Neither Wolf Nor Dog

“In an act as simple and caring as a Catholic’s genuflection before the Blessed Sacrament, that person had placed the sacred gift of tobacco on the crude image of the buffalo, and in so doing had paid homage to the animal that is the physical embodiment of the universe in all its bounty for the Lakota people.”

This passage reflects Nerburn’s attempts to speak directly to a white audience in his book. By comparing indigenous tobacco offerings to the Christian tradition of communion likely to be familiar to white audiences, Nerburn provides a familiar analogy for indigenous traditions. Throughout the narrative, Nerburn is explicit in identifying white readers as his primary audience.

“Though I was a white man, and all too aware of the effects of well-intentioned white people on the well-being of the Indian people, I wanted, from within my world, to help them retain the goodness in theirs.”

Nerburn’s acknowledgement of his positions as an outsider proves essential to his characterization as a narrator. Despite his good intentions, this passage reveals that he still maintains colonial habits and ways thinking. Distinguishing between his world and the indigenous world elides the fact that he is living on indigenous land, pointing to The Role of Language in Oppression.

“Now he had burned them himself. Now I was the box. Now he was going to fill it again.”

In the first chapter of the book, Dan gives Nerburn a box full of essays and notes and asks him to transform them into a book. Later, he burns the book as a symbol of his desire not to perform for white people. From this point forward, Nerburn serves as a conduit for Dan’s thoughts, which he records directly from Dan’s dictation rather than attempting to revise them.

“Maybe long, long ago, Europe was just land, too, like this land was for us. But that was so long ago that no one remembered. It had all been turned into property.”

Dan attributes the loss of indigenous land to a difference in belief about land: while indigenous communities view the land as a sacred relative, European settlers saw it as property to be claimed, bought, and sold. The repetition of the phrase “long ago” suggests that Dan believes that this view of land is entrenched so deeply within European history as to become inherent to European cultures.

“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.”

Dan takes pleasure in making Nerburn uncomfortable and reminding him of his position as an outsider on the reservation, emphasizing his privilege and inherent complicity in the oppression of indigenous communities. In this passage, Dan argues that this discomfort is productive because it helps Nerburn to relate to the intentional marginalization of indigenous communities on their ancestral lands.

“Nothing had been brought to conclusion. The only sign of industriousness was the inevitable line of laundry flapping behind each house in the ceaseless prairie winds. The white sheets seemed like flags of defiance in a landscape of despair.”

Throughout the book, Nerburn struggles to prove himself as a trustworthy white person to Dan and Grover. The references to incomplete projects and lack of industriousness in this description of the reservation reveal Nerburn’s subconscious colonialist ideas about land use and property that Dan later criticizes.

“The Indian will offer advice to the white person and that will make the white person better, but really it will be a movie about white people and how they become wiser when they add Indian wisdom to their white lives.”

This passage comes from Grover’s condemnation of movies about indigenous communities made by and for white people. Ironically, the language Nerburn uses in the Introduction establishes Neither Wolf Nor Dog as exactly this kind of book—framing indigenous people as mystical beings and written to show white people how indigenous ways of being can enrich their lives.

“For the first time I felt like the dreaded anthropologist—an observer who pretended to participate, an outsider for whom the natives felt compelled to perform.”

Dan and Grover compare Nerburn to a white anthropologist who comes to the reservation and gets scared off by Dan’s eccentric behavior, exacerbating Nerburn’s insecurities about being seen as an outsider on the reservation. This anxiety further complicates Nerburn’s depiction of himself as a trustworthy white man to his indigenous readers.

“My truck was destined to become a forlorn monument in the dusty field behind Jumbo’s garage, while happy Indians rode around on its new hundred-dollar tires and listened to powwow tapes on its recently purchased two-hundred-dollar tape deck.”

Throughout the early chapters of the book, Nerburn exhibits several of the traits and behaviors Dan and Grover criticize in white Americans. Nerburn’s internal monologue reflects pejorative stereotypes of laziness among indigenous populations and attributes a colonialist mindset of inferiority to practices and aesthetics that don’t conform to white norms.

“Before you wanted to make us you. But now you are unhappy with who you are, so you want to make you into us. You want our ceremonies and our ways so you can say you are spiritual.”

The trauma of the Industrial School system provides an important representation of The Lasting Trauma of America’s Violence against Indigenous Communities throughout the book. In this passage, Dan claims that white people who try to appropriate indigenous culture for themselves are perpetuating that legacy. He argues that expanding access to sacred ceremonies kills indigenous culture, fulfilling the goal of the Industrial Schools.

“‘Listen to me, Nerburn,’ he whispered, placing his face so close to mine that I could feel his breath. ‘The Creator has given you a task, just like he gave me a task. This is not a joke. He chose you to do this. You need to do it right.’”

The emotional intimacy between Nerburn and Dan provides the heart of the book. The physical proximity between the men in this passage reflects Dan’s belief that their fates are intertwined. He is harsh with Nerburn because he believes that they are completing important work together.

“‘Why is it so hard for you to understand that Tatanka is different from other animals?’

‘I’ve never had a lot of dealings with buffalo.’

‘Well, my people have. The buffalo gave us our food, our clothes, our shelter, almost everything we needed to live. We lived around them like brothers and sisters.’”

In this passage, Dan attempts to explain the importance of buffalo (Tatanka in Lakota) in indigenous communities by comparing them to cats and dogs, which white Americans understand as distinct from other animals. Despite this comparison, his reference to buffalo as brothers and sisters demonstrates a uniquely indigenous perspective on human-animal relations. Throughout the narrative, Nerburn positions buffalo as also a symbol of the Power of the Western Landscape.

“If it hadn’t been for your religion you would have lived just like us from the first minute you got to this land. You knew we were right. You started wearing our clothes. You started eating our food. You learned how to hunt like us. When you fought the English you even fought like us.”

One of Dan’s central arguments is that white Americans in the present want to take the best parts of indigenous culture without respecting indigenous people. In this passage, he suggests that this posture is historically entrenched, and that indigenous ways of living have influenced American culture since colonists first arrived on the continent.

“I don’t remember anything about Thoreau being a farmer. He mostly talked about how great it was to do nothing, then he went and ate dinner at his friend’s house. He didn’t want to farm and he’s a hero. We don’t want to farm and we’re lazy. Send us to a social worker.”

Dan references Henry David Thoreau, a 19th century transcendentalist best known for his book Walden, which describes two years he spent living on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. This passage demonstrates Dan’s familiarity with white American culture as well as his argumentative skills. By invoking Thoreau, Dan challenges the supremacy of white American culture and reinforces his own arguments about the hypocrisy of white people appropriating indigenous ways of living—often the very same practices for which they demean indigenous communities, they celebrate in themselves.

“Now, with the arrival of the stranger, all conversation had ceased. We were riding in Indian silence—unselfconscious, wordless, and without pretense. I felt like a complete outsider.”

Throughout the narrative, Nerburn’s position as an outsider on the reservation is essential to his self-perception, even as he tries to ingratiate himself into the indigenous community. In this passage, he initially frames the hitchhiker as an outsider intruding on his time with Dan and Grover. However, when he tries to interject white cultural norms into the situation, he immediately recognizes himself as the intruder.

“Good leaders wait to be called and they give up their power when they are no longer needed. Selfish men and fools put themselves first and keep their power until someone throws them out.”

Dan frames his distinction between leaders and rulers as a matter of moral character, reinforcing his argument about the cultural differences between indigenous communities and white Americans. He employs the historical example of Sitting Bull, whom he believes to be an example of an ideal leader, to criticize the self-serving corruption he believes characterizes indigenous rulers.

“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!”

Dan reframes the historical Ghost Dance movement—a 19th century religious and political indigenous movement which the federal government brutally subdued—as a response to Christian evangelism. He suggests that indigenous communities believed Jesus was returning to help liberate them from colonial oppression, contrasting the white narrative of heathen indigenous communities in need of conversion and spiritual salvation.

“‘He does this sometimes, when he feels the Old Ones nearby. It’s something he learned when he was young.”

Although Dan resists the characterization of himself as a wise old man, Grover’s matter-of-fact perspective on Dan as a person with connections to the spirit world—able to sense and communicate with their ancestors—reflects an indigenous worldview that accepts this ability as natural and important. In contrast, Nerburn’s bafflement and confusion reflects white cultural norms that frame such communication as mystical and folkloric.

“The men can’t hunt buffalo anymore. But we can still cook and sew and practice the old ways. We can still feed the old people and make their days warm. We can teach the children. Our men may be defeated, but our women’s hearts are strong.”

In highlighting the perspective of Danelle, Nerburn’s narrative touches on intersectional discrimination and the ways in which, for example, sexism and misogyny overlap with racism and the exoticization of indigenous communities. Danelle warns Nerburn not trust Dan and Grover on issues relating to women, arguing that women are the key to preserving indigenous culture, and that women should be the center of activism. The fact that Dan and Grover bring Nerburn to meet Annie, an indigenous elder, suggests that they also believe indigenous women are important for his understanding of indigenous culture.

“All we cared about was the way they were raised and the people they became. You looked at the color of their skin and the color of their hair and you started dividing them up to see how much white they had in them! You called them half-breeds. Wouldn’t let them be white and wouldn’t let them be Indians.”

One of Dan’s central arguments about the differences between indigenous people and white Americans is that they have drastically different concepts of race. In this passage, Dan argues that indigenous identity is tied to community, rather than ethnicity, while white Americans focus on the percentage of other races in an individual’s family line—inherently privileging proximity to whiteness and perpetuating racist systems of oppression.

“There was a star in heaven that led those kings to Jesus when he was born. But there can’t be a star that is given to our people as a guide. When our people talk about the seven stars and how they taught us to have seven council fires, you don’t believe it’s real. You say it is a myth or a legend.”

The resentment Dan feels about the forced conversion of indigenous children to Catholicism emphasizes The Lasting Trauma of America’s Violence Against Indigenous Communities. Dan often demonstrates his deep knowledge of Christianity in his lectures to Nerburn, condemning the hypocrisy of white evangelicalism. Here, he compares the stories surrounding Jesus’s life to indigenous oral history, and suggests they should be held as equally true.

“Bands of color cut for miles through the desiccated formations, echoing geological time that dwarfed all human considerations.”

In this passage, the landscape of the Badlands in South Dakota offers Nerburn a sense of the Earth’s history extending beyond the realms of American history, emphasizing The Power of the Western Landscape. The landscape of the Dakotas proves transformative for Nerburn, inspiring deep introspection and self-examination.

“For that, and the hunger to own a piece of the earth, we had destroyed the dreams and families of an entire race, leaving them homeless, faithless, and with nothing but the ashes of a once graceful and balanced way of life.”

In Chapter 24, Nerburn breaks from his established structure to insert his own internal thoughts. While previous chapters feature lengthy lectures from Dan, this chapter centers a monologue in which Nerburn takes accountability for crimes against indigenous people on behalf of his white ancestors. In this passage, Nerburn uses the pronoun “we” to accept blame in the same way Dan uses “you” to condemn white America.

“It does you no good to pretend that we did not exist, and that you did not destroy us. This was our land. We will always be here. You can no more remove our memory than you can hide the sun by putting your hand over your eyes.”

One of Nerburn’s stated goals for the book is to introduce white readers to the world of contemporary indigenous communities. In this passage, Dan argues that it should be impossible to forget that indigenous people have always lived on the continent, and that they will continue to do so.