Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn

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СКАЧАТЬ nodded vigorously. “Sure. What if you called black people Russians or Chinamen? Do you think they’d stand for it?” He laughed at the thought. “Hell, they change what they want to be called every few years.

      “I don’t blame them, though. They’ve been called some pretty bad names. And being called by a color is almost as strange as being called by a place you never lived. But the point is that our people mostly don’t care so much about something like a name. We’re pretty easygoing about things.

      “There is something we don’t like, though. It’s when people call us Indians and then start calling sports teams and other things Indians. If we’re going to have a false name, at least let us have it and then leave it alone. Don’t start putting it on beer bottles and ice cream cartons and making it into something that embarrasses us and makes us look like fools. And don’t tell us it’s supposed to be some honor to us. We’ll decide what honors us and what doesn’t.”

      The old man was getting agitated. The subject obviously brushed against a nerve.

      “See,” he said, “this is all part of the way it has always been since the white people first came to our country. No one will leave us alone and let us be who we are. First we were told who we are, then we were told how we should be. Now we are being told how we’re supposed to take it when someone wants to define us in a certain way. No one ever asks us. No one ever listens to us when we speak. Everyone knows what they want and we’re supposed to let them think it. If we don’t agree with it, we’re called radicals or troublemakers.

      “You remember a few years ago? Some Indians decided they would rather be called Native Americans. It’s an okay name; it’s more dignified than ‘Indians.’ But it’s no more real than Indians, because to us this isn’t even America. The word America came from some Italian who came over here after Columbus. Why should we care if we’re called Native Americans when the name is from some Italian?

      “It’s like if someone took over this country now and called it, say, Greenland, and then they said that those of us who were already here are going to be called Native Greenlanders. And they said they were doing this out of respect. Would you feel respected? Would you care a whole hell of a lot if they called you that or something else?

      “That’s the way it’s been for us. It’s what we put up with every day — people calling us a bunch of names that aren’t even real and aren’t even in our language, then asking us if one name is better than another. Hell, it doesn’t even matter. If some of us want to be called Native Americans, you should call us Native Americans. If some of us want to be called Indians, you should call us Indians. I know it makes you kind of uncomfortable, not ever knowing which one is right. But I think that’s good. It reminds you of how uncomfortable it is for us — we had our identity taken from us the minute Columbus arrived in our land.”

      The old man turned toward Wenonah. “Go get that magazine with the map on it.” Wenonah went into the bedroom and came out with an old National Geographic. Dan spread it out on the table. “Look at this,” he said. It was a map of various tribal areas in North America. He tapped his finger on the Bering Strait. “That’s the problem, right there.”

      I shrugged my shoulders and gestured for him to continue. But he wanted me to respond. He tapped the map again. “Tell me, Nerburn, what is an Indian, anyway?”

      I was wary of the question. I didn’t want to anger him, but I knew I had to answer.

      “It’s one of the people who was here originally,” I said, knowing full well that wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

      “Okay. Where did we come from?”

      “A lot of people say you were part of a migration across the Bering Strait.”

      “Ha!” he spat. “See, you don’t have an answer, either. You’re afraid to say we started here, that the Creator put us here. You come out with that damn Bering Straits idea, just like this magazine.”

      “Well,” I said, “Nobody knows.”

      “What do you mean, nobody knows? We know. But nobody believes us. We know in our hearts who we are. We have the stories from our ancestors. But we can’t prove anything. If we say we are the first people, the ones who are from here, some damn archaeologist will jump up and tell us we came over through Alaska on a land bridge. They want to make sure that we’re immigrants, too. Just that we got here earlier.

      “If we say that our ancestors tell us we started here, some anthropologist will pull on his beard and tell us that is just a myth.

      “Then if we don’t even try to talk about where we came from, but just say we are part of a tribe, no one will believe us without proof. We say we have the proof in our stories, but that’s not good enough. We are told it must be written down. But the people who wrote down the tribes were all white people or Indians who worked for white people and they made all kinds of mistakes.

      “And what about the Indian people whose tribes were destroyed and don’t exist any more? Are you going to say that those people aren’t Indians because they aren’t members of a tribe that the government recognizes?

      “You see how it is? We have a false name, someone else tries to tell us about our history and says that the history we know is wrong. Then the government tries to make its own rules about who we are and who can be part of us.”

      “It’s a sad situation,” I said.

      “Sad? I’ll say it’s sad. Then there’s another thing. There were times when the government let white people move onto our land and claim it for their own. Lots of white people moved onto Indian lands and later if there were treaty payments, they said they were Indians so they could get part of the treaty payments.

      “And then there was a lot of intermarrying between our races, and sometimes there were rapes, so nobody really knows who is an Indian anymore, or even what it means.”

      Wenonah had been leaning against the sink, listening placidly. She obviously enjoyed seeing her grandfather like this. She placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of him and gave me a sideways wink. “Take it easy, Grandpa,” she said. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

      The old man waved her away. “The hell with the heart attack. These are things I need to say.”

      He turned back to me. “You’d better be getting this down.”

      I pointed at the tape recorder. He nodded his approval.

      “This can get real confusing to us, Nerburn. Real confusing. The Europeans really did exterminate us, you know. They did it with guns and they did it with laws and they did it with all kinds of censuses and regulations that confused who we were.

      “They mixed us up with white people. They took away our language. They took our kids away to schools and wouldn’t let them learn about the old culture. They herded us onto reservations and rewarded Indians who acted just like white people. They created a generation of Indians who didn’t even know who they were.”

      He leaned over to me so close I could hear his chest wheezing. “Now, don’t get me wrong on this. But you’ve got to understand that we are still at war. It’s not like we are fighting against America or the American people, but we are still defending who we are. It’s a war to us, because if we don’t fight for who we are we will be destroyed. We’ll be destroyed by false ideas and phony Indians and all the good intentions of people who think СКАЧАТЬ