CHAPTER FOUR
ONE WILY OLD INDIAN
I didn’t bring up the subject of our conversation for a few days. I figured that the old man would say more when the time was right. But I knew now that Grover had been right. The old man had an orator’s eloquence that could never be captured by piecing together notes from a shoe box. I needed to stay with him, live with him, follow him, and listen. It was my pen and my tape recorder that were going to be my most precious assets.
Dan really did live his life like Fatback. He got up when he wanted, lay down when he wanted, spoke when he wanted, stayed silent when he wanted. Unlike white people, he never explained his actions, or announced when he was going to do something, no matter how abrupt it might seem. I might be sitting and speaking with him, and he would suddenly stand up and go into his bed. Or he might stop in the middle of a sentence and start watching the television, which droned perpetually from the corner of his living room. Sometimes there were reasons. Other times it made no sense that I could understand. He was responding to some inner promptings that were not mine to know.
The days passed in this relaxed and enigmatic way. Little of purpose was actually accomplished. We mostly spent the time driving around in my truck and sitting in his kitchen or on his porch.
I became increasingly aware of how old and fragile he really was. It was as if he had etched a strength into his body over the years, and he now could call upon it when he needed it to act. But the effort was great, and there were times when he would just sink into a reverie and then gradually slide into a fitful sleep. If I happened to speak he would open his eyes and answer, but I could see that I was calling him back from some faraway place. So I soon learned to occupy myself in silence while he slept.
One time Wenonah drove up while I was sitting there waiting for the old man to awake. She gestured me to her car. “You don’t have to sit there and wait for him, Nerburn,” she said. “He won’t mind if you go.”
“It feels disrespectful to me to leave when he falls asleep,” I answered.
“Don’t worry about it. That’s the Indian way. When you are here, you are here. When you are gone, you are gone. It isn’t a problem to be gone, so long as you are really here when you’re here.”
“That’s a nice Zen sentiment,” I offered.
She just smiled and shrugged. “He likes you. That means you can do what you want to. He will respect it.”
“I’d rather sit and wait. I’d feel better.”
She smiled and walked up the steps. “I’ve got to cook him some dinner.”
As soon as the screen door slammed, the old man was awake and alert. “Been waiting for you,” he said.
“You’re one wily old Indian, Grandpa,” she retorted. He responded with something in his own tongue and the two of them broke into gales of laughter.
The old man saw me still sitting on the stoop. He called me in. “You’re getting to be like Fatback, Nerburn. That’s how she started, just hanging around.”
“Maybe you should start sleeping under the car,” Wenonah said. “It’s cheaper than that motel.”
The two of them laughed again. Dan seemed wide awake and in a good mood, so I ventured a question: “Do you mind being called an Indian, Dan?” It seemed appropriate, since his granddaughter had just referred to him as an Indian, and it was a question that always lurked just below the surface when I was involved in conversations with Indian people.
“What the hell else would you call me?”
“Oh, Native American. I don’t know. Something. Anything other than Indian.”
The old man took a deep breath, as if he had explained this many times before.
“It doesn’t bother me. It bothers a lot of our people, though. They don’t like that the name we have was a mistake. Just because Columbus didn’t know where he was, we have to be called Indians because he thought he had found the East Indies. They think it takes away our pride and our identity.”
“That seems like a fair sentiment to me,” I said. The old man waved his hand in front of his face to silence me.
“I guess I don’t mind because we have taken the name and made it our own. We still have our own names in our own languages. Usually that name means ‘first people,’ but no one would ever call us that. So we let people call us ‘Indians.’
“Does that tell you something about us?”
I wasn’t sure what he was driving at. “It tells me you are willing to accept a certain level of injustice.”
He 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