Neither Wolf nor Dog (7 page)

A hint of melancholy had crept into the old man's voice. He fingered the bundle on his lap and began staring past me as he talked.

“When I make a promise, I see my grandfathers looking over my shoulder. If I break my word I disgrace them. Do you see what I mean? How could I do that? They're in the spirit world. It's up to me to act for them here. That's why I want to speak now. That's why you're here.

“I want to try to say things right. I know it's hard for you to figure out, how one minute I can be bullshitting with Grover, then do spirit talk. It's because, with Grover, I'm just talking for me. When I say these other things, I'm talking for my grandfathers. I'm talking in the way they passed down to me.”

I sat quietly, waiting for a sense of what the old man wanted next. I wanted to honor his words and accord them their proper respect. He stared blankly into the ground. He seemed to be falling asleep. I wondered whether I should take the pipe to keep it from falling. Suddenly he jerked his head up and cocked his ear, as if listening.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “You got gas?”

“Sure,” I answered.

“Let's go for a ride,” he responded. He was already up and shuffling toward the truck.

“Where're we going?” I asked.

“Bring that tape recorder of yours. You'll see.”

I helped him into my truck and started to back down the path. Fatback had scuttled out from beneath the junk car and was limping alongside and whining.

“Put her in the back,” Dan said. The old dog was wagging her tail feverishly.

“Come on, Fatback,” I said, hoisting her into the pickup bed. She licked my face with her wet, fetid tongue and took her place against the tailgate.

“That's a good dog, that Fatback,” Dan said as I climbed back into the cab.

“She should brush her teeth a little more often,” I said.

Dan let forth a happy cackle and settled back into his seat. Something had changed in him. The pensive, melancholy drift had been replaced with a sense of purpose.

“Go down this road here,” he said. The “road” was nothing more than two tire ruts through an old wash and up over a hill. A few bumpy miles later the trail met up with another set of ruts that snaked their way up a ridge.

“Take a left,” Dan said. He held the pipe bundle tightly on his lap.

My truck was a four-wheel drive. But I had mainly gotten it to deal with northern Minnesota snows. I wasn't much for off-road driving. Dan started laughing. “You're on a reservation highway, Nerburn,” he said. “We want to give the cows a fair shake.”

We bumped and juddered our way up the ridge. The truck's suspension was groaning from the unfamiliar jostling. “White boy's truck,” Dan offered. “My car likes these roads.”

I thought back to the old automobile carcass sitting up on blocks in front of his house. “Your car's a little short of wheels,” I said.

Dan chuckled. “Yeah, that's why I made it into Fatback's house.”

I ground the truck down into its lowest gear. We inched our way up the final rise. It was steeper than anything I had ever driven on before. Yet the ruts were well traveled and the prairie grass was crushed down from frequent use.

“Stop here,” Dan said.

I pulled to a halt on the top of the ridge. The wind buffeted the truck and whipped the antenna back and forth with its force. Beyond us to the west, the ridge dropped off into a
panorama of undulating hills and draws. The prairie grasses bent and moved in the distance like waves on the sea.

Dan stepped out and walked to the front of the truck. He took out a small buckskin pouch of tobacco and started sprinkling it in all four directions. I could hear him singing a low, melancholy song. The words were in his language, but the heart of the song was universal. It sent a shudder through me. When he was finished, he squatted down on his haunches and stared out to the west. He somehow seemed younger, more alive, more at home.

Fatback made her way over the tailgate of the pickup and ambled up to Dan's side. The old man idly stroked the old dog's ears. I stood behind, uncertain if I was part of this or if I was intruding upon a private moment. Finally, the old man spoke. “Nerburn, come here. It's time for you to learn something.”

I approached him tentatively. “Sit down,” he ordered. It was a gentle command, but firm.

I sat down quietly.

“Turn on that tape recorder,” he said. Then he began to speak.

“Let me tell you how we lost the land. Let me tell you the real story.

“The white people surprised us when they came. Those of us out west had heard about them. Some of our elders had told prophecies about them. But still they surprised us.

“We had seen other strangers before. But they were just other people like us — other Indians — from different tribes. They would come and ask us to pass through our land. If we wanted them to, we would let them. Otherwise they couldn't.

“But, you see, it wasn't our land like we owned it. It was the land where we hunted or where our ancestors were buried. It was land that the Creator had given us.

“It was the land where our sacred stories took place. It had
sacred places on it. Our ceremonies were here. We knew the animals. They knew us. We had watched the seasons pass on this land. It was alive, like our grandparents. It gave us life for our bodies and the life for our spirits. We were part of it.

“So we would let people pass through it if they needed to, because it was our land and they knew it. We did not wish them to hunt or to disturb our sacred places. But they could come to our land if they needed to.

“You need to understand this. We did not think we owned the land. The land was part of us. We didn't even know about owning the land. It is like talking about owning your grandmother. You can't own your grandmother. She just is your grandmother. Why would you talk about owning her?

“So when the first of your people came, they just wanted to go through. They were strange to us. They wore strange clothes. They smelled different. But they had many powers we had never seen. They were part of the Creator's plan, we thought. It was not our place to deny them, because it was not our right to control them. We were just living our lives.

“They promised they would not do any damage. They were like a new kind of warrior with guns and different weapons. They were strange because they were always searching. We thought they would just come and go. We let them come among us, and we fed them and helped them. They were like raindrops that fell out of the sky, then stopped and were gone.

“But soon other strangers came. This time they were like a stream. They came with horses and wagons. They went on paths through our lands. Still, it did not bother us except that it scared the animals and that these people did not know what was sacred. But we knew they had to eat, so we did not mind when they shot the buffalo.

“I have heard that it was the same for other tribes with other animals. They tried to help these people. They were
worried that the animals for the hunt would be scared away. But these people brought guns and that made hunting easier for us. So we did not mind.

“But then these strangers shot animals just to kill them. They left them lying in gullies. They made paths through the lands that were heavier than our paths. These people became like a river through the land.

“We had never seen the kind of things they did. For us, the earth was alive. To move a stone was to change her. To kill an animal was to take from her. There had to be respect. We saw no respect from these people. They chopped down trees and left animals lay where they were shot. They made loud noises. They seemed like wild people. They were heavy on the land and they were loud. We could hear their wagon wheels groaning in the next valley.

“We tried to stay out of their way. But they made us angry. They made hunting hard for us. They took food from our children's mouths. We did not want them around. Still, they were on small paths and we were free. We tried to leave them alone, except for the young men who were most angry.

“And we did want their rifles.

“Then something strange happened. These new people started asking us for the land. We did not know what to say. How could they ask for the land? They wanted to give us money for the land. They would give us money for the land if their people could live on it.

“Our people didn't want this. There was something wrong to the Creator in taking money for the land. There was something wrong to our grandparents and our ancestors to take money for the land.

“Then something happened that we didn't understand. The people who came said that we didn't belong here anymore. That there was a chief in Washington, which was a city far away, and
the land was his, and he had said they could live here and we could not.

“We thought they were insane. The elders said to be careful because these people were dangerous. Most of us just laughed — at least this is what the elders told me when I was young. These people would ride across the land and put a flag up, then say that everything between where they started and where they put the flag belonged to them. That was like someone rowing a boat out into a lake and saying that all the water from where he started to where he turned around belonged to him. Or someone shooting an arrow into the sky and saying that all the sky up to where the arrow went belonged to him.

“This is very important for you to understand. We thought these people were crazy. We thought we must not understand them right. What they said made no sense.

“And here is what was really happening. They were talking about property. We were talking about the land. Do you see what I mean? Your people came from Europe because they wanted property for their own. That was what they needed to farm and raise the food to live. They had worked for other people who had claimed all the property and took all the things they raised. They never had anything because they had no property. That was what they wanted more than anything. That is what was behind the whole idea of America as a new country across the ocean. To get property of their own.

“I don't know. Maybe long, long ago, Europe was just land, too, like this land was for us. But that was so long ago that no one remembered. It had all been turned into property. If people didn't have property they didn't have very much control over their lives, because everyone believed that whoever had a piece of paper saying they owned the land could control everything that happened on it. The people that came across the ocean believed this, too. They came here to get their own property.

“We didn't know this. We didn't even know what it meant. We just belonged to the land. They wanted to own it.

“And here is something that I think is important — your religion didn't come from the land. It could be carried around with you. You couldn't understand what it meant to us to have our religion in the land. Your religion was in a cup and a piece of bread, and that could be carried in a box. Your priests could make it sacred anywhere. You couldn't understand that what was sacred for us was where we were, because that is where the sacred things had happened and where the spirits talked to us.

“Your people did not know about the land being sacred. We did not know about the land being property. We could not talk to each other because we did not understand each other. But pretty soon your people were not like a stream or even a great river any more. They were like a great ocean. This ocean washed us back upon each other. It washed us off our land.

“Some of us wanted to fight. Some of us wanted to run away. There were old chiefs who said we should make the best deals we could so we could keep our most sacred lands for ourselves. There were even Indians who saw all the things white people had and thought we should give up our way because the Creator wanted us to try this new way.

“We did not know what to do. You were everywhere. You were killing all the animals. The buffalo were gone. The birds were gone. You put two rails across the country that the buffalo would not cross. Then you rode by on your trains and shot the buffalo as you passed. You left them to rot in the sun. You would not let us hunt. You gave us blankets and whiskey that made our people crazy. We were put in little pens of land that were like tiny islands in your sea.

“The worst thing is that you never even listened to us. You came into our land and took it away and didn't even listen to us
when we tried to explain. You made promises and you broke every one.

“First you said we could have our sacred lands, but then when you wanted them you took them. That is what happened with the Black Hills.

“Then you said we could have enough land to hunt and fish on. But when you wanted it you made it smaller or took it away and sent us somewhere else.

“Then you said we could always hunt and fish on the lands you took for your people, but then these new people said we couldn't.

“You did something we did not think was possible. You killed us without even taking our lives. You killed us by turning our land into pieces of paper and bags of flour and blankets and telling us that was enough. You took the places where the spirits talked to us and you gave us bags of flour.

“This is what you have to understand. To us the land was alive. It talked to us. We called her our mother. If she was angry with us, she would give us no food. If we didn't share with others, she might send harsh winters or plagues of insects. We had to do good things for her and live the way she thought was right. She was the mother to everything that lived upon her, so everything was our brother and sister. The bears, the trees, the plants, the buffalo. They were all our brothers and sisters. If we didn't treat them right, our mother would be angry. If we treated them with respect and honor, she would be proud.

“For your people, the land was not alive. It was something that was like a stage, where you could build things and make things happen. You understood the dirt and the trees and the water as important things, but not as brothers and sisters. They existed to help you humans live. You were supposed to make the land bear fruit. That is what your God told you.