Butler's Cinema Scene

David Bald Eagle, Christopher Sweeney, Richard Ray Whitman

“NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG” My rating: B-

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

In attempting to de-romanticize white notions of Native Americans,  “Neither Wolf Nor Dog” often comes perilously close to having just the opposite effect.

You can only hear so many words of wisdom from a 95-year-old Lakota elder before the mind starts wallowing in cliches about the noble red man.

Happily Steven Lewis Simpson’s film sidesteps most of the major cultural traps that make negotiating this particular landscape so dangerous.

This low-budget effort — filmed mostly on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation — is one of the more perceptive films about white/Indian relationships.

Based on Kent Nerburn’s semi-autobiographical novel, the bulk of “Neither Wolf…” is a reservation road trip in which an outsider gets a crash course in modern Indian ethos.

The late David Bald Eagle

Kent Nerburn (Christopher Sweeney), who had a modest publishing success with a collection of tribal folk tales, gets a phone call from Pine Ridge.  An ancient Lakota man, requests — no, demands — the writer’s presence.

Nerburn obliges, and is soon sitting across the table from Dan (the excellent David Bald Eagle, who died last year at age 97), who right off the bat says he hasn’t much respect for white folk who “wear Indian jewelry, grow pony tails and talk about the Great Spirit.”

Dan produces a shoe box filled with scribbled notes representing his thoughts and feelings on…well, everything. On one scrap of paper he advises remaining quiet around white people, since it drives them crazy and pretty soon they start talking and reveal whatever they’re trying to conceal.

Dan expects Nerburn to turn these thoughts into some sort of book. And before the writer can wrap his head around the project, he’s more or less kidnapped by Dan and his crusty buddy Grover (Richard Ray Whitman), who deposit him in the back seat of a vintage Buick and hit the res’s dirt roads.

Grover ups the antagonism ante by burning the box of notes and informing Nerburn: “You’re the box now. Gonna fill you up.”

Their low-keyed adventures include a visit to a small town museum where history is viewed through a strictly white point of view, and an embarrassing and sad encounter with an alcoholic Sioux man (Zahn McClarnon) in a white cafe.

Every now and then the screenplay by Simpson and the real-life Nerburn threatens to become a litany of injustices (for instance, Dan’s painful childhood in a government-run school where he was whipped for speaking in his native tongue), but the players usually find a way to deflect the more ponderous elements while emphasizing a less-frenzied way of life.

| Robert W. Butler