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PREFACE

Over the years, Neither Wolf nor Dog has taken on a life I never anticipated. It has been handed from prisoner to prisoner in some of America’s toughest penitentiaries. It has helped Indian and white school children from places as diverse as South Dakota, Seattle, and the high New Mexico desert to begin talking, for the first time, about their similarities and differences. It has had Maoris in New Zealand passing copies to their white friends and compatriots, saying that this book would help them understand how the Maoris feel about the loss of their native land. And it has had Roman Catholic missionary priests in South America asking me if I would consider writing the same kind of book for the tribes with whom they lived and worked. It has even changed the course of the Missouri River by opening the eyes of an official of the Army Corps of Engineers who, after reading the book, used his authority to modify a damming and diversion project that was under his direction.

All these stories, and hundreds of others, have amazed and heartened me. But, of all the stories, one has touched me most deeply. It was told by an Ojibwe man who stopped at my house here in northern Minnesota to look at some old scaffolding I was selling. After discussing people we knew in common on the reservation, I gave him a copy of Neither Wolf nor Dog. I was a bit embarrassed, because the gesture seemed too self-promotional and self-congratulatory. But something told me that it was the right thing to do.

A few weeks later I got a call from the man. His words were fumbling; I could tell that the phone call was difficult for him. “I’m the guy you gave that book to,” he said. “I just want to thank you.”

I told him that no thanks were necessary.

“No,” he said, “I got to do this. See, I’ve been sad my whole life. Ever since I was a little kid, people always said to me, ‘Why are you so sad?’ They’d see me outside playing and I’d be sad. They’d see me sitting in a chair and I’d be sad. My own little kids, even they ask me why I’m so sad. But I couldn’t tell them. I was just sad. Then I read that book you gave me and for the first time I knew why I was sad. I sat at the table one day and just started talking to my family. I talked more than I ever talked. I just kept talking until I talked all the sadness out of me. Now I’m not sad any more and my family isn’t sad. I want you to know what you did. You are my brother and I want to thank you.”

I hung up the phone with tears in my eyes. No writer has ever received a greater gift than I did at that moment. One of my literary children had healed the heart of a wounded man and freed him from his isolation, giving him back to his family, and giving his family back to him.

This is the kind of moment that makes me so thrilled to see Neither Wolf nor Dog released in a new edition. Now this unique and surprising book will have a chance to touch more people and work its magic in new and unexpected places.

I often ask myself why this book has the enduring capacity to create such magic. After all, I never intended it to be more than an honest homage to the deep and earthborn wisdom of the Native people I have known. The answer, I believe, has something to do with memory and honesty.

I have never met an Indian person who didn’t somewhere deep inside struggle with anger and sadness at what has happened to their people, and I have never met an honest and aware non-Indian person in America who didn’t somewhere deep inside struggle with guilt about what we as a culture have done to the people who inhabited this continent before us. We can like each other, hate each other, feel pity for each other, love each other. But always, somewhere beneath the surface of our personal encounters, this cultural memory is rumbling. A tragedy has taken place on our land, and even though it did not take place on our watch, we are its inheritors, and the earth remembers.

The small miracle of Neither Wolf nor Dog is that it carries this memory in the fabric of its narrative. The all-too-human characters who appear on its pages each struggle, in their own particular ways, to deal with that memory. They are inheritors of something that whispers in the wind and echoes from the land, and nothing they as individuals can do will silence these voices that rise up around them. Yet they search, for common meaning, common understanding, and common redemption. And, because they search, it does not matter that they are on opposite sides of a cultural chasm filled with tears and guilt and broken promises and dreams. They struggle together to reach across to each other, and, finally, they become more than friends — they become brothers and sisters.

This, I believe, is the key to the enduring relevance of Neither Wolf nor Dog. It is a call to each of us to become brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters don’t have to understand each other; they don’t even have to like each other. But they have to trust each other and stand by each other. That’s what Dan and Grover and I, as well as Danelle and Jumbo and Wenonah and all the others learn to do in the course of this book. We stand, strong and adamant, within the confines of our own values and self-understandings, but we reach out and care for each other. They didn’t try to become white; I didn’t try to become Indian. We simply reached across the chasm of our differences and held each other in common embrace.

This is no small accomplishment, especially in the relationships of whites to Indians. Too many white people I know — good and caring people who are deeply concerned with the plight of Indian people and the tragic history of their last several centuries on this continent — try to “become” Indians or, at least, try to become one with Indian experience. They take on the trappings, they romanticize, they try to right the historical wrong through a great outpouring of empathy, or try to enhance their own identity by appropriating Indian values or belief. In the process, they distort the reality of the people about whom they care so deeply, and turn them into a reflection of their own needs.

This is exactly what Dan and Grover and all the others would never let me do. They remained resolutely and unashamedly themselves, and demanded that I do the same. Whenever I stepped across the boundary I was slapped down. They refused to let me slip into glib generalizations that would mute their individuality. I was asked to recognize their common Indianness, but was constantly reminded that this did not mean I could invest them with a common identity that would reduce them to collective objects of sympathy or pity or veneration.

Consequently, they never let me surround them with my own thinking or understanding. Every time I tried to do so, or every time I found myself doing so unconsciously, they would turn my reality on its head. They would trick me, they would test me, they would ambush me, they would enrage me. They literally and figuratively kidnapped me, and would not let me go until I paid the ransom of giving up my own way of understanding. They wanted me to realize that I had walked through Alice’s keyhole, and the world I had entered was not mine to reduce to the size and shape of my own understanding. Yet, through it all, they cared for me as I cared for them, and when we finally parted on that dusty, Dakota roadside, we parted as family, and no one could ever take that away from us.

This, I believe, is why that man who came to my house could finally speak to his wife and children. This is why Indians and whites alike have embraced this book, and why it continues to work in the many unseen and unlikely corners of the earth where it finds a home. It is a book about acknowledging differences while seeking understanding, about standing on the angers and sadnesses and broken dreams and promises that separate us, and reaching across to become brothers and sisters and part of the common human family. It is about allowing ourselves to be seen, just as that buffalo on the hillside allowed me to see him, and trusting that those who see us will honor what they see, and treat it with gentleness and respect. In short, it is about faith — in ourselves, in others, and in the common humanity that lies beneath our many differences.

Can there be any message more enduring, or any message more needed, as we try to save this fragile planet, and to move it forward from its bloody and tearstained past toward a more humane and hopeful future?

Kent Nerburn

Bemidji, Minnesota

Spring 2002