Neither Wolf nor Dog (20 page)

“Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn't do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren't happy and didn't feel free. You made all the cages, then you wondered why you didn't feel free.

“We Indians never thought that way. Everyone was free. We didn't make cages of laws or land. We believed in honor. To us the white man looked like a blind man walking. He knew he was on the wrong path when he bumped into the edge of one of the cages. Our guide was inside, not outside. It was honor. It was more important for us to know what was right than to know what was wrong.

“We looked at the animals and saw what was right. We saw how the deer would trick the more powerful animals and how the bear would make her children strong by running them without mercy.

“We saw how the buffalo would stand and watch until it understood. We saw how every animal had wisdom and we tried to learn that wisdom. We would look to them to see how they got along and how they raised their young. Then we would
copy them. We did not look for what was wrong. Instead we always reached for what was right.

“It was this search that kept us on a good path, not rules and fences. We wanted honor for ourselves and our families. We wanted others to say, ‘He is a good man. He is as brave as the bear' or ‘as clean as the fox.' We had freedom so we did not seek it. We sought honor, and honor was duty. The man who sought freedom was just running from duty, so he was weak.

“The only time freedom is important is when others are trying to put you in chains. We had no chains so we needed no freedom.”

Dan paused to let me take it all in.

“Does this make any sense to you? The world your people brought saw everything in terms of freedom. We have always had our freedom so you had nothing of value to give us. All you could do is take it away and give it back to us in the form of cages.

“That is what you did when you took our land and tried to give it back to us in allotments. You took all our Indian land and gave it back to us in squares and said, ‘You now have the freedom to be farmers and ranchers.' We didn't want to be farmers and ranchers. We had been farmers when we had to. But we didn't want to be told to be farmers.

“When we didn't farm you got angry and couldn't understand. ‘We have given you the freedom to have your own land and be farmers,' you said. ‘And you aren't doing anything.' To us, all you had done is given us our own cage.

“If you take an animal from the woods or the prairie and give him a house inside a fence, is that giving him freedom? No. All it is doing is taking away his honor, because if he accepts it, he is no longer free.

“Yet that is what you did to us. ‘Either accept this cage or be killed' is what you told us. You took our honor and gave us
your freedom. And even you know that is no freedom at all. It is just the freedom to live inside your own locked cage.

“Here is what I really think. White people are jealous of us. If it hadn't been for your religion you would have lived just like us from the first minute you got to this land. You knew we were right. You started wearing our clothes. You started eating our food. You learned how to hunt like us. When you fought the English you even fought like us.

“You came to this country because you really wanted to be like us. But when you got here you got scared and tried to build the same cages you had run away from. If you had listened to us instead of trying to convert us and kill us, what a country this would be.”

“Hannh, hannh,” Grover said in a subdued gesture of approval. “That's damn straight, Dan.”

Dan sat erect and facing forward. He knew he had spoken well. His chin was held high; his arms folded across his chest. There was a pride and a peace in his bearing.

“Thank you, Dan,” I said.

“I will speak more if you want me to,” he offered. He was like a concert pianist, in full command of his powers, offering to play an encore for an audience that had pleased him with its intelligent attentiveness.

“I would be honored,” I said.

“What should I speak of?”

This was a rare opening for me. I was caught up short. I wanted to ask a big question, but none came to mind. “What's important to you?”

“Many things, Nerburn, and I will say them when it is time.”

There was a silence.

“I think I should talk about words. Your language. It is another thing that bothers me, and I think I should take away
the burdens of the things that bother me. That is what I heard from the old ones.”

He had taken on his formal manner again. He was once more the solitary orator, speaking the truths that he had worked out over so many years, with only an old friend, a white man, and a sleeping Labrador to hear him. I said a silent prayer to the gods of technology that my little discount-store tape recorder would catch his words so I could pass them on.

“Do you speak another language, Nerburn?” he asked.

“Not well,” I answered. “I can muddle along in German and Italian. But I'm no good.”

“So you know how hard it is.”

“It's hard for me.”

“It's hard for everybody. Can you say what you want in those languages?”

“No. If I'm lucky, I can say things one way. And it's probably wrong.”

“Would you like to read contracts in those languages?”

“No.” I could see where he was heading.

“Would you like to have someone you didn't trust tell you what those contracts said?”

“No.”

“That's what our treaties were. Pieces of paper written in a language we didn't understand and read to us by people we didn't trust. Then they were signed by Indians who were bribed to sign them, or maybe were threatened if they didn't. Then if there was anything in them that actually helped the Indian people, they were changed by lawyers for the government or taken into courts where the judges for the government made them mean whatever the government wanted.

“But you know this, don't you.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I think the treaty injustices are something that most Americans are beginning to understand.”

“‘Understand,' maybe. But not ‘fix.' But those are not what I want to talk about. They are like a large bear attacking us. Anyone can see them. It is the snakes I want to talk about.

“Here. Let me talk some more. I am going to say some things that you should think about.”

He drew in a large breath and began.

“I grew up speaking the language of my people. It wasn't until school I had to learn English. They just marched us into the classroom and started talking in English. We had to learn.

“I remember how funny it sounded when I first heard it. There were so many words. The teacher could talk for an hour and not even stop. She could talk about anything. She didn't need to move her hands, even. She just talked. Some days I would sit and watch her just to see all the words she said. One other boy once told me he thought she said as many words in a day as there were stars in the sky. I never forgot that.

“When I learned English I realized it was a trick. You could use it to say the same thing a hundred ways. What was important to Indian people was saying something the best way. In English you had to learn to say things a hundred ways. I never heard anything like it. I still watch white people talk and I'm surprised at all the words. Sometimes they will say the same thing over and over and over in different ways. They are like a hunter who rushes all over the forest hoping to bump into something instead of sitting quietly until he can capture it.

“I don't mind this, mostly. But I don't like it when it is used to hurt us or other people. Now I'm going to tell you some of those things that hurt because of the way people say them. I wonder if you ever thought of them.

“The first one is about the battles. Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or
white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad. They ‘won'; we ‘massacred.' I don't even know what a massacre is, but it sounds like dead women and little babies with their throats cut. If that's right, it was the white people who massacred more than we did. But I have hardly ever heard anyone talk about the white massacres. I don't like it when people use that word only about the killing we did. It makes our killing seem uglier than yours, so it makes our people seem worse than yours.

“Here's another one: uprising. You use that word to talk about anytime our people couldn't stand what was happening to them anymore and tried to get our rights. Then you should call your Revolutionary War an uprising. But you don't. Why not? There was a government taking freedom away from you and you stood up against it. But you called it a revolution, like maybe the earth was turning to something better.

“When we did it, it was called an uprising, like everything was peaceful and orderly until we ‘rose up.' Well, maybe we should make those words backward and call those ‘downkeepings,' because to us, we were being kept down all the time. I'd like it a lot better if history books said, ‘Then the Indians were kept down again,' rather than, ‘Then the Indians rose up again.' It would be more of the truth.

“See, that's how the English language is used on us. It is like a weapon you use against us now that you don't use guns anymore.

“What about ‘warpath'? When you came out against us you ‘formed an army.' When we came out to defend our families we ‘went on the warpath.' I won't even talk about words like ‘blood-thirsty' and ‘savage.'

“But those are things from the old days, and you probably don't even think they are real any more. Well, they are.

“My little great grandson came home one day and told me
they were studying the frontier in American history. I asked him what it was. He told me it was where civilization stopped. I almost told him he couldn't go back to that school anymore.

“Just look at that! They were teaching him that civilization only existed up to where the white men had reached. That means everything on the other side of that line was uncivilized. Well, we were on the other side of that line. We had governments and laws, too. Our people were better behaved than the people that came into our lands. We thought we were at least as civilized as the white man. But here is my little great grandson coming home from school talking about the frontier and civilization. It was like we didn't exist.

“Every time you talk about the frontier you are telling us that we don't matter. I looked up the word. It means the edge between the known and the unknown. Whenever you use it you are saying that our people are part of the unknown. You are teaching your children and our children a history that says Indian people were part of a big, dangerous, empty space on the other side of the line where people had laws and culture. It is like there were wildcats and poisonous snakes and Indians, and they all were the same — just something unknown that made the land dangerous.

“See, this is part of the big story you don't even see. You teach about the frontier. You talk about the wilderness and how empty the land was, even though to us the land was always full. You talk about civilization like we didn't have any, just because we didn't try to haul big chairs and wooden chests across the desert in a cart.

“The way you teach it, America started from some ships that came to Massachusetts and Virginia. The people got off and had to push their way through some big empty land that was full of danger. When they got to these plains, they sent the wagon trains across the mountains and the desert, like little
streams cutting their way through the earth. Once they got across, then more people followed their paths, and things were built along the way, and it was like these little streams of people became big rivers of people that all flowed across to California and Oregon and Washington. It was like the place was empty and you filled it up, and history is the story of how you filled it up and what happened while you were filling it.

“You can tell me you don't think that way, but you do. I look at the history books of the kids. They start in the east and come west, all of them, like that is the way history happened.

“Just think what that does to our kids. It tells them to see the past like white people. It teaches them to understand this country like they were on those boats and covered wagons. That's not the way it was to us. For us, this was a big land where people lived everywhere. Then some people came and landed on the shores in the east while others came up from the south. They started pushing us. Then some others came down the rivers from the north. All these people were fighting each other. They all wanted something from us — furs, land, gold. They either took it or made us sell it to them. They all had guns. They all killed us if we didn't believe that God was some man named Jesus who had lived in a desert across the sea. They wouldn't leave us alone.

“Pretty soon they set up a government way back somewhere in the east and said this all was their land. Not just where they lived, but everywhere they had been or even where they had heard of. If they could get one man to go to a place and put a flag in the ground, they said they owned everything between where they started and that flag. They started pushing us backward on top of each other. All of us who had lived side by side leaving each other alone had to fight each other for hunting land.

“We had to make deals with the white men or else fight
them. There wasn't enough food. Everything started to fall apart. We lost the land our ancestors were buried in. We got pushed into little ponds of land. We were like fish who had been swimming in the sea who were sent into little ponds.