Neither Wolf nor Dog (21 page)

“See, to us, American history is how the big sea became little ponds and whether those are going to be taken from us or not. It doesn't have anything to do with thirteen colonies and some covered wagons going west. Our land was taken from us from every direction. We can look at the same facts as you and it is something completely different. But you build your history on words like ‘frontier' and ‘civilization,' and those words are just your ideas put into little shapes that you can use in sentences. The big ideas behind them are weapons that take our past from us.

“I think that's a lot of where our people went wrong with your people. We didn't see the big ideas behind the words you used. We didn't see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was. You named us savages so that made us savages. You named where we lived the wilderness, so that made it a wild and dangerous place. Without even knowing it, you made us who we are in your minds by the words you used. You are still doing that, and you don't even know it is happening.

“I hope you'll learn to be more careful with your words. Our children don't know the old language so well, so it is your English that is giving them the world. Right now some of the ideas in your words are wrong. They are giving our children and yours the world in a wrong way.

“There was an old man who told me when I was a boy that I should look at words like beautiful stones. He said I should lift each one and look at it from all sides before I used it. Then I would respect it.

“I think he gave me good advice. You people have so many
words that you don't respect them the way you should. There is always another one, so you just throw them out there without thinking.

“I think you need to be careful. Those words are like stones. Even if they are very beautiful, if you throw them out without thinking, they can hurt someone.

“I have spoken now.”

I had said nothing during the discourse. Watching Dan had been almost like watching a man go into a trance. He hadn't seemed to form his thoughts, but to catch them and ride them like a hawk rides wind currents. He had kept his eyes closed for the entire time he spoke.

I thought back to some reading I had done on the orations of the Seneca chief Red Jacket, and how he had practiced speaking in his youth, so that he might one day become a great orator to give voice to his people.

This is what Dan had done, and he had done it in private, with no thought of audience, no thought of reward. He was speaking for his ancestors, voicing the feelings of his people, and I was to be his mouthpiece. A shudder went through me as I sensed the honor and responsibility that had been accorded me. This was not a game anymore, nor even a simple literary exercise. This was for real, for keeps, for all the voices that had been silenced and all the voices that did not know how to speak.

Grover was nodding his approval as he steered the car down the dusty road. “You spoke well,
Tunkashila
,” he said, using the word of highest respect for a grandfather, the words used to refer to the old ones. Then, to me he added, “I hope you are learning something, Nerburn.” Fatback wheezed and shifted in her seat.

I had this momentary image of us being adrift on an inland sea, a kind of Great Plains
Odyssey
, the old seer, the navigator, and the scribe, with a surreal canine chorus making commentary in the background.

“You're lucky to hear these things,” Grover continued. “The old man has kept silent for a long time.”

“Lucky to hear these things.” It was the same sentiment Wenonah had expressed while berating me from her front porch. Though they never said it in words, they revered this old man and his knowledge. They expected me to do the same.

“I will make your words heard, Dan,” I said. The formality in my own voice surprised me, but it felt appropriate and natural. Dan just nodded. I ventured further: “How did you come to speak of these things, Dan?”

The old man spoke slowly. “I will tell you now.

“When I was a boy, an old man who was wakan looked at my eye and said I had a special way of seeing. He said I had one Indian eye and one white eye. He told my father I must learn to see with both these eyes. ‘You must use your gift,' he told me.

“My father was a smart man. He knew I must listen to the old one. So he told me I must learn to watch, and even if others laughed at me, I must always watch. Then I would learn to see with two eyes.

“When I went to white school I was unhappy. I cried every night beneath my covers. A boy was not supposed to cry, and I was ashamed. When I came home for the summer I told my grandmother that I cried all the time and that I didn't know why. I told her I was not brave like the other boys. She told me I was wrong. That there were special ones who felt the pain for all their people so the rest could be brave. ‘Maybe you are one of the special ones,' she said. ‘You are a smart boy. Learn to speak. It will be good for you.'

“So I tried to learn to speak. Most of the kids were afraid to speak. The teachers hit them when they said the wrong words. They thought it was better to be silent. But I remembered what my grandmother had said.

“I told the teacher I wanted to learn to speak. She gave me one book of President Abraham Lincoln and another about Rome. They were full of speeches. She told me to learn one every week and say it to her after school.

“When I looked at them there were so many words I wanted to run away. But I didn't. I tried to learn those speeches. I didn't know most of the words, so I just learned the sounds. The teacher said that was good. I would have my own words, she said, but the sounds were like music. They were there for everybody.

“I learned those speeches. I still know them today.

“I thought they were the greatest speeches in the world. I never even knew there were Indians who gave speeches until one of the elders heard me saying my speech. He told me there had been great Indian speakers, too. He told me about Big Elk and Sitting Bull. He told me some Indian speeches in my own language. ‘That is a good gift,' he said, ‘to be able to speak.'

“Then I knew how to see with both eyes. I heard the same sounds in the Indian speeches as in the white speeches. I heard the footsteps of men walking. I heard birds and animals. I heard the songs of all the earth in the words and in the spaces between the words. I knew I could learn to speak by listening to the animals just like I could learn to speak from reading speeches in books.

“Since then I have not been afraid to speak. I have studied and learned words. I have watched, with my Indian eye and with my white eye. I have spoken in Indian and in English. I have honored my gift.”

Abruptly, he stopped. “What is your gift, Nerburn?”

I was unprepared for the question. “I don't exactly know,” I stammered.

“Then I will tell you. You are honest. You are not living a large lie. You do not need to sit in the center of a house. You hear others.”

I was taken aback by the strange construction Dan had put on my personality.

“But you're a coward.”

The words hit hard. “You're afraid of other people's anger. Wenonah told me that. She told me I could make you do anything by getting angry.”

I let out a nervous involuntary laugh. The accuracy of the insight was frightening.

“Do you see everything so clearly?” I asked.

“There's a reason why my people have survived,” he said. “Now, I want you to understand this. People are going to get angry with what you write. They are going to be angry at you and they are going to be angry at me. I don't care. I am not a coward.”

I made a mild protest. “That's an awfully harsh word.”

“Let me finish. You cannot be afraid. There is good anger, too, and you have that. It is the anger from seeing clearly. It's the same anger I have. It's the anger the Old Ones warned me about. You must learn to control that anger, then it can be of use. But there is bad anger, too. It is the anger of people who only want their own way. That anger is selfish. It is a child's anger, and you must not back down from that anger. If you back down from it you are being a coward. Do you understand me?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Good,” he answered with finality. “You will use your gift well if you stop being afraid of other people's bad anger.”

Grover wanted to emphasize the point. He was ever the watchful guardian, making sure I understood the dimensions of my task. “He's saying you write what you see and you write what you hear. You are a keeper of the fire.”

Dan nodded his approval. “Keepers of the fire cannot be cowards. They are carrying light.”

S
oon signs of human habitation began to appear. A small dot in the distance proved to be a mailbox on a post, set next to a rutted dirt roadway that curved off over the hills. About a mile further down two white men in cowboy hats were herding several dozen cattle along the side of the road. The man in the lead was driving a tractor, while the man in the rear rode a large brown horse. They waved and smiled as Grover slowed to pass them.

“Good town for you up here,” Grover said.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“White town. Homestead town. You'll feel at home. We'll stop for something to eat. You can make your phone call.”

I puzzled at his characterization of the town, but as it
appeared in the distance, I understood. This was not a “reservation” town of trailers, random pockets of gone-to-seed tract housing, junk cars in yards, and the occasional commercial enterprise sitting back from a dusty, rutted, dirt parking area. Instead, it loomed in the distance like any of a thousand rural enclaves that dot the plains and prairies of the central U.S. — a tiny huddling of buildings standing proud against the horizontal landscape, capped by those two proud monuments to civic and spiritual accomplishment — the water tower and the church steeple.

Though it was in the middle of a reservation, this was a white town; a product of the Dawes Act of 1887 that had chopped up reservations into 160-acre parcels and allotted them to individual Indians in an attempt to convert them to the ways of farming and private ownership. Few Indians had ever taken to farming, and even fewer had understood the subtleties of private land ownership. Before long, through legal maneuvers, swindles, and sales agreements of varying legitimacy, white settlers had obtained the best land on almost all the reservations in the country. In addition, land that had been left over after all eligible Indians had received the 160 acres had then been opened up for white homesteaders. Though the land technically remained within the boundaries of the reservations, it was settled and developed like white towns all over the prairies and plains. A traveler who was paying no attention to maps or road signs might drive into one of these towns and never know he or she was on a reservation, except for the unusual number of Indians conducting their business there.

Even from a mile away I marveled at how completely different this little town seemed from the world in which I had spent the last week. There was an implied sense of order here. The road was tarred. The approach of the town was heralded by the gradual and orderly increase in human habitation. The
commercial and the residential areas were distinct and demarcated. The signage, though intrusive, was professional and of a piece. In concept and in layout, there was an underlying mathematics to the experience.

Grover switched on his turn signal as we passed the black and white highway sign that announced, “Business District.” The powerful metronomic “click” and the heavy green flash from the dashboard seemed a perfect herald for the world we were entering. At the sound of the turn signal, Fatback popped up from her lethargy and scrambled upright in the seat next to me.

We pulled off the highway onto the main street. The business section was short, only two blocks long, with side streets that trailed off into dead ends after a block or so. At the far end of town, you could see the beginnings of a small residential area of right-angle streets canopied by shade trees.

I looked at the small storefronts. A Coast-to-Coast, a Cenex feed station, an empty two-story brick building that might once have been a hotel. This was a farm country town, once proud of its self-sufficiency, now populated by old men in pickup trucks who swapped stories at the local cafe.

There was a peace and an order here that was comforting. But the edge of decay was everywhere. It was different from the “Indian towns,” where poverty had kept anything from rising to a level of refinement. Here there was a memory of proper days and roadsters and men in blocky suits leading well-scrubbed families up church steps on Easter morning.

Now, however, there was no activity anywhere. With the exception of a low cinder-block bank and a convenience store at the junction with the highway, there appeared to have been no new construction here for at least fifty years.