LITMIR.BIZ

      AN OLD MAN’S REQUEST

      I got to the phone on the second ring. I could hear the scratchy connection even before the voice spoke.

      “Is this Nerburn?”

      It was a woman. I recognized the clipped tones of an Indian accent.

      “Yes,” I responded.

      “You don’t know me,” she continued, without even giving a name. “My grandpa wants to talk to you. He saw those ‘Red Road’ books you did.”

      I felt a tightening in my chest. Several years before I had worked with students on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation collecting the memories of the students’ parents and grandparents. The two books that had resulted, To Walk the Red Road and We Choose to Remember, had gained some notoriety in the Indian community across North America. Most of the Indians had loved them for the history they had captured. But some found old wounds opened, or familial feuds rekindled.

      Occasionally, I would receive phone calls from people who wanted to challenge something we had written or to set the record straight on something their grandfather or grandmother was supposed to have said.

      “Sure,” I answered. “Let me talk to him.”

      “He doesn’t like to talk on the phone,” the woman said.

      I had grown accustomed to Indian reticence about talking to white people, and I knew there were still a few of the very traditional elders who didn’t like to use the telephone or have their picture taken.

      “Is he upset?” I ventured.

      “He just wants to talk to you.”

      My nervousness was growing. “Where is he?”

      She told me the name of a reservation. It was a long way from my home.

      “What does he want?”

      “Could you come and see him?”

      The request took me aback. It was a strange request on any terms, coming as it did from someone I didn’t even know. But the distance involved made it even stranger.

      “I guess it’s important for me to know if he’s angry,” I said.

      The woman betrayed no emotion. “He’s not angry. He just saw those books and he wants to talk to you.”

      I rubbed my eyes and thought of the travel. When I had left the oral history project I had made a silent promise that I would keep using such skills as I had for the good of the Indian people. I had never enjoyed a people so much and had never found such a joyful sense of humor and lack of pretension. But more than that, I had felt a sense of peace and simplicity among the Indians that transcended the stereotypes of either drunkenness or wisdom. They were simply the most grounded people I had ever met, in both the good and bad senses of that word. They were different from white people, different from black people, different from the images that I had been taught, different from anything I had ever encountered. I felt happy among them, and I felt honored to be there.

      Sometimes I would stand on the land in Red Lake and think to myself, “This land has never been owned by the United States. This land has never been touched by the movement of European civilization.” It was as if I were feeling a direct link to something elemental, something beneath the flow of history, and it was powerful beyond imagining. Though I was a white man, and all too aware of the effects of well-intentioned white people on the well-being of the Indian people, I wanted, from within my world, to help them retain the goodness in theirs.

      Now, a voice had come to me from a place far away, asking me to come back to that world and hear what an old man had to say.

      “I’ll come,” I said, half hating myself for my hesitancy, half hating myself for agreeing at all. “It won’t be right away, though.”

      “He’s pretty old,” she responded.

      “Soon,” I said.

      “Just ask at the store in town. He doesn’t go anywhere much. He really wants to talk to you.” She gave me his name and hung up.

      And so this book began.