Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Dan decides the group should not attend the powwow, acknowledging that Nerburn needs to contact his family. Grover takes the truck off-road and onto the plains. In the bumpy back seat, Nerburn and Fatback both struggle with carsickness. When the group stops for a bathroom break, Nerburn expresses concern about the safety of driving off road in such an isolated location. Grover explains that they’re in “Indian country”, and that a lack of roads and houses doesn’t mean they’re alone. He compares his car to a horse, and laughs at the fact that white people name cars after horses but don’t treat them like horses.

Nerburn leaves the car to find Dan, who climbed down a hill to relieve himself. He finds Dan crouched close to the ground, staring into the distance. Dan points to a large bush and, as the men watch, it is revealed to be a buffalo. Dan explains that a buffalo (Tatanka in Lakota) can hide or reveal itself to humans as it chooses. When Nerburn challenges him, Dan compares his relationship to buffalo to Nerburn’s relationship to his dogs or cats, explaining that humans and animals communicate regularly.

As the group drives across the plains, Dan speaks on three differences between white Americans and indigenous people. First, he argues that white Americans value freedom, while indigenous communities value honor. Dan explains that the pilgrims came to America to avoid oppression, then sought that same oppressive power themselves. Dan argues that indigenous people, on the other hand, value honor, which he describes as an internal sense of right and wrong. He suggests that indigenous people look to animals and plants to find new ways of living honorably. They do not see honor as a finite resource. Second, Dan argues that white Americans use language to their advantage in several ways, weaponizing it as a tool of oppression. For example, forcing indigenous people to sign treaties in English, a foreign language, meant they didn’t always understand the deals they were making. Prohibiting the use of indigenous languages in Industrial Schools traumatically separated indigenous children from their families and culture. In modern classrooms, the use of words like “frontier” and “wilderness” to describe indigenous lands erases the long history of indigenous communities and the lives they built and continue to build on the land. Third, Dan describes how he learned to see and speak as a white man.

Grover drives the group into a homestead town, one of the many, white-founded towns on indigenous reservations that resulted from unjust federal policies. Initially comforted by a sense of order more familiar to him, Nerburn soon notices an air of decay in the once-prosperous town. The trio enters a decrepit café filled with a mix of indigenous and white people. When a drunk indigenous couple enters and is quickly kicked out, Nerburn asks Dan and Grover if they’re embarrassed by the historical legacy of alcohol dependence in indigenous communities. Dan describes alcohol dependence as a challenge given to indigenous communities by the Creator and suggests that white people weaponize the indigenous community’s struggles with alcohol dependence to oppress them. He argues that indigenous people lived for hundreds of years without electricity and running water, and that only white people thought that made them victims in the modern world. He asks what makes Henry David Thoreau’s adventures at Walden Pond more noble than indigenous ways of life and suggests that white people want to steal the best parts of indigenous living without respecting indigenous lives. For the first time, Nerburn is left reeling and confused by Dan’s words.

Nerburn has an upsetting conversation with his wife and young son, and begins to feel as if he’s abandoning his family. Grover’s flippant response to the conversation angers Nerburn, and the group rides in silence. Suddenly, Dan tells Grover to turn towards a sign for the Sitting Bull Burial Site Monument. He explains that Sitting Bull was a great leader who surrendered in order to protect his people. Sitting Bull knew that the treaties he was being asked to sign would not protect his people and thus, he rejected them. Grover spots a young indigenous man walking along the road and Dan suggests that they pick him up. As soon as the stranger enters the car, the men fall silent. Uncomfortable with silence, Nerburn asks if the man is visiting the burial site. The man asks to get out of the car. When the trio is alone, Dan admonishes Nerburn for breaking the silence. He explains that many of the indigenous people living nearby are descendants of the people who killed Sitting Bull to please powerful white Americans. He argues that the legacy of those conflicts are still present, just as the legacy of the Civil War is still present in the south.