Lakota Elder Dan Explains English
July 20, 2024
We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was.
In his fascinating book “ Neither Wolf nor Dog, On Forgotten Roads With an Indian Elder” researcher and author Kent Nerburn answers an ad and discovers Lakota Elder Dan who, after thinking deeply and for many years, has decided we pale-face could use some help.
Stuck in the boonies, researcher Nerburn buys a cheap recorder and carefully transcribes what Elder Dan has to say, here about the English language – – –
He [Lakota Elder Dan] had taken on his formal manner again. He was
once more the solitary orator, speaking the truths that he had worked
out over so many years, with only an old friend, a white man, and a
sleeping Labrador to hear him. I said a silent prayer to the gods of
technology that my little discount-store tape recorder would catch his
words so I could pass them on.
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“I am going to say some things that you should think about.” He drew in a large breath and began. “I grew up speaking the language of my people. It wasn’t until school I had to learn English. They just marched us into the classroom and started talking in English. We had to learn. “I remember
how funny it sounded when I first heard it. There were so many words. The teacher could talk for an hour and not even stop. She could talk about anything. She didn’t need to move her hands, even. She just talked. Some days I would sit and watch her just to see all the words she said. One other boy once told me he thought she said as many words in a day as there were stars in the sky. I never forgot that.“When I learned English I realized it was a trick. You could use it to say the same thing a hundred ways. What was important to Indian people was saying something the best way. In English you had to learn to say things a hundred ways. I never heard anything like it. I still watch white people talk and I’m surprised at all the words. Sometimes they will say the same thing over and over and over in different ways. They are like a hunter who rushes all over the forest hoping to bump into something instead of sitting quietly until he can capture it.
“I don’t mind this, mostly. But I don’t like it when it is used to hurt us or other people. Now I’m going to tell you some of those things that hurt because of the way people say them. I wonder if you ever thought of them.
“The first one is about the battles. Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad. They ‘won’; we ‘massacred.’ I don’t even know what a massacre is, but it sounds like dead women and little babies with their throats cut. If that’s right, it was the white people who massacred more than we did. But I have hardly ever heard anyone talk about the white massacres. I don’t like it when people use that word only about the killing we did. It makes our killing seem uglier than yours, so it makes our people seem worse than yours.
“Here’s another one: uprising. You use that word to talk about anytime our people couldn’t stand what was happening to them anymore and tried to get our rights. Then you should call your Revolutionary War an uprising. But you don’t. Why not? There was a government taking freedom away from you and you stood up against it. But you called it a revolution, like maybe the earth was turning to something better.
“When we did it, it was called an uprising, like everything was peaceful and orderly until we ‘rose up.’ Well, maybe we should make those words backward and call those ‘downkeep-ings,’ because to us, we were being kept down all the time. I’d like it a lot better if history books said, ‘Then the Indians were kept down again,’ rather than, ‘Then the Indians rose up again.’ It would be more of the truth.
“See, that’s how the English language is used on us. It is like a weapon you use against us now that you don’t use guns anymore.
What about ‘warpath’? When you came out against us you ‘formed an army.’ When we came out to defend our families we went on the warpath.’ I won’t even talk about words like ‘bloodthirsty’ and ‘savage.’
“But those are things from the old days, and you probably don’t even think they are real any more. Well, they are.
“My little great grandson came home one day and told me they were studying the frontier in American history. I asked him what it was. He told me it was where civilization stopped. I almost told him he couldn’t go back to that school anymore. “Just look at that! They were teaching him that civilization only existed up to where the white men had reached. That means everything on the other side of that line was uncivilized. Well, we were on the other side of that line. We had governments and laws, too. Our people were better behaved than the people that came into our lands. We thought we were at least as civilized as the white man. But here is my little great grandson coming home from school talking about the frontier and civilization. It was like we didn’t exist.
“Every time you talk about the frontier you are telling us that we don’t matter. I looked up the word. It means the edge between the known and the unknown. Whenever you use it you are saying that our people are part of the unknown. You are teaching your children and our children a history that says Indian people were part of a big, dangerous, empty space on the other side of the line where people had laws and culture. It is like there were wildcats and poisonous snakes and Indians, and they all were the same – just something unknown that made the land dangerous.
“See, this is part of the big story you don’t even see. You teach about the frontier. You talk about the wilderness and how empty the land was, even though to us the land was always full. You talk about civilization like we didn’t have any, just because we didn’t try to haul big chairs and wooden chests across the desert in a cart.
“The way you teach it, America started from some ships that came to Massachusetts and Virginia. The people got off and had to push their way through some big empty land that was full of danger. When they got to these plains, they sent the wagon trains across the mountains and the desert, like little streams cutting their way through the earth. Once they got across, then more people followed their paths, and things were built along the way, and it was like these little streams of people became big rivers of people that all flowed across to California and Oregon and Washington. It was like the place was empty and you filled it up, and history is the story of how you filled it up and what happened while you were filling it.
“You can tell me you don’t think that way, but you do. I look at the history books of the kids. They start in the east and come west, all of them, like that is the way history happened.
“Just think what that does to our kids. It tells them to see the past like white people. It teaches them to understand this country like they were on those boats and covered wagons. That’s not the way it was to us. For us, this was a big land where people lived everywhere. Then some people came and landed on the shores in the east while others came up from the south. They started pushing us. Then some others came down the rivers from the north. All these people were fighting each other. They all wanted something from us – furs, land, gold. They either took it or made us sell it to them. They all had guns. They all killed us if we didn’t believe that God was some man named Jesus who had lived in a desert across the sea. They wouldn’t leave us alone.
“Pretty soon they set up a government way back somewhere in the east and said this all was their land. Not just where they lived, but everywhere they had been or even where they had heard of. If they could get one man to go to a place and put a flag in the ground, they said they owned everything between where they started and that flag. They started pushing us backward on top of each other. All of us who had lived side by side leaving each other alone had to fight each other for hunting land.
“We had to make
deals with the” white men or else fight them. There wasn’t enough food.
Everything started to fall apart. We lost the land our ancestors were
buried in. We got pushed into little ponds of land. We were like fish
who had been swimming in the sea who were sent into little ponds.
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“See, to us, American history is how the big sea became little ponds and whether those are going to be taken from us or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with thirteen colonies and some covered wagons going west. Our land was taken from us from every direction. We can look at the same facts as you and it is something completely different. But you build your history on words like ‘frontier’ and ‘civilization,’ and those words are just your ideas put into little shapes that you can use in sentences. The big ideas behind them are weapons that take our past from us.
“I think that’s a lot of where our people went wrong with your people. We didn’t see the big ideas behind the words you used. We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was. You named us savages so that made us savages. You named where we lived the wilderness, so that made it a wild and dangerous place. Without even knowing it, you made us who we are in your minds by the words you used. You are still doing that, and you don’t even know it is happening.
“I hope you’ll learn to be more careful with your words. Our children don’t know the old language so well, so it is your English that is giving them the world. Right now some of the ideas in your words are wrong. They are giving our children and yours the world in a wrong way.”
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