Her expression caught my eye from a gift shop's rack of postcards at the Museum of the Cherokee Indians.

According to the card's text, her name was "Mosa." She was a youthful member of a dwindling southwestern Indian tribe in the very early 1900s, walking with her people down the lonely road to obscurity. Edward Curtis, the man who photographed scores of Indian girls and many times that number of small children and adults seems to have set her apart by writing, "It would be difficult to conceive of a more thorough aboriginal than this Mojave girl. Her eyes are those of the fawn of the forest, questioning the strange things of civilization upon which it gazes for the first time."

His photos show many girls Mosa's age, but their full faces don't project the tangled range of emotions seen in this pre-teen. His pointed remarks imply a mysterious visual impact. I couldn't leave her there.

The black and white picture shows her hair clean and straight, falling well below the shoulders, but perhaps uncombed. Fine daylight beams make it appear grayish on top of her head. The alternating dark and light geometry of three long bead necklaces stand out as they drape haphazardly from behind her shadowed neck. Her attractive face is turned slightly away from the intrusive camera as if in passive disinterest. A simple adornment below her chin seems to be part of the equally simple shirt-top. Perhaps homespun, it is heavy, coarse, durable and probably cheap. The dark-eyed gaze looks far, far away, like the thousand-yard stare seen in the faces of battle-worn soldiers; vacant and focused far beyond the reality of vision. Two fingertip-wide streaks of face paint begin at her hairline, then flow wide and down near her jaw, framing a gentle, yet determined face. Another pair, like tear stains, start below her eyes, curve downward across her cheeks and pass the corners of full lips, meeting the others near her chin. Powerful emotions seem permanently trapped behind young Mosa's stoic and unresponsive expression.

My simple postcard has been matted and framed as a three-dimensional diorama, 12 inches wide and 14 tall. A narrow off-white border separates the card from an equally narrow mat frame the color of dried blood. Atop that is the final dark mat resembling a chocolate-brown woven fabric. Three free form cuts, two above the picture and one below, suggest arrowheads themselves, and again expose the reddish undermat.

Within the three are the mismatched shapes of six ancient arrowheads – bird points and larger – flaked from yellow, gray, and sand-colored rocks. The largest is a Clovis point an inch or so broad and perhaps twice that long. Crafted by a man now thousands of years gone. Its point and part of one flute are missing. The mute stone chip begs the questions of where, when, and how?

Three faint gold lines trim the wooden picture frame, matching that of the brass grip and handguard of an antique saber pinned between the frame and wall. An American soldier wore the weapon during Mosa's life, but the saber and scabbard now hang crossed, points down, in an attitude of surrender; one of failure, not victory.

A modern handmade arrow rests between the saber and frame, its razor-sharp steel arrowhead is far more efficient at killing than any of the hand-flaked pieces of rock chips. Turkey feathers alternate faint streaks of dirty white and brown, drawing the eye backward from their fine front taper. Near where the arrow's nock straddles a bowstring, they are all white.

The stone points' craftsmen could never have envisioned such an efficient weapon.

Nor would they have imagined this simple picture of such a distant and defeated tribal sister.