to himself as "famous Indian artist," and who, like Cassie, has returned to the reserve. Monroe, a specialist in restoring paintings, buys the abandoned Methodist missionary church building and proceeds to paint it "out of" the landscape. The narrator leaves no doubt that the church actually becomes invisible even to Monroe himself when he is finished. Tecumseh becomes his assistant in a number of artistic endeavors (such as setting up metal buffalo statues to lure back the real buffalos chased away—or actually exterminated—by the white settlers in the nineteenth century), and Monroe is the only one of the adults who actually takes him seriously. Monroe tells Tecumseh important things about himself, even if he does it so that Tecumseh can then compose songs about his, Monroe's, heroic deeds. Eventually, Tecumseh finds out from Monroe that he not only restored nineteenth-century landscape paintings when he worked for museums around the world, he had also painted Indians "back into" the paintings and taken Native remains collected in these museums to take back. Monroe claims he is "going to save the world" (131). Another "heroic deed" of Monroe is his grand giveaway festival, to which he invites the whole town and at which he gives away all his possessions (these gifts also have symbolic meaning, e.g. Cassie receives an Inuit sculpture of a woman with a child on her back, Tecumseh gets the piano). Finally, it turns out that Monroe, wearing his characteristic wig, was the mysterious "woman" on the river and the skull the boys found one of the re-appropriated pieces of Native American history stolen from various Indian nations. Another story-line takes up Elvin, Tecumseh's father, a carpenter and smuggler, who tries to get things done and to be a good father, but who continually falls short. Tecumseh's parents are separated, but the father makes a number of ineffectual attempts to lure Tecumseh's mother back into a relationship. A chair that one of the members of the Indian band ordered, but which Elvin never gets done, is a running joke and emblematic of Elvin's inability to finish what he sets out to do. It comes as a complete surprise to everyone, including the narrator, when he drives to the Indian Days festival in the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, the car he had been promising to fix for Tecumseh's mother throughout the novel. Lum is perhaps the most tragic character in the novel.