How has your experience with the native people affected your personal spiritual path?
Kent Nerburn: This is an odd comment, but it’s made me much less afraid of death. They believe, and they’ve taught me, that you don’t say “passing away.” They say walking on. Death is just a different stage in the path of life. There is less of a sense of judgment at the end, that somehow we are measured for how we have lived in life, as opposed to the belief that we will go forward to walk into our past, we will walk on and meet our elders, and we will walk on to meet our family.
It all sounds fine and like it’s an easy philosophy, but we see it in practice. We see people aging gracefully and turning their eyes to the other side, not because they expect some great theological insight or some change of consciousness, but because they are walking into a world that they left, and they know they’ve been away from it for a while, and now they are returning to it.
It’s made me fear death less, and it’s made me respect the power of the teaching of ordinary life more. I look with more mindfulness at the teachings of the trees, the teachings of the rocks, what it can tell me to stand in front of the ocean, what it can tell me to be out in front of the sunset, and to be humble before these things and know that even if I don’t understand them, there is a dimension of gift to them. I guess I always had before, but I just feel it more now. I feel a greater sense of gratitude for the richness of nature and life.
I have been following this discussion and debate about the Washington Redskins name for a long time, and lately I have been reading comments written by sports fans after these articles are posted online. Clearly there is still a huge disconnect between the average American and the culture of the Native people. Do you think more needs to be done in this country to promote greater respect for the Native people?
KN: Oh, absolutely! Let me put it this way: We have such an odd interpretation and such an odd relationship as a nation with the Native experience. I know I could tick off a bunch of things, but I will mention only a couple.
Number one is the issue of minority groups. The Native people are the only people who were not brought here either voluntarily or involuntarily and are not pressing their nose on the window of the American culture saying, “Let us in, let us in!” They are an occupied people. They want to be left alone. By and large, they would like to be part of American culture, but, ultimately, we have done great damage to them that we cannot undo. We can’t simply loosen the reins of our own policies and say, “Well, now you’re integrated into American culture.” They don’t want to be integrated into American culture. They sit out there as a separate entity that really doesn’t fall into the category of the minority group, and yet, we don’t like to look at the fact that these are different people whose experience is different.
We’ve also done something very odd with the Native people. One of the things that always fascinates me is when a white person looks at a black person, he parses his lips and says, “I think that person’s black. I see some black in him.” Whereas with Natives, it’s the other way around, “That person doesn’t look like a Native.” There’s a litmus test visually that says, one drop of black blood in a white person makes them black. Witness the experience of our current president. But with the Native people, we say, “That person can’t be an Indian because they don’t look Indian enough.”
So, we’ve got these odd distinctions that we make that set the Native people apart, and then into this comes the notion of the skin.
Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, actually sued a paper (Washington City Paper) because someone had drawn a little pointed beard and some horns over his photo, and he claimed it was anti-Semitic. This is the same man who says the Redskins brand is too valuable to be changed. That’s the worst extension of our sort of blindness to the notion of mascots and redskins and tomahawk chops. Ultimately, the thing that has mattered the most to me is when I talk to my Native friends and they say, it hurts the little children in so many ways. They say, “This hurts our children and, therefore, it should be stopped.”
I don’t care what we’re talking about — whether it’s George Bush dropping bombs on people, or whether it’s Obama shooting off drones or whether it’s using Indian mascot names to sell products — if it hurts the children, that should be our litmus test of something that shouldn’t be done.
To me, we have a long, long way to go. Even if it doesn’t bother us, by acclimation we should say, “This is not something that is acceptable and it’s got to be changed, so I am going to stop supporting that.” The value of this issue coming up is that it brings it to mind once again. We will keep coming back and back to this until at some point we stand up and say, “Enough.” We’ve drawn our lines on almost every other racial group, but, for some reason, (using Native people as mascots) is a line we don’t draw. We make it into something that is supposedly honorific, and we know it isn’t, but we don’t touch it as something that should be stopped.
How have the Native people that you’re connected with responded to this new book?
KN: The ones I know have loved it — and that makes me very happy. I was very nervous about this. In the first book, essentially, I make myself just a person who comes through as a narrative observer. It is very close to oral history, in that sense. I don’t allow myself to have any presence. In the second book, I gave myself a little more presence, and in this third book I took a chance and gave myself parity with the other characters.
I thought people might say, “Well, Nerburn’s putting himself out in front,” which is the last thing I want to do. But what’s happened instead is that by giving myself parity, allowing myself to have the knowledge that I have and the biases, questions and concerns that I have, it allowed the other characters to reveal themselves more fully.
The characters Dan, Grover, Jumbo and Wenonah from the other books all had their origins in real people. It’s like you taking friends of yours and telling stories using the character of your friends, and their basic approaches to life, and then expanding upon it. You know who these people are and know how they think and what they’re like. So, by bringing these people to the fore, the Native people have really liked it.
Grover’s long talk about how he came to be the way he is has really meant a lot to Native people who have been down that road, and they like Dan’s point of view because Dan really embodies the best of the Native view on nature and life. In his own way, he’s a very thoughtful man. Jumbo represents in some ways the best of a gentle, Lakota character. Wenonah doesn’t play a big role, but she is strong, and she has the strength of character that a lot of the Native women have.
The Native people see themselves represented as contemporary human beings. So, my Native friends are the ones who are pushing the book as much as anything, because they know that I have a non-Native audience and I give them their voice. They have been really supportive.
The first thing that happens when a non-Native person writes about Native things is, “Who are you? Here’s one more appropriation of who we are by some guy for fun and profit.” There was a certain skepticism about me early on, and yet, as I worked, as I really found out who I was and what I was doing, I saw this partly as a corrective of our historical narrative and an enrichment of our historical narrative, and partly to bring the reality of the Native way of looking at the world to the forefront. So the Native people said, “Yeah, we’ll watch this guy carefully. We’ll see what he’s all about.”
And then I wrote about the boarding school and that sort of made a difference. They said, “He’s telling something that needs to be told.”
And now, with this book about the asylum, many of them didn’t know about it. I was just down in Sioux Falls. There’s a group down there, the friends of the Hiawatha Asylum, and they are actually going out and trying to find the stories of every single person who was incarcerated in that asylum. They are contacting them all, because it is a story that hasn’t been told. There is so much history that’s hidden, and the Native people see that I am trying to help get that story out there.
For more information on Kent Nerburn, visit www.kentnerburn.com.
