Neither Wolf nor Dog (26 page)

“Don't like Christianity much, do you?” I said.

“That's not true,” he retorted. “I like Jesus. Ever since I was a little boy and I learned about him I liked him. He was
wakan.
He should have been an Indian.”

It was a sentiment I had heard before.

“He didn't own anything,” Dan continued. “He slept outside on the earth. He moved around all the time. He shared everything he got. He even talked to the Great Spirit as his Father. He was just like an Indian.

“I loved him, Nerburn. I still love him. I still talk to him.
Those were things I learned from the priests and the sisters. They were good.

“But I don't like what the churches did to my people. When I see Indians standing in front of crosses it makes me sad. It is like they are such good people and their belief is so strong. Why can't it still be our old belief? Why was that taken away from us? The old ones shouldn't have to be begging Jesus to listen to them.”

He shifted slightly in his seat so he could see my reaction. I gave none.

“I guess it's a good thing Jesus wasn't an Indian,” he continued. “The U.S. government would have hunted him down and killed him. They would have killed him like they killed Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Just another dead Indian troublemaker.”

Dan stared out at the wide, sluggish expanse of the Missouri. I could see his reflection in the glass of the window. There was a pain in his placid expression.

“You know why Sitting Bull was camped in the hills up there?”

“No,” I answered.

“He was going to find out if the Messiah was coming. You've heard of the Ghost Dance?”

“Yes.”

“The Ghost Dance was what Sitting Bull wanted to know about. That's why he was down here, why he had left the agency up in Fort Yates. He said he wanted to ‘know that pray.' He wanted to see if it was good for his people.

“You know, the Ghost Dance was a dance about Jesus. I don't care what any white book tells you. There was a man out west — a Paiute, name of Wovoka — who said he had died and met the
Wanekia.
”

“
Wanekia?
” I said.

“Messiah,” Dan explained. “I don't know. I've heard it a
couple of ways, that maybe this Wovoka said he was the
Wanekia
, or maybe he was just a messenger to tell that the Messiah was coming. It doesn't matter. What matters is that all the people believed that the Messiah was coming again, just like the missionaries and priests had taught. Only, he was coming to the Indians this time because the white people had killed him the last time he came.

“The white books say that this Wovoka was a crazy man and that all the Indians who followed him were crazy. But let me tell you. The Indian people weren't looking for a man named Wovoka. They didn't care what his name was. They were looking for a man who they would know because of the nail holes in his hands and the spear wound in his side. Who does that sound like?”

“It sounds like Jesus,” I said, stating the obvious.

“That's right. The Indian people were looking for Jesus. Maybe he had a new name, but it was still Jesus. The people got excited because they loved Jesus and they wanted to welcome him better than when he had come to the white people.”

His voice got soft and distant. “They weren't going to kill him on a cross. They were going to give him feasts. They believed in him. They were going to honor him. That's why they were dancing. Wovoka had said that they had to dance, then they would be saved.

“Sitting Bull just wanted to know about this Messiah for himself, to find out if this dance was
wakan.

“The people were so excited. They never believed the Great Spirit had abandoned them to be starved and killed by the white people who were coming into the land. They wanted Jesus to come to help them. They were just believing like the white people had taught them.”

Dan was almost completely inside his mind by now. He stared emptily out the window.

“But the government got angry. They had killed us because we wouldn't believe in Jesus. Now they were going to kill us because we did. All the women. All the people. So full of hope. Believing what the white man said even more than the white man believed it.”

If it had been within his character to shed tears, he would have been crying.

“But it made the government angry. The Indians had hope. If you have hope you come alive again. We had all become dead in our hearts. When the government saw us coming alive again, it had to kill us. We could not have hope. If we had hope we might have dreams. We could not be allowed to have dreams.

“They called it a craze or a frenzy. That was what the papers said. But you know what? You know what is never said? A lot of the white people were scared. They thought we might be right. They believed in Jesus, too. They thought maybe Jesus was coming back and he was coming to the Indian people.

“The white people knew they were trying to get rich and weren't living like Jesus had told them. They made up excuses. When they looked at us they saw the way Jesus had said to live. We made their excuses look false.

“They were killing us and chasing us from our land just so they could get rich. In their hearts they knew what they were doing was bad. They were afraid we were right! They were afraid Jesus was coming to help us!”

Watching him was like watching a night sea swirl and change. His deep anger would rise, then subside, then emerge again somewhere else, only to be washed over by a great sorrow.

“That was our crime. We believed too much. We believed so much that the white man got scared of our belief. All we were doing was dancing. We were told that if we danced the Ghost Dance and believed, the buffalo would come back. We would see our ancestors. We would get to have our old way of life.

“Our people kept dancing. They wouldn't stop. They just got in a circle and danced until they couldn't stand. Sometimes they had visions. It was
wakan.
The spirit was very close.

“The white people were going crazy. Everything was wrong. The Indians had been broken, now our spirits were rising. We had been cut apart and put on separate lands, now we were together again in the dance. Some of the young men were getting braver. They said the Messiah would help us get back our lands. They were ready to fight.

“We were drunk this time. But it was good drunk. We were drunk on Jesus.”

He paused and inhaled deeply — a man trying to take charge of his own thoughts.

“We were making Jesus our own. We were bringing him into our hearts. What was so wrong with that? The only thing you ever gave us was Jesus, and then when we took him and made him one of us you said we couldn't have him.”

He lapsed into silence. This time it was not a quiet, peaceful silence, but a dark, slow-running silence like the turgid Missouri flowing by outside. The whole car seemed bleak. Fatback looked up with guilty eyes. Grover stared willfully at the road ahead of him.

“You won't even let us have hope,” he said finally. “There are no armies to free us. No governments to help us. We cry out and nobody hears us. We starve and nobody cares. All we have left is hope. But if you see hope you kill that, too.”

The Bible College stood off to our left. It was made up of long brick dormitory-like buildings set among stands of towering oaks and cottonwoods. It looked like an old military post. I wondered what the students inside those rooms thought about the Ghost Dance.

Dan's words were fading like the last rays of daylight. “We believed too much. We loved Jesus too much. We made him
our leader. You didn't want him to be our leader. When we went to see if he was coming back, you killed us. All the women. All the little children. So much hope. Dead. All dead.”

T
he brittle neon of bottle shops and restaurants greeted us as we made the wide turn onto the main thoroughfare through Mobridge. Twilight had overtaken the streets. Dan was morose and silent.

Grover stopped at a supermarket and disappeared into its harsh white glare. His step was stiff. He looked small and out of place — an old Indian in a cowboy shirt and cowboy boots limping his way into the packaged abundance of American culture.

“I'm going to let Fatback out,” I told Dan. He waved me off halfheartedly. His chin rested heavily on his right hand. His eyes were silent and distant.

Fatback rushed off toward the edge of the parking lot. After a few steps she squatted and urinated against the tire of a pickup truck. Two old women who were walking across the lot slowed and glowered at me.

“My mother's dog,” I said. They smiled and proceeded. Fatback stuck her nose to the ground and charged off toward some unknown destination. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dan staring blankly into the purple twilight.

I walked in the direction where Fatback had disappeared. The heavy smell of river filled my nostrils. It was fetid, rich, indolent.

Waves of longing broke over me. Crossing back over the Missouri had turned me toward home. Dan's jocularity and anger had given way to a deep weariness of spirit. Sitting there in the car with his long, stringy hair, he looked every bit the old
man, stubborn but broken, empty of dreams, devoid of hope. He was tired. We were all tired. It had been a long day.

Fatback reemerged dragging a greasy white fast food bag. “Give it up, Fatback,” I said. She skulked off with her booty and crawled under a bush at the edge of the parking lot. Through the supermarket window I could see Grover wheeling a shopping cart toward the checkout counter.

I didn't think I could go much further.

T
he hills were paper cutouts against the darkening sky as we drove back across the bridge into the growing western night. Within minutes Mobridge was just a memory. The round moon bathed the hills in silver and left the draws in purple dark. It was a landscape painted by giants.

“Got a ways to go,” Grover announced. Dan just sat in his seat and smoked.

“How far?” I asked.

“Hour or so. Maybe two.”

“Mostly roads?”

Grover laughed. “All but the last part.”

Powerpoles stood like silent crucifixes along the side of the highway. The only movement inside the car was the needle of
the speedometer making its steady arc against the ghostly numbers on the dashboard.

Dan's mood had not improved. I could see that his spirit had never returned from the bleak landscape into which it had been thrust when he talked about Sitting Bull and the Ghost Dance. I wanted to reach him in some fashion. Yet, at every turn, something stopped me. Words seemed too white; a touch seemed too familiar. Joking was not called for, and idle conversation was out of the question.

A cat's eyes glinted from the side of the road and disappeared.

I decided to approach straight on, but softly, in the only way I knew how.

“Dan?” I said.

He turned ever so slightly.

“May I talk?”

“Why not?” he answered flatly.

“I don't even know how to say this. It seems so stupid.” I was groping for words. “I hate what's happened to your people. I just hate it. I feel like we've committed a crime that can never be undone.”

“You have,” he said.

“I know. But I didn't do it. Even if my grandparents did it — if blood is on their hands — I can't undo it.”

“I know.”

“So what's the answer?”

“There isn't one,” he said simply.

“Then what's to be done?”

The smoke lingered around his head like a halo. I could hear him sucking on his cigarette as we moved through the darkness.

“I wish I knew,” he answered. “Do you see what has happened to my people? We've been torn apart. Sitting Bull fighting
with Gall over whether or not to give in to the white man. Young people joining AIM trying to become warriors again. Tribal bigwigs acting just like white bosses. Nobody knows what to do.