THE GIRL WHO SANG TO THE BUFFALO

george catlin

The book I have been waiting for fell into my hands less than a week ago, a book I cannot stop reading. I stop when my eyes are about to fall out, wanting to leave some to read later. But I don't want to leave too much for later. Want it all now. It pulls me to it like a powerful magnet. Close to the end now, I don't want it to end, and can't stop reading. The story speaks to me so powerfully, it puts me in a place deep inside myself, a place I like where I feel most at home in relation to the spirit within. There is so much more to our lives than history and science allow, not meaning to minimize either, I'm interested in the spirit behind the expression. The Australian Aboriginal belief said that everything happening on earth has already been dreamed. I think of it like the prophecy in the Revelation, a dream, a vision manifesting now in earth time. The vision shows how it happened in the world of spirit. Now we're seeing how those spirits manifest in the physical world of human experience. This book I'm involved in dwells in the zone of the spirit world and how it manifests in our everyday world. The book, The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo, was written by Kent Nerburn. In the front is a quotation from Shakespeare, There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. It is the third in an unintended trilogy. The first, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, and the second, The Wolf at Twilight. The first was good, the second better, this third one dwarfs the first two. I hesitate to recommend it. The first two seem like they are required reading to tap into this third in the series.

george catlin

Or so I suppose, having already read them. It could be appreciated plenty by itself. The characters continue from the books before. I call them books, though they don't seem like books. Nerburn's writing brings the characters to life. His writing makes scenery visual and the people come to life before my eyes. It's watching a movie in another language with subtitles. I'm seeing the landscapes, buildings, cars, highways and the people. I see them clearly, as in a movie in my mind's eye, and reading what they say I hear tone of voice. Nerburn's writing is clear, simple, direct and straight-forward. He is the narrator and one of the characters. His writing flows so naturally, it doesn't feel like I'm reading something important, though what comes through is important. The trilogy concerns one old Lakota man on the reservation, who was the next generation after his people, way of life, history, were swept from the earth. He endured Indian school where Christians beat, humiliated, shamed the kids, turned them against their own culture and their families, Yer gonna go to hell, and lived his life on the reservation getting along like everybody else. In his later years he saw a book Kent Nerburn had written and took him for a listener with understanding. He contacted Nerburn, called Nerburn to come see him. The old man, Dan, wanted to tell his story to Nerburn, and while telling his story, also taught Nerburn to understand what he was saying. He was neither a shaman nor a chief. He was just a man with a story living on the rez.

lakota reservation

Dan has a friend named Grover, one of the great characters in literature. He relentlessly makes Nerburn a representative of White Man, blames him for the woes of the Indians on reservations. He is dedicated to the old ways, like Dan, and lives the spirit of the forgotten culture. And there was Wenonah, Dan's daughter who takes care of Dan in his old age, a powerful, serious woman. She didn't like Nerburn being around, didn't like him learning their secrets. She and Grover kept Nerburn understanding he did not belong among them. It always came back to the old man called him to write his story, he was there to honor the old man's call, and it was their role to allow him to do what he was there to do. They were not white man friendly. And when you learn their stories, you understand. And there is Jumbo, big guy who eats and eats. He is a mechanic who fixes things like bicycles and cars. All are dedicated to keeping the old ways alive the best they're able. They live in poverty, the worst kind of poverty, enforced by federal government. Still, a hundred years after the Indians were conquered, they're kept in concentration camps the enemy. This third volume, The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo, is different from the two previous titles in which Dan invited Nerburn to come see him. This third time, Nerburn, living in Minnesota, experiences recurring dreams of an old Ojibwe woman appealing to him. He drove several hours to see her and she had died a few days before. She left a hand-written story in deerskin pouch with a younger woman to give to Nerburn concerning Dan's sister he lost in childhood to an Indian Insane Asylum in South Dakota, because she talked to birds. It becomes Nerburn's role to deliver this written message to Dan.

george catlin

sundance ceremony

Kent Nerburn's drive to the reservation, in western South Dakota, included a visit with a mystical old man in the deep woods of northern Minnesota, living in a trailer. The old man had been in Indian School with Dan's younger sister, remembered her being taken to the Indian asylum. Everywhere Nerburn went, the Indians did not like him meddling in their secrets, but he kept on, honoring the assignment he did not understand. The reader goes with him to the rez. He found Grover and Jumbo, who told him old man Dan is in his last days. They took him to see Dan, who was frail and waiting to die. The message Nerburn delivered in the deerskin pouch brought Dan to life, animated him, made him want to see the old man in the north woods of Minnesota. The old Ojibwe man wanted Dan to come see him when the first snow fell. This meant Nerburn was to go home and wait for the first snow. First snow, he drove to the rez, picked up Dan, Grover, Jumbo, a four year old girl, Zi, and Zi's parents. Before the trip, Dan explained a great deal to Nerburn, and later, on the drive to Minnesota, he explained more. The little girl, it turns out, is a reincarnation of Dan's little sister he had mourned and wondered about all his life. He needed closure on her, and Nerburn found it for him. The Indians told Nerburn he was not ready to learn about reincarnation, and evidently he was not, though had no choice but to see obvious evidence of it in the story he'd unfolded. I'm at the place near the end where they go to see the old man, Benais. He asks to see Nerburn alone. He let Nerburn know with certainty he did not like Nerburn recording him, and told him to get out, now. I have to wait til next reading to see what follows. The characters in this three-volume tale have entered my life such that they live within me like people I know who have gone on.
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kent nerburn and cat

*

 

SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT HOME

robert rauschenberg, untitled, 1954

Today I started reading in Kent Nerburn's The Wolf At Twilight again and couldn't stop, went all the way through to last page. The last half of it didn't allow me to stop anyplace, except to get up and pour a refill of green tea. It is the beautiful writing, the 90 year old Lakota man Dan, who had been damaged for life by Indian school in his childhood, like all the other kids there, was searching to find what happened to his sister after they were separated as children. He wanted to know before he died. He called on Nerburn, who had written the earlier book of Dan and his world, his friend Grover, his granddaughter, Wenona, his dog, his bare essentials way of living. It's several years later, Dan wants Nerburn to find what he can of what happened to his sister, Yellow Bird, or Sarah after Indian school. Dan wanted to know if she was living, and if so wanted to find her. The first half, Nerburn sets the scene that we're in a culture totally different from our own, different way of thinking, different way of seeing. The last half is the search. Dan gave him a postage stamp size photo from when she was little. That picture was all Nerburn had to go by, and her name.



Nerburn was the one to call. He'd promised Dan he'd do what he could to find her. The Indians around Dan didn't believe he could do it. In the meantime, Dan talks to Nerburn while the cassette recorder is recording. He told the history of the Indians being eradicated from sea to sea by the boat people. He told a bit of experience in the Indian school, the kids dying, the kids killed. The martial treatment was off the track for Indian kids. Indians didn't hit their kids. They respected their kids. They saw the kids and the old people the ones closest to the Creator. He told the story of separation from his sister. Old Dan was using a walker in this volume. Ten years before, he declined someone lending him a hand to help him out of a chair, or in awkward places. By this time, when he's 90, he allows an assist with grace. Another volume in the history of the Native people, the story of a man in the last years of his life telling the history from the side of the people living on reservations in degraded conditions. A century later, they continue to have FBI for law enforcement on the res. People kept down in poverty in concentration camps, denied basic human dignity.



When I read the last page, I didn't want it to be over. Nerburn is a subtle writer. You think he's just giving a reading of what the weather is like at a given moment. Yet it's told in a perfectly clear sentence that when you pay attention the sentence is a little haiku of poetry. Several times I read over a sentence that pushed my Awe button for its beauty as as sentence in the English language. Through the spidery branches I could see the daylight fading. These two volumes are something on the order of documentary films. I'd love to see a film made of the story, drama or documentary, either way would do, without Robert Redford, Brad Pitt or Matt Damon, please. These are more along the lines of Black Elk Speaks, a record of what a Lakota man has to say at the end of his long life. It's not mysticism. It's history.



Then I caught a whim that I wanted to see Oliver Stone's W. with director's commentary. Had an idea it would be interesting to hear Stone talk about his film, scene by scene. It was. Very interesting. It's like the one thing I would like to ask a director of a film I appreciate to do for me, take me through it scene by scene, tell me what you were doing. Who's going to do that for a schmo in the mountains? Stone may have visited people at Roaring Gap some time along the years, was in driving distance to come over to my place, put the movie in and explain for me all the way through it what he was up to. Thank you, Mr Stone. Most gracious of you. I'll be your fan forever. Can I have your autograph before you go? Since I don't see that happening before the end of my lifetime, imagine how much I anticipated seeing it with Stone's commentary. I enjoy hearing an artist talk about his work in ways that illustrate his/her thinking. Stone has always made interesting films, whether or not I like the subject. It's Oliver Stone's vision that makes me want to see more, that made me take W home.



*

KENT NERBURN'S THE WOLF AT TWILIGHT

photograph by andrea galvani

Reading in Kent Nerburn's The Wolf at Twilight, part 2 of his earlier book Neither Wolf Nor Dog. In the section I read today, Dan, the old Indian man, Lakota, told the history of the white invasion in just a few pages starting with Columbus. It parallels our history from Columbus to now, but from the other side of the us and them divide. Different words, but it's all there. Our story is from the point of view of the ones that killed the Indians, theirs from the point of view of the ones killed, whose land was taken away. "Boat people" he calls us, the ones that came over on boats, cut down trees, put up fences and placed surviving Indians on the poorest land the white people didn't want. They were told to be farmers, after nearly all others had been killed. The old boy, Dan, speaks to Nerburn naming him personally responsible for all that the old man was telling him. Dan sent him a message to come to the reservation several years after the first book about him, Neither Wolf Nor Dog. He wanted to tell Nerburn some more before he dies.

All through this second volume, Dan tore into Nerburn for attention to the clock, always in a hurry, looking at the clock, wondering what time it is, living by the clock in his head. Dan and another old Indian named Grover, a friend of Dan's, who was with them on the trip by car they're on in the pages I'm reading, acted as a translator for Nerburn of Dan's particular ways. They were driving to the boarded up building that was once the Indian school where Dan spent a great portion of his childhood, the very most traumatic extended period of his life, Indian school. The Indian way of reasoning was very different from Nerburn's, a white suburban middle class PhD professor, writer. Like the time they were out on a highway on the reservation in the morning, stopped someplace where Dan wanted to get out of the car. Grover wanted to drive up to the next town to get some cigarettes. All the time Grover was gone, Nerburn was fixated on why he wasn't back, when he'd had plenty of time. Nerburn couldn't get it off his mind, Dan would talk to him about letting it be. Grover is wherever he is and he's doing whatever he's doing where he is.

Later, Grover returned and they went on their way. Nerburn eventually asked Grover what took him so long. Grover said he thought Nerburn and Dan needed some time to talk. The funny part is that Nerburn had his mind focused on Grover's return with his car, and missed what Dan had to say. One of the many aspects of these two books I like is neither Dan nor Grover are shamans or chiefs. They're just men who happened to live long enough to get old. From time to time Dan passes some Indian wisdom to Nerburn that is told from how the Indian sees things. Here is something he said about children, The boy is in all of us. That's why we got to be good to the children. The boy always lives inside the man. Isn't it so, to the chagrin of their wives who say in exasperation, When are you going to grow up? Much of the time through the narrative, both Indian men are picking at Nerburn and lecturing him on his white ways, lack of patience. Nerburn knows it's in good humor, though there are moments he has to stand up for himself and tell them they don't understand his world either. Which, of course, means nothing to them, because they don't want to, they understand it more than they want to already.

To give an idea of the difference of how they thought, they had gone to a highway bar for lunch. Dan ordered 28 french fries, and sat at the table telling Nerburn the genocide of the Indians from their side. Nerburn was impatient with him. Dan had ordered 28 french fries the man at the bar had to fry to order. He salted them. At the table, Dan was telling Nerburn the history of the destruction of the Indian way of life and the Indians themselves, Dan would break each french fry in half, rub them together to rub the salt off, "the doctor said it wasn't good for me." He gave one half the french fry to his dog, Bronson, and ate the other. Nerburn asked, "You could have just asked the guy to hold the salt." Dan said, "Whoever heard of french fries without salt?" The difference was far greater than that, but this exchange shows one does it one way, the other another way. You have this old Indian man who is not what you'd call a "wise" man, but just a man. What Nerburn was intending while telling his story of a man without a title, it appears to me, was to show the attitude and the thinking of the reservation Indian, descendants of the ones that rode horses. 

Dan asked Nerburn to write his story. This is the second volume of Dan's story. In the second volume Dan tells about his time in Indian school as a child. Parents let kids go to Indian school for a place where they could have some food in a time when the white invaders were starving out the survivors of genocide by war. The humor running through the story is the problem Kent Nerburn has, not much experience understanding the culture of the Indian people, like people new to the mountains do not know anything about mountain culture. As always happens when you're new in a culture and don't know your way around, the people laugh at you in a light-hearted way for language interpretation, words with different meanings in the 2 cultures. Just a white man's arrogance stands out among people in a culture of poverty. It's not intentional arrogance, just an attitude that comes through tone of voice, words and actions. Dan and Grover respect Nerburn to the point of trust among white people. Though he knows Indian history as an historian, he still doesn't know Indian ways. He has a clock in his head, they do not. He wants to know about details, they don't care about details.

I'm reminded of my first months and years in the mountains. It was a lot to learn, an entire culture without written history, and sometimes I'd be frustrated, just like Nerburn, but different circumstances. There would be times I'd drive to Winston-Salem to go to a movie and drive around in traffic, just to have an experience from my own home, Flatland, in my own culture. A mini-vacation. I'd go to my spiritual retreat that is 500 acres of virgin forest between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, between Hwy 17 and the sea, cabins around in the woods and communal kitchens. There, I'd be among my Flatland friends and talk Flatland style where everything is comprehensible. That was as much what I'd go there for as spiritual regeneration, which I also needed, Flatland or mountain. I like Kent Nerburn's way of making his own puzzlement in the Indian culture a part of the story. It helps emphasize the cultural difference, a way of saying it's another world in the Indian way of thinking. Nerburn deals continually with translating different ways of thinking. Sharing his frustration gives me a far deeper understanding of the differences, and gives a better understanding of the Indian ways. Their ways are not lesser versions of our own, the same as mountain culture is not a lesser version of Flatland culture.  

*  

WHITE MAN

air bellows in ice

It's an awful day outside, about as bad as it gets. 21 degrees, 9 this morning at 8, and it hasn't been above freezing for several days. The snow on the ground has an ice crust 3 inches thick. Now it is snowing such that the air is like fog. The new snow lands on ice, the wind blows it so much you can't tell if it's new snow or snow flying in the wind. What the new snow does is fill in holes I've made in the snow for walking to the mailbox. The car's battery is dead and I didn't leave the headlights on. It's a cheap battery that has been needing a change, and I totally forgot yesterday at Napa. This is at least the half dozenth time I've had to jump a dead battery. I took the cables out of the trunk and put them on the floorboard of the passenger side. That will be their place until I get a new battery.

I have always loved snow until today. Difficult as it is to even stand up in, it might as well be 10 feet deep. The glacier on the north side of my roof fell off last night at 11:30. WHUMP. That dead battery put me in a rotten mood. It's been such a pain. Instead of having posts on top, it has little 3/16 inch nubs to clamp the cable to on the front side of the battery, under this hose and that metal strut such that it takes at least 10 attempts at each nub to get the clamp to hold. Just now called Napa about it to see if they have one for this car with posts on top. I'd have to change the battery cables in the car. This is why I'm not a mechanic. To fix one thing, the next thing and the next thing come up to the point that if I don't have a garage with a lift in it, I can't do anything myself. So I don't. When a neighbor passes I'll get a jump and maybe go drive awhile. I don't know. No need to be in town til Friday afternoon. I may do it that morning. Right now I want to stay inside out of this fierce wind and blowing snow.

That's what I do anyway, so it's not like a change of routine. Reading a beautiful book, Neither Wolf Nor Dog. It's an account by a white man an old Indian on a reservation in presumably South Dakota had his daughter call and ask him to come to see the old man. The old man had read one of the writer's former books and liked the way he wrote about Indians, with some humility. White man drives a thousand miles to see what the old man wanted. Right away the writer is in a culture that has no place for him, a white man. He goes around with the Indian man with tape recorder to record him when he wants to talk for the record. It's role reversal in the extreme. On the rez the Indian rules and he tells white man everything he has to say to white man, the writer a symbol of the whole, much to frustration of white man who has to remind his host that he was asked to come there, didn't do it because he was an Indian wannabe.

They gradually develop a friendship, which it turns out they had all along, just needed to know each other better. One time, the writer, Ken Nerburn, packed his belongings in his car and set out to go home and not even leave notice. He'd had it. As soon as he gets going he blows a head gasket. Car won't go. There he is. He has to go through with it. It turns out the old man is teaching him the Indian way, not the question and answer way. After much torment, the white man gradually comes to see how much he has learned in this association that seemed more like brow beating than teaching. The old man was also working on white man's humility. Put him through a really tough time and when he's had all he can take, the Indian man tells white man he handled it well, he likes him.

Keeps him going back and forth between wanting to leave and wanting to stay to continue the project, all the way along.

Since I first found out about Indians in childhood, I had strong feeling for them. Playing cowboys and Indians with neighborhood boys, I was always the Indian and the others were the cowboys. I had the magic power of coming back to life after getting shot. Indian sayings like, White man speaks with forked tongue, I knew well. I lived among white people and got the forked tongue from parents, church, school and all the adults in my life. Everybody lies to kids, it seems, or seemed to me then. Old man Dan the Indian lays it to the white man. It's like he knows white people better than white people know themselves.

It's a tremendously complex issue between white people and Indians. The Indians have only been lied to, taken from, killed at will, kept down in concentration camps called reservations where the FBI is law enforcement. It brought up in me much that has bothered me over the years of reading about the Indian experience. I've never known any Indians, except a few peripherally, to meet and say hi. When around an Indian or Indians, I feel like they're terribly arrogant toward white people, which is what they say white people are to them. And that's what Nerburn is getting from old man Dan, talked down to to the point Nerburn had to stand up to him and remind him again he is not there of his own volition, he was asked, and, furthermore, he was not there at Wounded Knee, he was not in on any of the massacres of villages killing women, kids and old people. He didn't do any of that. He wasn't living then.

It turned out the old man was wanting him to feel what the Indian felt, to really get it and understand it, to feel it, to know the anger. In hindsight, it's perfectly clear the old man was teaching him by helping him to feel what it is he was setting about to write. It was a hard place to go to. It has caused me to think about my own attitudes toward the Indians. In my heart, I'm all with them. In the arena of everyday life, they're another culture so far away from my own, that although I'm sympathetic and I wish it had been otherwise for them, I can't entertain guilt for the same reasons Nerburn expressed for himself. What was done to the Indians by white man is simply not mine. I will not buy that I am guilty just because I'm white. I don't feel particularly good about my own heritage in the light of Indians on reservations, but, again, I wasn't there. Of course, to the Indian, the white man is the bitterest enemy there ever was. They know that had it not been for liberals back east, they'd have been killed to the last baby. But the white liberals don't get credit for anything but being white, the enemy.

From childhood, I've been sympathetic to people overrun by my culture, like the black people for the most obvious of several. I feel compassion for what they go through and have been through. That I can't stop it does not mean I'm to blame. I can't stop the snow storm, but I'm not to blame. It's this racial sensitivity between people of other races and white people that has caused me over time to stay away from people of other races because I don't care to go through the gauntlet of explaining I'm not like the ones that speak with forked tongue. That tends to twist up into knots and one sinks deeper instead of finding understanding. I feel deeply for the atrocities done to the Indians by the white soldiers. I can't do anything about something that happened over a hundred years ago any more than I can change anything about what's happening in Pakistan now, anywhere in Pakistan. Hail far, I can't even change myself. I can't help it my culture is whiteness. I'm as white as they get; fair skin, red hair. When it comes to dividing up racially, I don't have a choice. I don't like what "my people" did in that place and time, but I still can't find that I had anything to do with it. I will not feel guilt because somebody I don't know, who doesn't know me, expects me to. Still, I'm sympathetic to the Indian cause and would love to be able to help. But, like the old man said, it's theirs to take care of, not mine.