The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction by Bernard Malamud

Horse he could stay. He told Windy Voice to watch himself or he would be in grave trouble. He told Foxglove he was expelled from the tribe.
    Foxglove spat on the ground. “Does he know what he’s doing?” he asked Indian Head.

    “He knows.”
    “I am doing what Chief Joseph also would tell me to do.”
    “Don’t look at me with those bad-luck eyes,” said Foxglove. “I don’t want your bad luck on my head.”
    “My luck is good,” said Jozip. “I asked the Great Spirit what I must do and He told me to do what was right. The medicine man said it would be wrong to exile Foxglove alone, but when I look in your eyes I see who murdered the settler. And I have to send you out of the tribe.”
    “I will leave with hatred for you,” Foxglove said to Jozip.
    Jozip did not reply.
    Foxglove went for his horse and left the tribe without clearing his lodge.
    Within ten minutes Colonel Gunther came galloping up to Jozip’s tepee accompanied by fifty armed cavalry men.
    “Hear me,” he commanded, as he tried to control his pawing horse. “I have come to tell you that the U. S. government has already informed you that your tribe must leave this land in three weeks of time. Those words are out of the mouth of the Great White Father, U. S. Grant, President of these United States of America.”
    Jozip, thinking what he must look like to this man, and ashamed of his broken-faced appearance before his tribe, said slowly, “Mr. Cohnel, you said last time that we had a month to leave this valley.”
    “That was before you began to murder our settlers,” said the colonel.
    “But where will we go, where?” Jozip said. “How can you take away overnight where we live and also our property? We are human beings, not animals.”
    “I intend to refer this matter for additional adjudication by the proper authorities in the War Department. They will inform you where your tribe will have to go. I will telegraph Washington and at the same time put this tribe on strict notice that it must prepare itself for a major move of departure out of this valley forever.”
    “This is a long time,” Jozip sighed.
    The colonel wheeled his horse and with his fifty troops galloped over a hill and disappeared beyond it.

TEN
    When We Go Where Shall We Go?
    MANY SCHEMES tempted Jozip but nothing could he seriously propose. Where could a whole tribe of Indians go? Flight, if it came to that, had to be prepared for. It was impossible without a strategy, a way of holding together, renewed commitment to their way of life.
    It is my responsibility, Jozip thought, but without a careful plan, a hasty move—the wrong move—might mean the end of the People. This thought frightened the new chief.
    Jozip then called a tribal council, reluctantly seeing himself addressing his tribe in a tongue he was still trying to master. Was there a word for chutzpah in their language?
    Jozip, after whitening his black eyes with paint, opened the council of sub-chiefs in his tepee. The council of ten men sat in a circle on the ground with the medicine man, Last Days, and around them sat many other braves. Some smoked pipes whose odor all but nauseated their chief. If he remained with the tribe he must introduce the cultivation of a mild tobacco; buffalo manure was too much for his nerves.
    At last he spoke some reluctant words, squirming at all he had to say in a new tongue, but going on with greater ease as the words came to him.
    “My brothers,” Jozip said, “you know the contempt the whites
have for us, as if they were the firstborn of the Everlasting Power. Our reservation in this valley is one in which our tribe has lived for fifteen years, and it was promised to us to live in forever. Chief Joseph told me this before he left us to walk in the Everlasting Fields. He spoke these words in the presence of One Blossom, who still mourns for the father who is not now with us. Now the paleskins want us to give up our land and go somewhere to a place that they have not