Kent Nerburn

Finally — for those of you who have asked over the years — I have gotten permission to reprint TO WALK THE RED ROAD: MEMORIES OF THE RED LAKE OJIBWE PEOPLE. This is the book of oral history and historical photographs that the students at Red Lake high school collected as part of a project that I directed on the reservation in the late 1980’s. It is the book that brought me to Dan’s attention and became the impetus for the journey that resulted in Neither Wolf nor Dog.

Immediately after the publication of Neither Wolf nor Dog I began receiving inquiries about To Walk the Red Road because of the fact that Dan made mention of it in Neither Wolf nor Dog. I would direct people to Red Lake High School or the tribal archives at Red Lake, since the school held the copyright. But since we had printed so few of them and they had become so popular around the reservation and throughout Indian country, there were none to be had.

School districts are not notoriously wealthy entities, and those on reservations are especially poor. So there has been no money to reprint the book. But now, the school district has granted me permission to reprint a limited number on my own.

I am making them available to you through my sisters’ website, http://wolfnordog.com/. Go there and click on What’s New and follow your way down the text to the place where you can order To Walk the Red Road.

What you will find in this book is the voices of ordinary folks talking about their upbringing and their memories of what their elders told them. There are stories that range from one man’s memory of his grandfather being brought home on a travois after a battle with the Sioux to a woman’s recollection of making a joke to a white woman in a store that had the white woman believing that the Red Lakers made soup out of dogfood.

What makes these stories so wonderful is that they were told to the young people. These were not people talking to an anthropologist or professional interviewer. These are the parents’ and grandparents’ memories and teachings that they want their own children and grandchildren to hear.

I want this book to get out to the general public, so I will probably reprint this post several times in the future. If I don’t, it will simply scroll into obscurity, and new visitors to the website will not be aware of this wonderful treasure that is finally available to them.

I will also post a bit more about the book in the next few weeks. I’d like to share a few stories about its creation with all of you.

So, if you’re interested, go to http://wolfnordog.com/ and order your copy. You can, of course, order it as part of a gift box or basket or with Neither Wolf nor Dog if you know someone to whom you’d like to give Neither Wolf nor Dog and the book that helped bring it into being.

And to all of you who have waited — thanks for your patience.

I happened to be at our local airport when some of the local National Guard troops returned home from their service in Iraq.

Ours is a small airport where the planes come only a few times a day and you stand in the terminal watching the arriving passengers walk down stairs from the plane onto the tarmac only a few feet from you.

To see these young men and women step off the plane and rush into the arms of their families was a moment I will always cherish. In those embraces I was witness to the best of the unprotected human heart. It was as if all the suppressed fear and loneliness those young people had felt for all their time away had been left behind, and they were once again young American boys and girls who were happily in the embrace of their families.

I loathe this unnecessary war and the tiny man who started it, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of the mothers and babies and elders in Iraq who have died for our adventurism. But none of that cuts a whit into the feeling of joy and respect that I experienced seeing these young men and women return to the arms of their families.

I only wish we were welcoming them home from service in our forgotten city, New Orleans, which has been ignored by our government for two years to the day today, instead of from Iraq, where we are spending three billion dollars a week — yes, $3,000,000,000 a week — to serve some nefarious and ill defined purpose of a government run amok.

May we at some point in the future become the country we all know we can be, and reach out to help our fallen brothers and sisters rather than sending the best of our young people to advance the causes of men and women who see profit, not kindness and service, as the highest purpose of the American nation.

Last week my eighteen year old son, Nik, completely on his own initiative, took a bus down to Chicago (about 700 miles from here) to participate in Camp Obama, a two day training session for community organizers in the Obama campaign. I don’t think Nik knew exactly what he was getting into, and I don’t think he fit the profile of a potential organizer. But he met some interesting people, received training in organizing skills, and came home energized about Obama in particular and politics in general.

I applaud his initiative, just as I applaud the young people everywhere who overcome their cynicism to enter meaningfully into the political process. Those of us who have been around for awhile know that everything is political, and that every political decision reverberates throughout the fabric of society until it gets at least to your front door and probably into your living room and pocket book, and maybe even into your bedroom. To see young people choosing to be engaged is to know that this strange, imperfect, and wonderfully resilient democracy of ours still has its roots in hope and possibility.

Nik has spent his life, with the exception of the last year, up here in the north country in a town that is sandwiched between three Indian reservations. He’s gone to school with Indian kids, skated with them in skate parks, gone with me to Turtle Mountain and Pine Ridge and Rosebud, and drunk in the issues of Indian politics and contemporary culture. So it was no surprise that he raised the issue of Indian policy when he was at Camp Obama.

There were two surprising developments. The first was that Obama has already met with Indian leaders, showing me that he is a man with a more than ordinary breadth of vision. The second was that some of the young people at Camp Obama said, quite literally, “You know, I have never even thought about Indians once in my life.”

After I picked Nik up in Minneapolis upon his return from Obama camp, we drove north 150 miles to the Adam Beach Scholarship golf tournament at the casino course of the Fond Du Lac Ojibwe reservation deep in the woods of northern Minnesota. There we were in the company of several hundred Indian folks, ranging from national leaders to actors to tribal members who just wanted to play a pleasant round of golf. It was a festive event, filled with the good natured ribbing and bonhomie that characterizes Indian gatherings. No sense of status, no judgment — just good, honest folk having good, honest fun.

What struck me above all else was how familial and egalitarian everything was. A guy in Wal-mart jeans was completely at ease with someone who was ironed and spit shined. Children ran happily among the adults as they would at a family picnic. The laughter was easy; the friendships were good. In fact, the whole event had the feel of an extended family reunion, which, in a way, it was.

Whenever I get in an Indian gathering — and it has happened many times over the years — I am struck by the good-natured, good humored ease with which everything takes place. The embrace is large, and all are included. Where there are petty differences or animosities of long standing, they are simply ignored rather than accentuated through backbiting and criticism.

Nik had a good time. In fact, he was thrilled to meet and be met by celebrities and people of importance. I, too, had a good time. I generally am more comfortable in the company of Native people than non-Native folks because, as I have often noted, you are judged more by the quality of your heart than the length of your resume.

My hope is that some of the ease and grace and familiality of Native reality can be infused into this political campaign by Obama and others. There has been too much mean spiritedness and anger in American politics of late. I have been guilty of it as much as anyone. But when I see ordinary, hopeful people being run roughshod over by people in power, I get angry in a very deep part of me. I don’t want this; I don’t want it for anyone. We have become a nation of winners and losers, and I prefer to think of us as a large family in which we are all responsible for each other.

This is what the Indian world, at its best, offers. It is sad when you hear someone say that they have never thought of Indians even once in their life. Perhaps Obama can change that. Perhaps Nik’s experience can be of some assistance. Perhaps my writings can, too.

In the interim, summer begins to wane and the edges of a few of the leaves on our property are turning to reds and yellows.

Next post I may have some interesting news regarding the movie of Neither Wolf nor Dog, the reissue of To Walk the Red Road, and a project involving the Lakota people of Pine Ridge .

Thank you for checking back periodically, and please subscribe to the blog on the button at the top of the page if you are not already a member. I’ll make sure to send out notifications each time I write something. And, as always, I love to hear back from you. This is a medium that allows an amazing intimacy between author and reader. Though I have to be judicious with my time and communications, I value your presence more than you know.

Keep the faith and do good works.

I drove by the fallen bridge in Minneapolis the other day. It was a strange and eerie feeling.

There is something both suspended and final about seeing a bridge hanging in parts with vehicles overturned and crushed and stopped on impossible angles. You want the scene to continue until it settles into some kind of visual resolution. But it doesn’t. The cars remain there, parked sideways on a ramp of concrete jutting like a broken bone into the sky. The overturned vehicles, piled on top of each other, feel like unfinished stories — incomplete events frozen in time.

And then there is the absence of life. There should be people in those cars. There should be movement on that bridge. Instead, it is like a room people abandoned without taking even so much as a toothbrush with them.

I have seen this once before, in La Conchita, California, where a mudslide had sent houses down the side of a cliff, and you could stand before the mountain of mud and look at houses snapped open with rooms displayed like pieces of a dollhouse dropped by a careless hand. Here a toaster hangs by a cord from a wall socket, there a curtain flutters in the breeze in a glassless window. Couches sit in rooms that have no front wall. And all of this, like the cars on the bridge, takes place on impossible angles that beg for some resolution by the laws of equilibrium and gravity.

In some ways, these two disasters share something. In each, the earth shifted, slid, and stopped. There was finality, but no resolution. Each was a ghost of an event, where you could see the result but not the action. It was like “here is where it stopped,” followed only by silence and a sense of desperate abandonment. People wander around looking, but they are miniature in scale. Rescue workers and clean up crews seem like ants scuttling over a great, fractured surface.

But, blessedly, in the bridge collapse, as in the La Conchita mudslide, the event echoes more with the absence of life than the presence of death.

It is a miracle to me that only 8 people died in this bridge collapse. It is inconceivable that a freeway bridge, packed bumper to bumper during rush hour, could fall eight stories into a river and result in only eight fatalities. My wife said she would have guessed 500 dead just by looking at the wreckage. I would have said 1000.

But the number stands at eight — no consolation to the families of those who are among that number, but a miracle in light of what could have been.

I am proud of our Minnesotans for how they responded. We are, indeed, a kind and helpful people here, and it is good to see that demonstrated before the eyes of the nation.

But I am ashamed of our governments — both state and national — for how they have betrayed the trust of those good people by selling the idea of government as the cause of problems rather than the solution. Our bridges should not have gotten to such a condition and their construction should not have been done so much on the cheap that they only have a fifty year life span. The way to avoid this is to build to maximum specifications and exacting tolerances and to maintain to an impeccable standard. But such impeccability costs money, and you cannot expect people to give over their earnings willingly when you see a government conducting an impossibly expensive and unjustified war through the use of high-paid private contractor proxies, offering up pork barrel projects to legislative districts all around the country, and all the while selling a political philosophy that government can only be wasteful and cumbersome rather than compassionate and universal in its reach.

This bridge has been reduced to a pile of rubble. It will not soon go away, but it will soon be out of the hearts and minds of those in other parts of the country. It probably is already. But we need to remember it, just as we need to remember the mine disasters that result from lax government oversight and the cities of the south that lay in ruins from a hurricane that has passed from consciousness for most of us and is being criminally ignored in the halls of our national government.

My hope is that the young people of today will soon say, “We’ve had enough. It’s time for change.” My generation did it, though I’m still not sure on balance if we did more good than harm. But at least we galvanized for collective action. This generation has new challenges where the enemy is not conformity and regimentation as it was for us, it’s selfishness and mindless consumption.

Maybe the metaphor is in that bridge. It was built in 1967 on the eve of the Tet Offensive, when my generation truly came alive to what was happening around us, and the old way of thinking began to fall. Maybe this bridge can be a different kind of Tet Offensive. Coming on the distant heels of Katrina, but touching us all with the nearness of a similar danger in our own lives, maybe it can bring a new generation alive to what is happening around us, and the current way of thinking will begin to fall.

I hope so, because if we don’t soon realize that collective responsibility is as real as individual prerogative, a lot more than that bridge is going collapse beneath us.

Just a quick informational note here for those of you who have asked:

Progress is finally being made on the filming of Neither Wolf nor Dog. I wrote the screenplay a number of years ago under the able tutelage of director, John Irvin (Turtle Diary, Widow’s Peak, A Month by the Lake, etc.), but nothing came of the project at that time. Now the project is finally getting off the ground.

My screenplay will be used, though I am sure there will be modifications. Directors, actors, and producers all have a say in how something is shaped. The director has not yet been chosen, nor have the actors. But the company that will produce the film has already been formed (or, at least, is in the process of being formed), and locations are being scouted.

This is a long way from a finished product, but the direction is good and the feel is positive. When people begin investing their own time and money in a project, you know that something is taking place.

I don’t wish to say too much at this point, partially because there is not much to say, and partially out of respect for the process. I feel fortunate to be working with people for whom this is a labor of love and who choose to see me as a creative partner in the enterprise. I am hopeful that something good is in the making.

Perhaps in a future blog I’ll write a bit more about the fascinating process of creating a screenplay. It is as different from writing a book as creating a melody is from writing lyrics. I learned much in the process, and am a better writer for the effort. With luck, something special will result.

And, oh, I should mention: yes, there is Native involvement in the project beyond the cast. I would not have had it any other way.

Stay tuned. And remember to check out wolfnordog.com

Fifteen years ago I made a conscious decision to take a trip each year with my son, Nik. He was only three at the time. My reasoning was simple: if we made this an annual ritual, we would continue it when we reached the point where our life paths and outlooks diverged.

I was right. But there was more. And I see it each time we go out together on one of our “little trips.”

I mention this because he and I just returned from a simple three day trip into the Turtle Mountain region of North Dakota. To most folks, it would be a “nothing” trip — 700 miles of driving through the prairies and small towns of a state most either ignore or denigrate. But, oh, how wrong they would be. North Dakota, like everywhere else, has magic, if only you have eyes to see.

I have long loved the state. It has a peace about it that no other place in America contains. This is a result of the spiritual clarity of the land — sky, earth, horizon line — and the physical emptiness that allows the voices of the past to speak. Each town is a sentinel; each cloud, a messenger. The people live with a respectful awareness of the shoulders on which they stand: tough, honest immigrants who braved winters and loneliness and hardships that we can only imagine. But because of how little things have changed, it is possible to come close to an understanding of their lives just by staring into the changing prairie sky, or sensing the coming of a thunderstorm, or feeling the first chill of an encroaching winter wind.

The graveyards, too, echo with the presence of the past. Small and isolated, they sit in the great openness as testaments to the human spirit and the common humanity we all share.

And then there is the Native presence. It is not so strong for me as in South Dakota — not because it is not there, but because the power of the weather and the great, looming presence of the impending winters always intrudes upon my consciousness. Summer seems like a spasm here. In this way, it is like my own northern Minnesota — your eyes turn toward the northwest and hear a distant drumbeat of something inchoate and monumental. In South Dakota, something different echoes up. It comes from the earth. In North Dakota, it comes from the sky.

But I started this post as a praise to a moment shared between father and son.

In the course of our three days, Nik and I walked through the creaking halls of small museums created from abandoned school houses; we shared a table with a 92 year old Dakotah man who grew up speaking only his tribal language and had his life shaped by the boarding schools; we wandered amidst ruins of abandoned homesteads; we met people who had been born and raised, and now were reaching their final years, in the same small town of 150 people. Witnesses to almost a century in a single place, they were not simply the artifacts of history, they were its very vessels. It was an experience of intimacies set against the vastness of a great landscape that levels all with its challenges. Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, Dakotah, Ojibwe, Icelanders, Norwegians, Irish, Lebanese, Poles — all these and others carved out lives in this land of wind and space, and all their lives still echo. When you meet someone in the small towns, they immediately connect you with the past, because their experience has changed so little from those who went before.

Yes, our conveniences are greater; our connectedness is greater; our capacity for comfort and protection from our environment is greater. But to see a Mandan earth dwelling, or an abandoned farmstead, or an old thresher rusting in a field, is to feel the presence of the past in a way that is almost visceral.

This is one of the great privileges that comes from visiting the unpeopled parts of our country: history, in all its guises, lives close to the surface. You can see old trails, old footprints, old shards and pieces of lives in each town, near each riverbed, on each hillside.

Nik and I had this privilege together. We talked — about life, about our individual dreams and failures, about the people we met and the places we saw. I got to see him interact with strangers, watch the nature and level of his curiosity about the things we encountered, saw him meet the world with the fresh curiosity and energy of youth.

My bones are old. They start slowly, take fewer risks, require more rest. If he sees a hill, he climbs it. If he sees an abandoned building, he explores it. He floats out grand theories about life and history, and wanders in his mind with a freedom and excitement that I can only remember with fondness and participate in vicariously. My mind, my thoughts, my understanding, are freighted with knowledge and experience, and those sometime limit the freedom of creative imagination.

It was a wonderful journey, this short flare of a trip into the intimacy and immensity of North Dakota. It was a symbolic embrace of father by son and son by father. And it is the product of years spent traveling together, where the father who once watched carefully from behind a wall or a tree while a young, energetic child ran from excitedly from place to place, now watches appreciatively while the same son wanders with intense curiosity among the memories and artifacts of different people in different times and places.

And I feel him watching me — to see if I am alright, to see if I am keeping up. He values my capacity to talk to strangers, and tries to mimic me in this regard. But he also sees my limitations, my indecisiveness, my easier physical weariness, and works to assist and protect me.

What a wonderful passage this is — father to son. It is our journey across the seasons of our lives, and it is made all the more precious when it is set against the seasons of the land.

I received an interesting comment from a reader named Ruth in response to my posting about the president and the bridge. It went like this:

“I value your passion and feel your frustration in regards to your view of our President. But please don’t let bitterness take root and choke out even a portion of the beauty that’s in your heart. He may simply be the subject of the moment (or even the summer) but there is no room for bitterness in the garden of your soul - no matter how justified.”

I understand Ruth’s concern and I thank her for the compliment. She set me to thinking.

I oftentimes worry about this blog, simply because you readers tend to fall into two distinct groups — those who wish to see the “hidden beauty of everyday life,” and those of you who feel outrage and moral responsibility for crimes committed against the innocent. One looks toward the light, and the other cries out against the darkness. It is my conviction that both are spiritual paths, and we must follow the one that fits our spiritual makeup.

This is a complex subject that requires a complex unraveling that could easily be the contents of an entire book. The short form is this: there are those among us who believe we must clarify and purify our individual spiritual consciousness before we turn toward the world’s injustices. There are others who feel that an honorable spiritual life requires shining a light on the world’s injustices and standing up them. Think the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King.

Now, it is worth pointing out that the greatness of a King was that he did not let bitterness take root in his soul, even as he stood up to injustice. But he did feel and express a keen outrage at the world’s wrongs, and he did not wait for spiritual clarity before acting against those wrongs. It was through his struggles against injustice that his spiritual clarity was gained.

The point I would make is that it is equally valid to point toward the light or point toward the darkness. They are both part of the world in which we live. Jesus said, “I am the light,” even as he knocked over the tables of the money changers in the temple.

My own struggle is, as Ruth put it, not to allow bitterness to take root in my heart. But this is not the same thing as standing up to injustice or cruelty where I see it. There are those who could walk through Darfur or Rwanda and shine a healing light on all they see, but there are those who walking through those streets and villages would be filled with a conviction that they must stand up against such horrors and hold accountable those responsible for them so they never happen again. The world needs both.

May we each find the path we can walk with conviction, and walk it with confidence and clarity and no bitterness in our heart. It is the least we can do, and the most we can do. There need be no shame if our sights are more on the light toward which we are walking or the darkness through which we are traveling. All paths lead to the top of the mountain; all streams lead to the sea.

President Bush is coming to Minnesota.

I do not want him here.

He is coming to view the bridge disaster.

What happened to this bridge is exactly what we are doing to the bridges of Baghdad as a matter of policy.

And to the people on them.