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(More customer reviews)Dan, the Lakota Elder who we met in Kent Nerburn's nationally acclaimed book "Neither Wolf Nor Dog", reconnects with Kent via a mysterious note attached to a tobacco pouch that says, simply, "Fatback's dead."
"The Wolf at Twilight", a "novelized non-fiction" account of Kent's second encounter with Dan, unmasks the dynamically complicated relationship between a white American and a Dakota Indian. Nerburn creates this remarkable partnership through humor, gentle understanding, wisdom, historical revelation, suspense, full embodiment of real people, and his personal journey through the colorful lives of the Lakota people. The Lakota Elder, Dan, has an abiding trust for Nerburn, not because he can pay for the gas, motel rooms and meals, but because Kent has proven his genuine understanding of the Native people through an earlier book project with the children and elders of the Red Lake Indian Reservation, "To Walk the Red Road: Memories of the Red Lake Ojibwe."
It's been many years since Kent and Dan shared an adventure together on the sprawling plains of the Dakotas in "Neither Wolf Nor Dog". But, a cryptic note and a strong sense of duty (and some remorse) again send Nerburn on the road with Dan and Grover through the sprawling plains of the Dakotas. There is a colorful collection of Native characters embedded in this excursion including Fatback, Dan's dead dog who Dan has preserved in a freezer for Nerburn to bury; Grover, Dan's crusty, intrepid friend and protector; Wenonah, Dan's granddaughter who makes it clear to Nerburn that he better not disappoint her grandfather; young Native relatives and friends practicing the traditional ways of the Lakota; and small town Americans responding to the confusing juxtaposition of the modern world and an ancient way of life.
Nerburn is the student (and sometimes the stooge); Dan is the teacher. Throughout the book, Dan the Elder practices the traditional indigenous pedagogy passed on to him by the many teachers before him. We are reminded constantly, at the expense of Kent's pride, to stop talking and just listen. He asks Nerburn to engage not only his ears in the listening process, but all his senses. Many scenes in the book are masterfully descriptive in their sensory sensitivity. But, Kent also accesses the deep sensing of the forces of nature and brings us into the world of the unseen.
Dan is the ever patient but desperate pedagogue. He must get the message to Nerburn. Dan trusts Kent with the responsibility to pass on the information and experiences of his life. It is a life that is fading quickly and Dan needs Nerburn to just do what he's told. We can learn from Dan many of the traditional teaching techniques that worked just fine for thousands of years before the arrival of the Black Book. If Dan can bring Kerburn to understand that the sacred is in everything, they can travel through the unseen world of the spirit guides who will lead them to Dan's long-lost sister, Yellow Bird, and ultimately, to resolution.
There are many times when the student, Nerburn, tries to settle for "contempt prior to investigation", but Dan refuses to accept anything but full cooperation. When Dan explains that his newfound, mange riddled mutt, Charles Bronson, was revealed to him by the spirit of his former (and once frozen) dog, Fatback, Kent is incredulous. But Dan persists, and we find much later that Charles Bronson takes on an important role in solving the mystery of Dan's lost sister. Nerburn learns along the way that the seen world is only a fraction of what Dan accesses to guide him through life. It's more often the vast unseen world that directs Dan, and Nerburn's not always reading the same script. It's this spiritual tension that gives us so many vibrant exchanges between the dying Lakota Elder and the Stanford and Berkeley educated Ph.d.
At the end of this book, there is a realization that Nerburn, the word sculptor, has carved a beautiful piece of art from the dirty, dark historical secrets of the Indian boarding school experience. He has taken this huge, gnarled chunk of wood and allowed us to observe him carve through rotten pieces of historical and intergenerational trauma. This is not a wandering travel-log we are on. We are the observer, watching a master craftsman follow the grain and knots of a twisted past. We see him in dialog, and in process, with a form that was there before the work began. The shavings on the floor of the studio are the remnants of an ugly episode in American history that cannot be swept under the rug of denial and propaganda. We realize that what we have today is the result of what was created in the past. Nerburn is here to bring it to life.
There is a very complicated dynamic between the Native American people and the predominant White culture. It is a twisted web of superiority braided with submission; shame carefully disguised as hegemonic religiosity; genocide justified by hubristic government policies that declared that we must "Kill the Indian to Save the Man"; federally issued educational edicts that ignored the constitutional separation of church and State and bankrolled church sponsored schools of torture and cultural homicide; and the portrayal of the "Noble Savage" on Saturday morning TV shows with big lips, hook noses, buckskin loincloths, and an intuitive sense of humility (a la Tonto). The White culture has always attempted to justify their superiority over indigenous peoples by using the smoke screens of charity, righteousness and pity. The result has been an entire indigenous culture that has lived their lives with the realization that, "I am no longer myself. I am someone else." Dan's search for his sister also becomes a search for his own sense of self. It is a search led by a resilient survivor and not a broken down victim.
It is unfair to assume that this book is going to be a "downer" or another swing of the White guilt stick. "The Wolf at Twilight" is, above all, a great story. It takes you through the lives of real people who experience the full range of emotional dynamics and complex human relationships. Kent gives us breathing, crying, dying, laughing, Mountain Dew swilling people who are very much a part of the ethnosphere, and not just anachronistic remnants of Manifest Destiny.
Tom Kanthak
Perpich Center for Arts Education
Liaison for Indigenous Arts Education
Teacher on Special Assignment
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows
A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boarding-school mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood.In this fictionalized account of actual events, Nerburn brings the land of the northern High Plains alive and reveals the Native American way of teaching and learning with a depth that few outsiders have ever captured.
