Painted Waters draws the portraits of three characters as their divergent motivations ebb and flow on a plot-twisting palette.
Joseph Rhodes, a Zuni Pueblo Indian artist; The Reverend Reginald Reichard, a cyberspace evangelist; and Katherine Riley, a Pulitzer Prize winning Irish journalist, comprise Loisette's cultural collage. During a lavish banquet following the re-enactment of a 10,000 B.C. Paleo-Indian bison kill, the reader hears their unspoken words-indigenous, Teutonic, and Celtic. Set in the Zuni Pueblo of New Mexico, and the old mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, the defining motif of Painted Waters is time: prehistoric, historic, and future on a canvas where 2,000-year-old fundamentalist religion vies with 12,000-year-old Native American beliefs for one woman's womb.
