in Indian themes because they are popular, nor a blue-eyed wannabe who has miraculously discovered a Cherokee grandmother somewhere in my distant past. And, most of all, I believe you will see that I am not one of that most pernicious breed of white writer who claims to have met some wisdom-bearing elder who has unaccountably decided to share his or her innermost cultural secrets and teachings with me.
No, if I have done my task well, I believe you will see that I am simply a person of honest heart who has had the good fortune to know and value Indian people, and who has happened upon the opportunity to create a book that can give voice to the thoughts and feelings of a very special man. This opportunity is, to me, a gift, and I take it seriously.
Dan, whose story I tell and thoughts I reveal, has sworn me to secrecy. “Cover my tracks like I am being hunted,” he told me. I have done so, changing what needed to be changed, obscuring what needed to be obscured. But his words are as true and as honest as I can make them. If there is good in what he says, it belongs to him; if there is error in the way it is presented, that belongs to me. I have done my best, with honor and humility, and I offer it as my gift to you.
And to you, my white readers, I say read with an open mind and heart. The land you walk upon, whether it be city streets, country lanes, or suburban cul-de-sacs, is Indian land. There are echoes beneath your feet that are there to be heard if you are willing to still your mind and listen to your heart.
But those echoes are not to be found in the myths and false images upon which we have been raised. The drunken Indian, the vicious savage, the noble wiseman, and the silent earth-mother are all products of our historical imagination. We do the Indian people no honor by dehumanizing them into such neat and simple packages.
The real Indian people laugh, cry, make mistakes, honor their creator, get angry, go to stores, raise children, and dream all the same dreams as you or I. And it is in the real Indian people, not in the myths and images, that the true voices of our land can be heard.
Dan is such a person. He will not fit your images. He is like the buffalo rock — rough-hewn, elemental, and born of the earth. But, like the buffalo rock, he is also possessed of a deep spirituality for those who have the eyes to see.
Listen to him. Learn from him. Come along on our journey and share our story. You will learn as I have learned, and you will be the better for it.
In the last analysis, we must all, Indian and non-Indian, come together. This earth is our mother, this land is our shared heritage. Our histories and fates are intertwined, no matter where our ancestors were born and how they interacted with each other.
Neither Wolf nor Dog is one small effort to help this coming together. It is not an attempt to build a fence around a man and his people, but to honor them with the gift of my words. I have done my best, and I place this book before you, like the tobacco before the buffalo rock, as a simple offering.
May you receive it in the spirit with which it is offered.
Kent Nerburn
Bemidji, Minnesota
Spring 1994
CHAPTER ONE
AN OLD MAN’S REQUEST
I got to the phone on the second ring. I could hear the scratchy connection even before the voice spoke.
“Is this Nerburn?”
It was a woman. I recognized the clipped tones of an Indian accent.
“Yes,” I responded.
“You don’t know me,” she continued, without even giving a name. “My grandpa wants to talk to you. He saw those ‘Red Road’ books you did.”
I felt a tightening in my chest. Several years before I had worked with students on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation collecting the memories of the students’ parents and grandparents. The two books that had resulted, To Walk the Red Road and We Choose to Remember, had gained some notoriety in the Indian community across North America. Most of the Indians had loved them for the history they had captured. But some found old wounds opened, or familial feuds rekindled.
Occasionally, I would receive phone calls from people who wanted to challenge something we had written or to set the record straight on something their grandfather or grandmother was supposed to have said.
“Sure,” I answered. “Let me talk to him.”
“He doesn’t like to talk on the phone,” the woman said.
I had grown accustomed to Indian reticence about talking to white people, and I knew there were still a few of the very traditional elders who didn’t like to use the telephone or have their picture taken.
“Is he upset?” I ventured.
“He just wants to talk to you.”
My nervousness was growing. “Where is he?”
She told me the name of a reservation. It was a long way from my home.
“What does he want?”
“Could you come and see him?”
The request took me aback. It was a strange request on any terms, coming as it did from someone I didn’t even know. But the distance involved made it even stranger.
“I guess it’s important for me to know if he’s angry,” I said.
The woman betrayed no emotion. “He’s not angry. He just saw those books and he wants to talk to you.”
I rubbed my eyes and thought of the travel. When I had left the oral history project I had made a silent promise that I would keep using such skills as I had for the good of the Indian people. I had never enjoyed a people so much and had never found such a joyful sense of humor and lack of pretension. But more than that, I had felt a sense of peace and simplicity among the Indians that transcended the stereotypes of either drunkenness or wisdom. They were simply the most grounded people I had ever met, in both the good and bad senses of that word. They were different from white people, different from black people, different from the images that I had been taught, different from anything I had ever encountered. I felt happy among them, and I felt honored to be there.
Sometimes I would stand on the land in Red Lake and think to myself, “This land has never been owned by the United States. This land has never been touched by the movement of European civilization.” It was as if I were feeling a direct link to something elemental, something beneath the flow of history, and it was powerful beyond imagining. Though I was a white man, and all too aware of the effects of well-intentioned white people on the well-being of the Indian people, I wanted, from within my world, to help them retain the goodness in theirs.
Now, a voice had come to me from a place far away, asking me to come back to that world and hear what an old man had to say.
“I’ll come,” I said, half hating myself for my hesitancy, half hating myself for agreeing at all. “It won’t be right away, though.”
“He’s pretty old,” she responded.
“Soon,” I said.
