Aria and Taylor had stopped eating and were instead watching Wolf guardedly. Neither of them was sure whether they were entering into a conflict with him or were simply watching a process of self-implosion. In truth, they had unintentionally wandered into a war that he had been waging long before meeting them, one that had started long before he was ever born.
“We speak the same words from our mouths as the white man, but the language of the heart and how we communicate to the web of life is different,” Wolf continued. “It is a language the white man don’t possess. We are invisible to ’em unless we are used as their sports mascots or slaves. They exploit our medicine, ceremonies, culture and textiles. They sell us. They label us as Indians, Redskins and Savages, and change our tribal names to bastardized references so it better suits their ignorance. We Natives have so many ways of being, but we are seen by the white man only one way … as warriors on horseback with our shirts off and with long dark hair … with painted faces and buckskin and bows and arrows. They force us to play roles as the villains in every story told where the white cowboy is always the hero savin’ the day. Even the Lone Ranger’s sidekick is named ‘Tonto’ which is a word that means stupid. They call us savage and simple but they are the savages. They annihilated over 100 million of us. Ten times more people than Nazi Germany killed.
“We call the white man ‘Little Brother.’ Because it’s the Little Brother that needs to be taught. He doesn’t know how to work with nature anymore, including his own nature. He has to be reminded of how to take care of himself and all existence again. But Little Brother is a stubborn, defensive little shit and blind to the death he causes to the natural world. We have lost countless animals, tribes and holy grounds to extinction because of his ‘modern world.’ The heat even rises in our atmosphere and still Little Brother doesn’t believe what the wisdom keepers have been warning us about. We are banished or exiled by the white man into reservations and barrios, and those places don’t give us a place to belong. All that’s left is anger. We rot out there in the abuse, the alcohol, the poverty, the religions and the broken way of life that has been forced on us by the white man. We had to practice our own spirituality in secret until 1978.”
Wolf fell silent. His soliloquy suddenly turned inwards against himself. The most deafening war within him was being fought because Wolf was a mixed breed. The rape, pillaging and slavery brought to his people by what Wolf called Little Brother meant that he, like so many other Natives, had both the victim and the villain in his veins. Many of his suicidal downswings were initiated by the fact that he had turned against his own blood. The white man was once a demon that had come to them. Now, he and his people faced new demons. Most of them, the kind that resided within. Wolf wanted the earth and its people to return to what it was before those demons had landed. The brawl against the modern way of life was a varnish covering the fact that he knew deep down that life would never be that way again. To Wolf, every rock and tree and animal and stream was not only family, it was himself. He dreamed of coexistence. He dreamed of Tribe. But he could not seem to create it. He screamed against the sickness that they had been infected with. That sickness was not smallpox. It was separation.
Aria and Taylor said nothing and just let Wolf’s words wash over them. Both of them knew that Wolf was right about everything he said. But at the same time, neither of them felt that it was fair to be resented to such an obvious degree for crimes that they themselves had not committed. Nor did it feel fair to be expected to pay the price for what their forefathers had done. Especially given that they never asked to be related to them in the first place. Even if there was a way for someone to repair the damage done, Aria and Taylor were in no position to help themselves, much less sew together the patchwork of a fragmented past. The crimes of those who came before them, who bore the same skin color as their own, were like a yoke around their neck that they were born with. They would forever be seen as the villain for what their ancestors had done to people of other races, colors and creeds. Both Aria and Taylor knew that the resentment would immediately convert to both fury and ridicule if they were to say anything about the mutuality of pain inherent in being just as incapable of changing the color of their own skin. They were both aware that expressing the pain of the unwelcome inheritance of the stigma of being white was taboo. And so, they kept silent.
For a few minutes, Taylor searched through the confusion of his feelings about what Wolf had said, until he recalled the original lesson that Wolf had meant to convey to him about acting. He looked for a part of himself that was as angry, but his search was cut short by a noise coming from across the street. A man, engulfed in multiple layers of clothing, had begun throwing handfuls of
