Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Neither Wolf Nor Dog is a multilingual book, featuring orators who speak in both English and Lakota, an indigenous language of the Sioux nation. Lakota offers Dan and Grover the ability to speak freely in Nerburn’s presence, but use of language—specifically English—in oppressing others proves an important theme in the book. Dan asserts that white Americans used English “like a weapon” (162) to harm indigenous communities historically and in the present. For Dan, the most egregious example of this weaponization is the treaties that the federal government forced indigenous communities to sign to give up their ancestral lands. Dan describes the treaties as “pieces of paper written in a language we didn’t understand and read to us by people we didn’t trust” (160). He argues that the federal government abused the linguistic gap between indigenous and white American communities. To ensure dominance and control over indigenous communities, the federal government forced assimilation by forbidding indigenous children from speaking their indigenous languages. As Dan remembers, “they just marched us into the classroom and started talking in English” (160), forcing students to adapt or, more commonly, fall behind. The failure of indigenous students to thrive in classrooms taught in a foreign language reified white American’s existing prejudicial view of indigenous people as intellectually inferior. In a similar way, Dan suggests that the use of the term wilderness to describe indigenous lands transformed the West into “a wild and dangerous place” that needed to be conquered by the federal government (165). These historical examples demonstrate the dangerous potential of language to aid in oppression of marginalized communities.

Dan’s lectures also suggest that language has a powerful, ongoing role in the continued oppression of indigenous people. He tells Nerburn that English is “like a weapon you use against us now that you don’t use guns anymore” (162). He argues that historians use language to manipulate the public’s sense of history. When describing battles, for example, “whenever the white people [win] it [is] a victory. Whenever we [win] it [is] a massacre” (161). He argues that this distinction “makes our killing seem uglier than yours, so it makes our people seem worse than yours” (161). Similarly, white historians “use [uprising] to talk about anytime our people couldn’t stand what was happening to them anymore and tried to get our rights” (161). The negative connotation of the word implies that “everything was peaceful and orderly until [indigenous communities] ‘rose up’” (162). These examples demonstrate that emotionally-charged language can be used to prejudice audiences against indigenous communities.