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 they are helping us by making us act like white people.”
“Grandpa,” Wenonah interjected.
The old man shook his head. “No. Let me finish. I’m almost done.
“Think about this. Do you ever hear white people saying that they are part black or part Mexican? Hell, no. But the world is full of people who say they are part Indian. Usually they’ll say it was their grandmother or their great grandmother. It’s never a grandfather. You wouldn’t want an Indian man in your background. He might have had a tomahawk or something. You want some old blanket Indian woman who taught your family wise ways. And they’re never a Potawatami or a Chiracahua or a Tlingit — usually it’s a Cherokee. Something about the Cherokees is more romantic. I bet I’ve met a hundred white people who say they had a Cherokee grandmother. And you know what? They believe it! They want it to be true so much that they make themselves believe it.
“Mostly they leave it at that. But some of them don’t. They grow their hair in braids and go to some powwows. Maybe take a class from some phony medicine man, and presto! we’ve got a new Indian. Pretty soon they’re spouting Indian philosophy and twisting up the idea of the Indian even further.
“I tell you, Nerburn, being an Indian isn’t easy. For a lot of years America just wanted to destroy us. Now, all of a sudden, we’re the only group people are trying to get into. Why do you think this is?”
I told him I didn’t know.
“I think it’s because the white people know we had something that was real, that we lived the way the Creator meant people to live on this land. They want that. They know that the white people are messing up. If they say they are part Indian, it’s like being part of what we have.”
Wenonah had been hovering around the outside of the conversation. She had been watching the old man carefully, monitoring his anger and his exertion like a nurse watching a patient. It was clear that she loved him dearly. I let her take the lead in how to proceed.
Soon she walked over behind him and put her arms around his neck. She nestled her head against his and spoke softly into his ear. “That’s enough, Grandpa. That’s enough.”
The old man nodded. He slumped back in his stiff wooden chair. An impassive look settled over his face. Wenonah took the National Geographic off the table and returned it to the bedroom. From the half darkness of the back room I could see her looking at me. She raised her hand to her lips, as if to say, “He’s had enough.”
The old man’s exhaustion was palpable. He seemed to be turning to stone before my eyes. His stare did not vary and he didn’t move a muscle. It was as if he had gone inside to a place of tears and memory.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said. Wenonah nodded, obviously pleased that I had understood her message. I took one last look at the old man as I pushed open the screen door. Wenonah was standing behind him, stroking his hair with the side of her hand and humming softly like a mother hums to a child.
CHAPTER FIVE
A LAND OF DREAMS AND PHANTASMS
It had been several weeks since I arrived on the reservation. The weather was starting to take a slight autumn turn. Great roiling cumulus clouds rolled like tumbrels across the sky. The light seemed filtered, the ground animals more industrious.
As a child of the woodlands, I had never had much of a sense for the plains and the prairies. But now, as the days passed, the hypnotic power of the land had overtaken me. I felt like a man on an inland sea. The billowing, waving prairie grasses were symphonic in their ebbs and swells; the marching cadences of the passing clouds transfixed the eye. Sound was magnified, as if echoing against some vast,