Neither Wolf nor Dog (10 page)

“There,” he said, pointing to a patch of scrubby grass in the distance. “What do you see?”

“It looks a little greener than the rest of the hills,” I answered. “At least in a few patches.”

“Good. Now why is that?”

“I don't know.”

“Look closer.”

I squinted my eyes. There was nothing to be seen except the short green grass.

“I don't see anything,” I said.

“Look closer.”

I squinted again. There seemed to be some kind of movement, but it was too small to make out.

“Something is moving,” I said.

“Good. Do you know what it is?”

I admitted I didn't.

“Pispiza.
You call them prairie dogs.”

“Okay,” I acknowledged.

“That's why the grass is green. Our brother prairie dogs dig under the ground to make their homes. They dig up the earth
so the rain can go deeper and the roots of the grass can grow stronger.

“Where the grass is richer, the bigger animals come to feed. If we sit here quietly, in the morning, when the antelope are hungry, we will see them and we could hunt them. It is all because of our brother prairie dog. Where he lives, we can live.

“These are the kind of things I see when I look out here. They are things my grandfathers taught me. I hear them, too. My grandfathers. I hear their bones under the ground.”

I looked at the clump of dusty earth he held in his hand.

“You think I'm lying, don't you? Or just a crazy old fool. I can't explain it. But I know where the dead are buried. I hear them. They speak to me in some ancient tongue. It's a gift I have.

“You've read about those people who can find water by using a forked stick? They walk along with the stick above the ground, and when they get above water the stick just points down.

“That's the way it is with me. When I get over one of the graves I have a feeling inside me. It's like a shiver. My grandmother had it, too. She said that our ancestors gave it to us, and that I should always listen.

“That's why I come up here, Nerburn. Out there is where my people are buried. This is where I come to listen.”

“I believe you, Dan,” I said. And I did. Once, many years ago, I had taken a great deal of peyote. I had thought nothing of it at the time — it was just one of those acts that went along with life in the sixties. Within hours I was lying on my back under the midnight sky listening to the springs flow under the ground. It was a rushing sound, as if they were all speaking to each other. I felt like I was overhearing a conversation in the earth. Then, as I walked to a certain spot that sat like a plateau overlooking a valley, I felt a cold shiver come across me. “There
are graves here,” I had said to myself. I knew I believed it, but I had never been sure whether it was the peyote talking or whether I had been opened to some deeper realm of meaning. I had never forgotten that moment, though I seldom shared it with anyone.

Now, this old man was telling me the same thing, but for him it was not some drug-induced awareness, but a part of everyday reality. I wondered what it must be like to have that sensitivity every moment of your life.

He saw my curiosity. “Here,” he said, “watch this.” He sat back on his haunches and cupped his hands over his knees. Nothing seemed to be different. I sat silently beside him, wondering what it was I was supposed to see. Suddenly, Fatback came rustling through the tall grasses wagging her tail.

“Good dog,” he said, and ruffled the scruff of her neck. Fatback wagged her tail furiously, then pushed back off through the weeds.

I raised my eyebrows and gave Dan a little half smile.

“See,” he said.

“You called her over here?”

“Want me to do it again?”

“No,” I answered, though I truly wanted to challenge him on this. But I knew that, on some level, everything was a test, and I did not want to appear the skeptic. My job was to record what I saw as he wanted it told, not to get involved in some ersatz anthropological research. All I could think of was what one tough old woman had said to me when I first arrived on the Red Lake reservation to begin the oral history project. I had gone over to her office to request her assistance in identifying elders who might be interested in participating. She stared at me with a hard glare, then stated, simply, “If you think you're going to come up here and do one of those goddamn white anthropology projects, you can just get on your
pony and ride.” Then she turned back to her beadwork and never said another word.

As much as I wanted Dan to prove that he had called Fatback, it seemed too close to a “goddamn white anthropology project.” So, I just said, “That dog's got good hearing,” and let things go at that.

Dan chuckled knowingly. “You're a good boy, Nerburn. Let's go get some lunch.”

O
n the way back down the hill, Dan suggested that we go visit Grover. “He makes a mean baloney sandwich,” he said.

I was more than happy to agree. I had come to value Grover greatly. He was a tough and crusty character. But he spoke his mind. Ever since I had given him the tobacco, he had taken on the role of Dan's protector. He did not trust me totally. He had seen enough
wasichus
come and go, bearing good intentions, sycophantic fantasies, and simple greed. He was not willing to give an easy assent to any white person who claimed to want to work or live among Indians. As he had put it to me one time, “Most of you white people don't even know what it is you want. But you want something, and you're using us to get it.”

Until proven otherwise, I was just one more in this long
tradition of exploiters who had come among the Indian people to fulfill some personal agenda, whether spiritual, material, or otherwise. But he knew the old man had asked me to come, so he was willing to work with me. He just wanted to make sure I kept what he called “a good heart.”

Grover's house was on the other side of the village. I had not yet gone through the village itself — Dan's house was nearer the highway. A visit to Grover would give me a chance to see more of the reservation without feeling like a white intruder.

We bounced our way back down the hill, then turned onto a gravel road that skirted a dusty, amber wash. Houses were set back from the road about a half a mile apart. They all had the look of prefab postwar bungalows gone to seed. Doors hung by one hinge. Windows without screens were covered by blankets. The front yards were nothing more than spotty patches of dirt with kids' bicycles and old appliances lying randomly on the ground.

Everything seemed to have just been left where it was dropped: there was no sense of order or indication of effort to keep things clean. One house had an old spool table sitting in front of it with a pile of oily car parts on it. Another had a large frame made out of telephone poles with an engine block hanging from it by a heavy logging chain. Beneath the engine a rusty beige Chevrolet with no front wheels sat on heavy timbers, its hood open as if the engine had just been extracted like a tooth.

It was a world of half-efforts. Nothing had been brought to a conclusion. The only sign of industriousness was the inevitable line of laundry flapping behind each house in the ceaseless prairie winds. The white sheets seemed like flags of defiance in a landscape of despair.

I had always been mystified by the willingness of people to live in squalor, when only the simplest effort would have been
required to make things clean. Eventually, I had come to shrug it off to the old sociological canard that it reflected a lack of self-esteem and a sense of hopelessness about life.

But, in my heart, I knew that this was too facile, too middle-class in its presumptions. But it certainly was preferable to earlier explanations — that people who lived like this were simply lazy and shiftless. I wanted to ask Dan. I was sure he'd have a point of view. But I hesitated: the question seemed to run to the heart of the contemporary Indian life.

I needn't have worried, though. The old man saw me glancing around and came right to the point himself.

“Bothers you, doesn't it,” he said.

We passed a house with a burnt-out station wagon lying on its side in the front yard.

“Yeah. I guess so,” I answered. “I just don't understand it.”

“I've been waiting for you to ask. But I guess you figure I got forever.” He gave me a mock blow on the shoulder. “I'm damn near eighty, Nerburn. You've got to work faster.”

I grinned at his humor. “Sorry, Dan. I'm on white man's time.”

He chuckled several times and pointed at another of the passing houses. The top of an old Plymouth protruded from a patch of weeds. “What do you see when you look out there?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I asked, didn't I?”

“I see lack of concern for the land that you claim to revere.”

“You mean, you see a bunch of shit, right?”

His candor was liberating. “Yes.”

“That's what all white people see. You drive through our reservations and say, ‘Look at all the junk cars and all the trash.' What do you think we say when we drive through one of your cities?”

“I really don't know.”

“We say the same thing. Just because you have everything scrubbed down and in order doesn't mean anything. What is bigger trash, a junk car or a parking ramp? We can tow the junk car away. The parking ramp has to be torn down with bulldozers and wrecking cranes. The only reason you don't see it as trash is that you still use it. When you don't need a building anymore, or it is too expensive to fix, then it is trash. To us it looks like trash all the time.

“If Fatback lives in my car, is it trash? To you it is because it isn't being used the way you want it to be. If a car is new and shiny and goes down the road, then you say it isn't trash. If it is old and can't go, then it is trash. It really isn't any different on the earth whether it moves or not. You just think it is. When it comes time for the earth to take it back, it is going to be just as much trash as the car sitting in my yard.”

“Still, it wouldn't take anything to clean it up.”

“Maybe we're still using it. That was the Indian way. Use every part of the buffalo. Make ropes from its hair. Make drumsticks from its tail. Some of these people are making one car out of a lot of them. I'm making a dog house out of mine.”

This was the closest I had ever come to a confrontation with Dan. Usually, I had just acceded to his point of view. This time I wanted to challenge him to see where it would lead.

“Junk cars aren't buffalo carcasses.”

“Same thing.”

“That's bullshit.”

“Bullshit!” he exploded. “I'll tell you what is bullshit! White people's attitude toward possessions is bullshit!”

“Okay,” I said, “tell me.”

He shifted himself in the truck seat so he was squinting right over at me. “Owning things is what white people's lives are about. I watch TV, and every ad I see tells me something is ‘new'. That means I should get it because what I have is old and
this is new. That's no reason to get something, just because it's new. Your way teaches people to want, want, want. What you have is no good. What you don't have is new and better.

“From the first you are told, ‘This is mine, this is yours'; ‘Don't touch that, it doesn't belong to you.' You are taught to keep away from things because of ownership, not because of respect. In the old days we never had locks on our doors. There was no stealing, but if someone was hungry, they could go in your house and get food. That was all. Why didn't people take things? Because of respect.

“You build fences around your yards and pay money for people to measure the ground to tell you if your neighbor's fence is one inch too close to your house. You give nothing away unless you can get something in return. Everything is economic.

“Your most powerful people don't even hide their thinking on this. If you ask for something, they don't ask whether you need it; they say, ‘What's in it for me?'”

“I'm afraid that's America, Dan,” I said.

He hammered the air with his gnarled fist.

“I know it. And a lot of our people have started to act like that, too. Not all, but enough. This kills the old Indian way, where everything was shared. We believed that everything was a gift, and that a good man or woman shared those gifts. Next to bravery, generosity was the most important.

“Now we have been turned around. We think that good people should be rewarded, just like the white man thinks. Can't you see how much better it was when good people thought they should give, not that they should get?

“We didn't measure people by rich or poor. We didn't know how. When times were good everyone was rich. When times were bad everyone was poor. We measured people by how they shared.”