Painted Waters draws the portraits of three characters as their divergent motivations ebb and flow on a plot-twisting pallet. 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, the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, 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.