Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn

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       “Let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make for our children.”

      — Sitting Bull

      It was on a motorcycle ride, several years before this book was even an idea in my mind, that the seed for it was actually planted.

      I was traveling across North Dakota. The August sun was unbearably hot and the land rolled on endlessly before me. As I came over a rise I saw in the distance a forlorn wooden structure with three enclosed sides and a low-pitched roof. At first I thought it was a farmer’s abandoned fruit stand or a life-sized crèche placed on the roadside by some fundamentalist religious group. But as I got closer I realized that it was a shelter for some kind of historical marker.

      I pulled to a stop and walked across the simmering highway toward the enclosure. As I approached, I could see that it contained a large, irregular boulder enclosed in a fence. A plaque nearby explained that this was a buffalo rock of the sort that the Lakota Indians held sacred.

      The plaque was fine — very informative — and at great pains to be respectful of the Lakota tradition. If you looked closely, it said, you could see the chippings and markings where the anonymous craftsman generations before had tried to coax a more recognizable form from the rock.

      I read the words carefully and then turned toward the boulder itself. Though I could not examine it minutely because of the fence, I could see a few of the chip marks from the ancient craftsman who had tried to enhance its shape. It did, indeed, look like a buffalo. It was easy to see how the Lakota had come to value this rock and invest it with spiritual significance.

      At another time, earlier in my life, I might have catalogued the information somewhere in my memory and gone happily on my way, satisfied that I had seen something interesting and pleased that I had learned a little more about Indian culture.

      But my eyes have changed. I have had the good fortune to have lived and worked among Indian people. I have sat at their tables, talked with them about their children, played basketball with them in the chill of mission school gyms, helped them bury their dead. I have seen how they love each other and fight each other and chide each other and respect each other. I have been part of their lives.

      Because of this, I saw something else in that sweltering roadside enclosure. I saw a piece of the earth — a huge and silent rock — enclosed in a pen like an animal. I saw the living belief of a people reduced to a placard and made into a roadside curiosity designed for the intellectual consumption of a well-meaning American public. In short, I saw one of the most poignant metaphors for the plight of the Indian people that I am likely to confront in my entire life: the spirit of the land, the spirit of a people, named, framed, and incarcerated inside a fence.

      And I wasn’t the only one who had seen something more than a history lesson in that roadside enclosure. On the top of the rock, insignificant to anyone who didn’t understand, some previous passerby had placed a few broken cigarettes. In an act as simple and caring as a Catholic’s genuflection before the Blessed Sacrament, that person had placed the sacred gift of tobacco on the rude image of the buffalo, and in so doing had paid homage to the animal that is the physical embodiment of the universe in all its bounty for the Lakota people. And more than that, he or she had paid homage to Wakan Tanka, the Creator, whose immutability and eternal steadfastness is seen as incarnated in the character of every stone.

      To that anonymous passerby that rock was not an artifact; it was not even a metaphor. It was a living, spiritual presence. And nothing that the highway department or the historical society or a thousand well-intended anthropologists could do or say with their plaques and enclosures would ever hallow that stone as much as that simple gift of tobacco laid by an unknown hand.

      At that moment, as I stood there in the searing August heat on a lonely stretch of North Dakota highway, I made a solemn and private vow. Though I could never experience the sacred presence of the land in the way that it was experienced by the Indian people, neither could I ever again look at the lives and works of my Indian brothers and sisters as object lessons for my education and edification. I had a human obligation to try to bridge the gap between the world into which I had been born and the world of a people I had grown to know and love.

      Neither Wolf nor Dog is my attempt to fulfill that obligation.

      I realize that there will be a great many Indian readers who will be skeptical about my decision to undertake this task. You have seen your people misinterpreted, misrepresented, and unconscionably exploited by white writers of both good and bad heart.

      To you, my friends, who feel this way, I can say only that you should judge me by what I do.

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