Neither Wolf nor Dog (33 page)

“It's the same about kids,” he went on. “If a white person marries someone who's not white, and they have children, it's okay if the kids are raised like white people, at least while the kids are still small. But if they're raised as Indians or blacks or something else, you say, ‘Oh, that poor kid. He doesn't really belong anywhere.'”

“Well, if that kid has an Indian parent, they belong with us. We believe that. We don't give them any tests or put them in groups according to how much Indian blood they have in them.

“Admit it. If little Eugene was with white people you would think it's more okay than him living with Indians. Admit it.” He was proud of his reasoning. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “But if that little fellow went back to live with white people, other kids would call him Tonto and half-breed and would make war whoops when he went by. That's the damn truth.”

“The kid was talking to me,” I said simply. “That's all there was to it.”

“Tell that to April,” he answered, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a piece of lined paper that had been torn from a school notebook and handed it to me. On it was a meticulously rendered child's drawing of four people. There was a big round figure outlined in pink with a scrawly beard, standing next to a smaller round figure with yellow curlicues hanging
from its head. The two were facing forward and had water-melon smiles, large circle eyes with dots in them, and stick arms that ended in bird-foot hands. Next to them, with a slight separation in between, were two other round figures, smaller, one with legs and one with a triangle dress. The one with a dress had a silver coin in her bird hand. Her face, like that of the figure next to her, was colored in a dark brown. Both had little dots like raisins for eyes. Neither had a mouth.

On the bottom was scrawled, in careful Catholic-school hand, “For mister kent. from April. Thanks. Bye.”

I flushed a bit as I stared at it. “It's okay, Nerburn,” Dan said. “You gave her a quarter.”

W
e drove onward into a darkening sky. Signs began appearing along the side of the roadway. Most touted some desperately conceived attraction or artificial reason for a traveler to stop: “Live Bears.” “Reptiles.” “World's Largest Car Collection.” “See Elvis' Motorcycle.” “Shortest Route to the Black Hills.”

Others demanded that we renounce abortion or make a commitment to Jesus.

Grover took great pleasure in reading their messages out loud as we passed. He was a town crier at work, making no commentary, but merely repeating what was before him.

Occasionally he would chuckle if one struck his fancy, though there was no apparent logic in his choices.

Dan, as usual, was smoking cigarette after cigarette. Whatever anger and agitation had gripped him as we left Annie's house seemed to have dissipated. I wasn't sure whether it had just been my perception or whether he had actually been feeling anguish about his son, but he had a less wistful, more analytical air about him now. He was watching the passing landscape with a renewed interest.

Approaching cars now had their lights on. Far up on a hill some rancher had erected a cross. It stood in whitewashed nakedness against the grey backdrop of the impending storm.

“The land of Jesus,” I said, idly.

“The land of
Wakan Tanka
, ” Dan corrected.

“A land of faith, at any rate,” I said, trying to embrace all possibilities.

“Yep. It'll do that to you.”

The heat was stifling and foreboding. Dan was relaxed in his seat with one arm draped out the window. His old plaid shirt flapped around his elbow.

“What do you think of Jesus, Nerburn?” he asked.

It was a question I did not want to touch. I said nothing.

“I mean, do you think he is alive today?”

“Like the Second Coming?”

“That might have already happened,” Dan said slyly. “I mean, is his spirit alive?”

I started to launch into some academic dodge. Dan stopped me.

“No, I don't want to hear that. I got you figured already. It's that rancher I want to know about. The one who put up that cross. What does he think?”

I cast about for an answer. Grover broke in to read us some billboard about Mount Rushmore.

“That's what I mean,” Dan said. I hadn't a clue what he was talking about.

“Those presidents. I've thought about this a lot. Let's take those two guys.”

“What two guys?”

“The two guys I'm talking about. Jesus and Abraham Lincoln.”

I thought perhaps he had lost all grip on reality. “You're not talking about them, Dan. You must be thinking about them. I think the heat's got you.”

He pushed on, undeterred. “Those missionaries come around the reservation. Three, four ladies in a car, all dressed up. They come out and try to talk to you about Jesus. Now, Jesus has been dead for a lot of years. Why do they come and try to talk to us about Jesus?”

He was on the trail again. All I could do was go along. At least the ghost of his son did not hang over this conversation. “Because they believe if you believe in him he will be alive in your heart and you will be saved,” I said.

“Right!” Dan was excited. “Now, why don't they get all dressed up and come and talk to us about Abraham Lincoln?”

The image was so bizarre that I didn't even hazard an answer.

“It's because Abraham Lincoln is dead. But, now, Jesus is dead, too. But he can come alive if you bring him into your heart. That's what they always say. Here's the question: Why can't Abraham Lincoln come alive if you bring him into your heart?”

I felt like a contestant on a surreal quiz show. “I don't know.”

Dan was triumphant. “It's because Abraham Lincoln was part of white man history.”

“And Jesus wasn't?”

“No. He's part of a different kind of history. The kind Indian people understand. Where things have power because
they are
wakan.
That's why so many Indian people believe in him.”

For all its fragmented logic, there was something significant percolating in Dan's mind. I sat up and took interest.

“Good,” he said. “You've decided to listen. I was getting ready to give up on you.”

“I'm all ears.” I switched on the recorder and settled myself into a comfortable position against the sweaty green vinyl. Fatback chuffed at being disturbed, but quickly settled back to sleep.

“Now. Your Abraham Lincoln kind of history, the kind you teach in schools, is not good for Indian people. It is a funny kind of history, where the most important thing is what happened. You want to know everything about what happened, like how many people were somewhere, what they wore, what they were thinking. That's all-important to you. The more you know, the more history you think you have.

“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.

“This has really hurt the Indian people. You had a bad kind of history, then you got that bad history all wrong.”

“What do you mean, we got it wrong?” I interjected. I wanted to make sure I was following him.

He breathed a deep sigh of resignation. “Am I talking or are you? I thought you wanted to learn something.”

“Sorry.”

He shook a crooked finger at me. “That's why we always beat you white guys in a fair fight! You only know how to go in a straight line. We knew how to move around and come in on you from all sides. Now, just be quiet and listen.”

Grover slapped the steering wheel in pleasure.

Dan continued. He was his old, cantankerous, exuberant self.

“Look at what your way did to our people. When you came among us you didn't care what was alive in our hearts. You wanted to know 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.

“So you made our history from the things your people could remember. And all you remembered were the things the traders wrote down, or the things the missionaries wrote down, or the soldiers. When we fought with you, you wrote down what weapons we used and how many people got killed.

“If you could find some Indian who would work for you, you made him a chief so he could sign papers giving away our land, then you wrote down what he said. If he didn't say anything, you wrote down something for him and had him sign it, then that was the history.

“Do you see what this did? Think about it. The traders wrote down numbers about how many furs they got. Maybe they wrote something about what the Indians lived like. The missionaries wrote down why we weren't civilized and maybe about our ceremonies, and how strange they seemed. The people who fought us wrote down whatever they wanted in order to make themselves look good.

“Do you think they wrote, ‘The Indians had a better battle plan and were better fighters'? Do you think they wrote, ‘We killed a lot of babies today'? I don't think so.

“And those false chiefs, you wrote whatever you wanted to
make those false chiefs seem like our leaders. And they would say anything you wanted because then you would give them houses and money. You even had them sign things they couldn't even read, and because it was written down, you said it was true, even though there wasn't an Indian in the world who knew what it said.

“Then later, when you tried to divide our land up and give us little pieces, you tried to make us have last names and marriage certificates, like we were white people. You wrote it all down. Some of our people thought it was so stupid they would give you different names every time they talked to you. So you got everything confused and wrong.

“By the end, everything was wrong and a lie. But it was all written down, so you said it was true and you taught it to your children like it was true.

“That's what your white history did for us.”

He sucked triumphantly on his cigarette. The signs for Mount Rushmore, with their bad line drawings of the four presidents' heads, were becoming more frequent. They looked absurd and miniature against the looming dark of the western sky. I thought he was finished. But he exhaled hard, expelling a long stream of smoke, and began again.

“But it did something worse, too. It took away all of our history from before the time you came here to our country. It's like before you came here, we didn't exist. You won't believe anything we tell you unless you can dig up some pot or an arrowhead. Then you put it in a lot of machines and put chemicals on it so you can know when it was made, and then you say, ‘Now we know about it. Now we know what happened.' Then the man who did the tests writes down what he found out and other people write down what they think about what he found out, and you call that history.

“I can come to you and tell you what my grandfathers told
me, and that's not history unless the chemicals told you the same things. I can even tell you about power, like
wipoye
, the medicine bag, or how one becomes a double woman — but I wouldn't — and you would just say that is a story.

“See, none of what we know is history to you. Our sacred stories are just legends to you. The powers we were given by our ancestors you think are superstitions. The responsibilities, too. None of that is real in your history.

“All it really means is there wasn't anyone with a book writing things down. It doesn't matter that when your people came with books and wrote things down, they wrote lies. All that is important to you is that they wrote something down. Once it was down then it was truth. Then there was history. The elders used to say, ‘
Wasichu
builds his house on lies.' That's what they meant.”

I couldn't suppress a smile. Dan looked at me and twinkled, his milky white eye glinting in the halflight. A little, low “heh, heh” came like thunder from deep in his chest. He knew he had me.

“This is where Jesus comes in. When they made me go to church and learn about Jesus, nobody asked what year it was. Here he was, the most important person, and nobody wanted to know what year it was when things happened to him. It was just ‘when Jesus was alive.' What was important was what happened.

“Like, I was taught that when he was killed there was a big earthquake.”

“Yes,” I interjected, looking out at the gloaming sky, “A great darkness came over the land.”

Dan was in no mood for cleverness. “It was killing him that made it happen. Nobody ever asked how many people were killed in this earthquake, or how many people were standing around when Jesus died. No one needed to know what year it was. That wasn't important. What was important was that an earthquake happened when Jesus died.