Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Content Warning: This section includes references to rape, infant death, and violence against indigenous communities.

The trio drives on an interstate crowded with Christian-themed billboards. When Nerburn remarks that they’re in the land of Jesus, Dan begins a lecture on faith and history. For white historians, Dan argues, history is knowing what happened and writing it down. Because indigenous historians maintained oral histories without standardized year numbers (referring instead to major events that occurred during a year), white historians believed they had no history. When indigenous historians tried to share their oral histories, white historians dismissed them as myths and legends. Dan argues that the practice of white history allows white Americans to erase indigenous history.

Dan points to Jesus and biblical history as evidence that white people can think like indigenous historians. He notes that evangelicals he encounters are not interested in what year Jesus lived or how many people were there when he died but focus on the lessons of his life. Nor do they dismiss the idea that an earthquake followed Jesus’s death as myth, the way they might if he were a indigenous prophet. Dan wonders why white historians don’t treat Abraham Lincoln the same way, using his life as a call to continue to free the oppressed.