Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder (Canons)

by Kent Nerburn

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?”

“We are weak,” Dan said. “We are weak for alcohol. Just like white people are weak for owning things.” He turned to me. “But those weaknesses are gifts, Nerburn. They are gifts, just like our strengths are gifts. Weaknesses make us strong, because they make us stand up to ourselves.”

When your life isn’t going right, you blame your parents or your work or something else. You talk about being burned out. You spend all kinds of money to have psychiatrists tell you why you aren’t responsible for your life.

I don’t want to be weak. I want to be strong, like my grandfathers. My own father used to walk to the river every morning in the winter and cut a hole in the ice to get water. It didn’t matter that it was forty below zero. He just did what he had to. It made him strong.

“Now our people are being taught that we were victims of society because at the same time white people had running water. So what? Before you came here we didn’t have running water. We still went to the river at forty below and got water. We never thought of ourselves as victims.

“Think of that Thoreau fellow. I’ve read some of his books. He went out and lived in a shack and looked at a pond. Now he’s one of your heroes. If I go out and live in a shack and look at a pond, pretty soon I’ll have so many damn social workers beating on my door that I won’t be able to sleep. “They’ll start scribbling in some damn notebook: ‘No initiative. No self-esteem.’

“You want to know how to be like Indians? Live close to the earth. Get rid of some of your things. Help each other. Talk to the Creator. Be quiet more. Listen to the earth instead of building things on it all the time. “Don’t blame other people for your troubles and don’t try to make people into something they’re not.”

“I remember the speech. It was one of those I learned when I was young. I learned it in English, too. It went like this. ‘I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen were worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog.’”

“That’s what happened to us. We listened to the white man. Now we’re neither wolf nor dog. Sitting Bull was right.”

I kept my counsel. I kept reminding myself of the advice one of my dear friends had given to his jabbering ten-year-old daughter: “Just because it comes into your mind doesn’t mean you have to say it.”

“How can a calendar tell us how long a person is a leader? That’s crazy. A leader is a leader as long as the people believe in him and as long as he is the best person to lead us. You can only lead as long as the people will follow.

Good leaders wait to be called and they give up their power when they are no longer needed. Selfish men and fools put themselves first and keep their power until someone throws them out. It is no good to have a way where selfish men and fools fight with each other to be leaders, while the good ones watch.

“This isn’t good history. It isn’t Indian history. It’s like studying all the parts of the body and then saying you understand about life. It is just facts.

“If you asked us when something happened, we might tell you it was in the year when all the buffalo froze. Then you’d get mad and ask us, when was that? So maybe we’d tell you it was the year the stars fell. That’s how we kept track of years. “But that wouldn’t be a good enough answer for you. You would want to know what year it was by a number. As if it made any difference to know a number of a year. You got mad when we couldn’t give you a day with a number on it and said we didn’t remember.

“There is too much to know everything. We Indians just tried to know the important things, so we could live better and understand.

“I will tell it to you one more way. If you hear a song, is it real? Or is it only real once somebody writes it down?

“I will tell you one last thing,” he spoke up. Once more, it was as if he were hearing a voice, and passing along what it said. “It is why you wasichu are in trouble. For you nothing is wakan. You have taken the power out of the Earth and the sky and the things that live there. Everything is a fact. You will drown under your facts.”

His was a world in which every action, every movement, had meaning. My ignorance of those meanings felt like naivete. I was better served by silence.

“I think this is hard for you to understand. But our old people were our best people. Nowadays, the world is all for the young people. It wasn’t that way for us. We were taught that the old people and the babies were the closest to God and it was for them that we all lived. They were the most helpless and they needed us the most.

For that, and the hunger to own a piece of the earth, we had destroyed the dreams and families of an entire race, leaving them homeless, faithless, and with nothing but the ashes of a once graceful and balanced way of life. And now we had the arrogance to claim to “rediscover” them and to appropriate the very spiritual truths we had tried to destroy, in order to fill the void of our own spiritual bankruptcy.

“They say that perhaps it is not by love, but by blood, that land is bought. They say that perhaps my people had to die to nourish this earth with their truth. Your people did not have ears to hear. Perhaps we had to return to the earth, so that we could grow within your hearts. Perhaps we have come back and will fill the hills and valleys with our song. Who is to know?

“There is no more time for fighting. Our anger must be buried. If I cannot bury mine, it will be for my children to bury theirs. And if they cannot bury theirs, it will be for their children, or their children’s children. We are prisoners of our hearts, and only time will free us.

“Your people must learn to give up their arrogance. They are not the only ones placed on this earth. Theirs is not the only way. People have worshiped the Creator and loved their families in many ways in all places. Your people must learn to honor this.

“It is your gift to have material power. You have much strength not given to other people. Can you share it, or can you use it only to get more? That is your challenge — to find the way to share...