, and went out, and Sophie heard her footsteps go off down the old hall toward the stairs and the light, past the room where the old man was writing the lost words back onto the board, out into the crossing river of twenty thousand strangers on the hill above the valley where it had all started, carrying the bones of it now, going to get the rest.
The University of Nevada, Reno enrolled roughly 21,000 students by 2019 and had grown substantially during the 2010s; in the fall of 2019 it offered its first Northern Paiute language course, taught by Pyramid Lake Paiute elder Ralph Burns. The university stands in the Truckee Meadows, part of the ancestral homeland of the Wašiw (Washoe) people, whose territory centers on Lake Tahoe (Da ow aga) and the surrounding valleys and adjoins that of the Northern Paiute, whose lands include Pyramid Lake and the lower Truckee River; the Washoe language is a language isolate, the only non-Numic language of the Great Basin. Reno’s early Chinese quarter, founded by Central Pacific railroad laborers after 1868, was damaged by fire and later forcibly razed by city order.