No one has seen the Aunorwi in over a hundred years. Decimated by disease, with strong cultural imperatives for isolation from outsiders, and never numbering more than about five thousand in a relatively small area, they were always vulnerable. Contact with European colonists had always been schizophrenic–minor trade and friendly hand signals mixed with violent assault for real or perceived offenses by both sides. There were some scattered efforts to initiate more peaceful contact, including an elaborate plan to raise a young Aunorwi to act as an intermediary that foundered when the subject died of typhoid. But no one was surprised when the Aunorwi stopped emerging from the dense wilderness that had housed them.

Editorial eulogies appeared in local newspapers, a nearby normal school renamed its newsletter “The Aunorwi,” ethnologists and linguists sparred over the few remaining scraps of speech and word list, endlessly debating how the Aunorwi may or may not have been related to other tribes. But they remained an academic pursuit, and an average inhabitant of their lands would be hard-pressed to name the people that had preceded them as stewards of the land.

That is, until a 40-year-old Aunorwi and her 75-year-old grandmother emerged from the wilderness near Janeston.