"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 5 - People Of The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

Keep your cool. Professional, all the way. She steeled herself,
drawing from Power--from the strength that ran in her blood and the
blood of her people. It wasn't something that could be explained to a
white guy. Power lived in everything, but its roots lay in the past,
in that ability to endure despite conquest and reservation, disease,
malnutrition, ignorance, alcohol, drugs and homicide.

Maybe that was why the site they'd recently discovered was sp
important. Its remains were a link to the past, to a time when the
Power carried in Indian DNA had been strong and had pervaded everything
in the world. Mary's grandmother was a revered medicine woman, a
Healer, but the thread that had passed to Mary was faint. She prayed
it would carry her through this government meeting.

She knew most of the BLMers who had come. Wesley Keene, the district
manager, had settled across from her and dropped a stack of papers
before him like a symbol of state. He wore synthetic stretch pants, a
white dress shirt with a bland tie and had a pocket full of pens. She'd
come to understand Keene. Like most district managers within the BLM,
he'd been promoted because he was a nice guy-"a team player"--not
because he was particularly bright or efficient.

The district archaeologist, Jack Riddler, sat at Keene's right and
avoided Mary's eyes. She'd been told that eighty five percent of the
people in the BLM were grossly incompetent and that the fifteen
percent who really cared actually made the Bureau function--such as it
did. If so, Riddler headed the class of the eighty-five percent.
Riddler had taken a federal job back in the late 1970s, when real
archaeologists were still out in the field doing archaeology. He had
written an MA. thesis on Minoan ceramics and then hired on with BLM
when no one else wanted him. Scuttlebutt had it that one Resource Area
even abolished its archaeologist's position in an effort to get rid of
him.

One of the realities of life was that once a person received a
government job, no amount of ineptitude could get him fired.

Mel Adams, the engineer, and a couple of the others filled in the
flanking chairs. Mel Adams carried a quick-draw calculator on his belt
and wore a yellow polo shirt, brown duck pants with slit pockets and
scuffed brown loafers. He deposited a pile of rolled-up maps,
blue-lines and surveyors' plats on the table before him.

The rest of the participants looked the way BLM employees generally
did--attired in basic Banana Republic. Why the wildlife biologist, the
hydrologist and the landscape architect were attending the meeting
would remain to be seen; Keene no doubt saw this as an opportunity to
keep them from shooting rubber bands at one another in the main office
while the meeting was taking place.