Neither Wolf nor Dog (2 page)

This is exactly what Dan and Grover and all the others would never let me do. They remained resolutely and unashamedly themselves, and demanded that I do the same. Whenever I stepped across the boundary I was slapped down. They refused to let me slip into glib generalizations that would mute their individuality. I was asked to recognize their common Indianness, but was constantly reminded that this did not mean I could invest them with a common identity that would reduce them to collective objects of sympathy or pity or veneration.

Consequently, they never let me surround them with my
own thinking or understanding. Every time I tried to do so, or every time I found myself doing so unconsciously, they would turn my reality on its head. They would trick me, they would test me, they would ambush me, they would enrage me. They literally and figuratively kidnapped me, and would not let me go until I paid the ransom of giving up my own way of understanding. They wanted me to realize that I had walked through Alice's keyhole, and the world I had entered was not mine to reduce to the size and shape of my own understanding. Yet, through it all, they cared for me as I cared for them, and when we finally parted on that dusty, Dakota roadside, we parted as family, and no one could ever take that away from us.

This, I believe, is why that man who came to my house could finally speak to his wife and children. This is why Indians and whites alike have embraced this book, and why it continues to work in the many unseen and unlikely corners of the earth where it finds a home. It is a book about acknowledging differences while seeking understanding, about standing on the angers and sadnesses and broken dreams and promises that separate us, and reaching across to become brothers and sisters and part of the common human family. It is about allowing ourselves to be seen, just as that buffalo on the hillside allowed me to see him, and trusting that those who see us will honor what they see, and treat it with gentleness and respect. In short, it is about faith — in ourselves, in others, and in the common humanity that lies beneath our many differences.

Can there be any message more enduring, or any message more needed, as we try to save this fragile planet, and to move it forward from its bloody and tearstained past toward a more humane and hopeful future?

Kent Nerburn
Bemidji, Minnesota
Spring 2002

“Let us put our minds together and see what kind
of life we can make for our children.”

— Sitting Bull

I
t was on a motorcycle ride, several years before this book was even an idea in my mind, that the seed for it was actually planted.

I was traveling across North Dakota. The August sun was unbearably hot and the land rolled on endlessly before me. As I came over a rise I saw in the distance a forlorn wooden structure with three enclosed sides and a low-pitched roof. At first I thought it was a farmer's abandoned fruit stand or a life-sized crèche placed on the roadside by some fundamentalist religious
group. But as I got closer I realized that it was a shelter for some kind of historical marker.

I pulled to a stop and walked across the simmering highway toward the enclosure. As I approached, I could see that it contained a large, irregular boulder enclosed in a fence. A plaque nearby explained that this was a buffalo rock of the sort that the Lakota Indians held sacred.

The plaque was fine — very informative — and at great pains to be respectful of the Lakota tradition. If you looked closely, it said, you could see the chippings and markings where the anonymous craftsman generations before had tried to coax a more recognizable form from the rock.

I read the words carefully and then turned toward the boulder itself. Though I could not examine it minutely because of the fence, I could see a few of the chip marks from the ancient craftsman who had tried to enhance its shape. It did, indeed, look like a buffalo. It was easy to see how the Lakota had come to value this rock and invest it with spiritual significance.

At another time, earlier in my life, I might have catalogued the information somewhere in my memory and gone happily on my way, satisfied that I had seen something interesting and pleased that I had learned a little more about Indian culture.

But my eyes have changed. I have had the good fortune to have lived and worked among Indian people. I have sat at their tables, talked with them about their children, played basketball with them in the chill of mission school gyms, helped them bury their dead. I have seen how they love each other and fight each other and chide each other and respect each other. I have been part of their lives.

Because of this, I saw something else in that sweltering roadside enclosure. I saw a piece of the earth — a huge and silent rock — enclosed in a pen like an animal. I saw the living belief of a people reduced to a placard and made into a roadside curiosity
designed for the intellectual consumption of a well-meaning American public. In short, I saw one of the most poignant metaphors for the plight of the Indian people that I am likely to confront in my entire life: the spirit of the land, the spirit of a people, named, framed, and incarcerated inside a fence.

And I wasn't the only one who had seen something more than a history lesson in that roadside enclosure. On the top of the rock, insignificant to anyone who didn't understand, some previous passerby had placed a few broken cigarettes. In an act as simple and caring as a Catholic's genuflection before the Blessed Sacrament, that person had placed the sacred gift of tobacco on the rude image of the buffalo, and in so doing had paid homage to the animal that is the physical embodiment of the universe in all its bounty for the Lakota people. And more than that, he or she had paid homage to
Wakan Tanka
, the Creator, whose immutability and eternal steadfastness is seen as incarnated in the character of every stone.

To that anonymous passerby that rock was not an artifact; it was not even a metaphor. It was a living, spiritual presence. And nothing that the highway department or the historical society or a thousand well-intended anthropologists could do or say with their plaques and enclosures would ever hallow that stone as much as that simple gift of tobacco laid by an unknown hand.

At that moment, as I stood there in the searing August heat on a lonely stretch of North Dakota highway, I made a solemn and private vow. Though I could never experience the sacred presence of the land in the way that it was experienced by the Indian people, neither could I ever again look at the lives and works of my Indian brothers and sisters as object lessons for my education and edification. I had a human obligation to try to bridge the gap between the world into which I had been born and the world of a people I had grown to know and love.

Neither Wolf nor Dog
is my attempt to fulfill that obligation.

I realize that there will be a great many Indian readers who will be skeptical about my decision to undertake this task. You have seen your people misinterpreted, misrepresented, and unconscionably exploited by white writers of both good and bad heart.

To you, my friends, who feel this way, I can say only that you should judge me by what I do.

I believe you will see that I am neither a white exploiter who traffics in Indian themes because they are popular, nor a blue-eyed wannabe who has miraculously discovered a Cherokee grandmother somewhere in my distant past. And, most of all, I believe you will see that I am not one of that most pernicious breed of white writer who claims to have met some wisdom-bearing elder who has unaccountably decided to share his or her innermost cultural secrets and teachings with me.

No, if I have done my task well, I believe you will see that I am simply a person of honest heart who has had the good fortune to know and value Indian people, and who has happened upon the opportunity to create a book that can give voice to the thoughts and feelings of a very special man. This opportunity is, to me, a gift, and I take it seriously.

Dan, whose story I tell and thoughts I reveal, has sworn me to secrecy. “Cover my tracks like I am being hunted,” he told me. I have done so, changing what needed to be changed, obscuring what needed to be obscured. But his words are as true and as honest as I can make them. If there is good in what he says, it belongs to him; if there is error in the way it is presented, that belongs to me. I have done my best, with honor and humility, and I offer it as my gift to you.

And to you, my white readers, I say read with an open mind and heart. The land you walk upon, whether it be city streets, country lanes, or suburban cul-de-sacs, is Indian land. There are echoes beneath your feet that are there to be heard if you are willing to still your mind and listen to your heart.

But those echoes are not to be found in the myths and false images upon which we have been raised. The drunken Indian, the vicious savage, the noble wiseman, and the silent earth-mother are all products of our historical imagination. We do the Indian people no honor by dehumanizing them into such neat and simple packages.

The real Indian people laugh, cry, make mistakes, honor their creator, get angry, go to stores, raise children, and dream all the same dreams as you or I. And it is in the real Indian people, not in the myths and images, that the true voices of our land can be heard.

Dan is such a person. He will not fit your images. He is like the buffalo rock — rough-hewn, elemental, and born of the earth. But, like the buffalo rock, he is also possessed of a deep spirituality for those who have the eyes to see.

Listen to him. Learn from him. Come along on our journey and share our story. You will learn as I have learned, and you will be the better for it.

In the last analysis, we must all, Indian and non-Indian, come together. This earth is our mother, this land is our shared heritage. Our histories and fates are intertwined, no matter where our ancestors were born and how they interacted with each other.

Neither Wolf nor Dog
is one small effort to help this coming together. It is not an attempt to build a fence around a man and his people, but to honor them with the gift of my words. I have done my best, and I place this book before you, like the tobacco before the buffalo rock, as a simple offering.

May you receive it in the spirit with which it is offered.

Kent Nerburn
Bemidji, Minnesota
Spring 1994

I
got to the phone on the second ring. I could hear the scratchy connection even before the voice spoke.

“Is this Nerburn?”

It was a woman. I recognized the clipped tones of an Indian accent.

“Yes,” I responded.

“You don't know me,” she continued, without even giving a name. “My grandpa wants to talk to you. He saw those ‘Red Road' books you did.”

I felt a tightening in my chest. Several years before I had worked with students on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation collecting the memories of the students' parents and grandparents. The two books that had resulted,
To Walk the Red Road
and
We
Choose to Remember
, had gained some notoriety in the Indian community across North America. Most of the Indians had loved them for the history they had captured. But some found old wounds opened, or familial feuds rekindled.

Occasionally, I would receive phone calls from people who wanted to challenge something we had written or to set the record straight on something their grandfather or grandmother was supposed to have said.

“Sure,” I answered. “Let me talk to him.”

“He doesn't like to talk on the phone,” the woman said.

I had grown accustomed to Indian reticence about talking to white people, and I knew there were still a few of the very traditional elders who didn't like to use the telephone or have their picture taken.

“Is he upset?” I ventured.

“He just wants to talk to you.”

My nervousness was growing. “Where is he?”