Neither Wolf nor Dog by Kent Nerburn Page A

me,” Grover answered. “This isn’t worth the effort.”
    â€œIt bothers me a lot more now than it did then,” Dan added.
    I slipped a rubbery pink piece of baloney onto my white bread. “Why’s that?”
    â€œWell,” said Dan, “when we were kids we didn’t see a lot of white kids. Those we saw were just like us. Poor as hell and justkids playing in the dirt. Their folks might have had it better than our folks, but the kids seemed just the same. We never thought of ourselves as any different. Cowboys and Indians was just a game, like cops and robbers. It didn’t have anything to do with our real lives.
    â€œI mean, nobody had any cars. We didn’t get to any big town except maybe once or twice a year. There wasn’t any TV. It wasn’t until after the war, when the soldiers came back and told us what it was like out there, that we even knew that anyone lived different from us.”
    â€œYeah,” Grover said. “That’s when it hit me. When I got back from Korea. All the other guys in my unit called me ‘Chief,’ and I kind of liked it. But when I got back and lived in the city for a while, I started to hear white people talk about Indians for the first time. The things they said were so damn stupid. That’s when I started to get mad about those cowboy movies.
    â€œSee, it never bothered me about the way those movies made Indians look. But it bothered me about the way they made us look to white people — like a bunch of savages who just rode around faster than hell on horseback shouting and hollering. Made white people treat us bad.”
    Dan swallowed a mouthful of sandwich. The television gunshots were blaring in the background.
    â€œYou know where all that stuff came from?” he asked me.
    I had done some reading on the subject, but I wanted to hear his thinking.
    â€œBuffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. You heard of it?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œGood,” Dan said. “Then you know a little bit. Buffalo Bill had this show that traveled all over, to New York and to Europe and everywhere. He sort of made it up after he had killed all the buffalo and the U.S. had pretty much destroyed us all. He thought he could still make some money on Indians. It was rightafter we had taken care of Custer and all the newspapers were writing about Indians as bloodthirsty killers. Buffalo Bill figured people wanted to see real live Indians.”
    â€œLike animals in a circus,” Grover cut in.
    â€œRight,” Dan said. “Only we were the animals. He put together this show. Sitting Bull even was in it for a while, although I’ll be damned if I know why he let himself do it. Anyway, it had Indians riding around on horseback hollering and killing people, just like white people wanted.
    â€œPeople came to see that show from everywhere. I think even the Queen of England saw it. I know some Indians met the President. It was in all the papers. It was really a big thing.”
    â€œYeah,” Grover echoed. “That was all people knew — what they saw in Buffalo Bill and what they read in the papers.”
    â€œNo, there was another thing,” Dan said. “There was that poem of Hiawatha. ‘By the shores of Gitchi-gumi.’ What the hell is Gitchi-gumi, anyway?”
    â€œI think it’s Lake Superior — up my way,” I offered.
    â€œMaybe,” continued the old man. “But that’s the other idea white people had of us. Moccasin Indians sneaking through the woods and paddling canoes. Buckskin Indians in the forest, while we were the war-paint Indians.
    â€œThat’s what white people thought Indians were like. Then when movies came, and TV, they just kept making us look the same. Sometimes you’d even have some Indian sneaking through woods in his fringy buckskin shirt in one scene — paddling around in a canoe and stuff — then in the next one he’s covered