Neither Wolf Nor Dog

1996 Minnesota Book Award winner — A Native American book The heart of the Native American experience: In this 1996 Minnesota Book Award winner, Kent Nerburn draws the reader deep into the world of an Indian elder known only as Dan. It’s a world of Indian towns, white roadside cafes, and abandoned roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Readers meet vivid characters like Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, and Annie, an 80-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin. Threading through the book is the story of two men struggling to find a common voice. Neither Wolf nor Dog takes readers to the heart of the Native American experience. As the story unfolds, Dan speaks eloquently on the difference between land and property, the power of silence, and the selling of sacred ceremonies. This edition features a new introduction by the author, Kent Nerburn. “This is a sobering, humbling, cleansing, loving book, one that every American should read.” — Yoga Journal If you enjoyed Empire of the Summer Moon, Heart Berries, or You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, you’ll love owning and reading Neither Wolf nor Dog by Kent Nerburn.

In this 1996 Minnesota Book Award winner, Kent Nerburn draws the reader deep into the world of an Indian elder known only as Dan. It’s a world of Indian towns, white roadside cafes, and abandoned roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Readers meet vivid characters like Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, and Annie, an 80-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin. Threading through the book is the story of two men struggling to find a common voice. Neither Wolf nor Dog takes readers to the heart of the Native American experience. As the story unfolds, Dan speaks eloquently on the difference between land and property, the power of silence, and the selling of sacred ceremonies. This edition features a new introduction by the author. “This is a sobering, humbling, cleansing, loving book, one that every American should read.” — Yoga Journal

With an introduction by Robert Plant Against an unflinching backdrop of 90s reservation life in the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf Nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Native American Indian, connected by their own understandings of life yet struggling to find a common voice. As they journey together through small Native American Indian towns and down forgotten roads where the whisperings of the wind speak of ancestral voices, these two men will travel beyond myth and stereotype, revealing an America few people ever get to see.

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 N...

During the nineteenth century, Americans looked to the eventual civilization and assimilation of Native Americans through a process of removal, reservation, and directed culture change. Underlying American Indian policy was a belief in a developmental stage theory of human societies in which agriculture marked the passage between barbarism and civilization. Solving the "Indian Problem" appeared as simple as teaching Indians to settle down and farm and then disappear into mainstream American society. Such policies for directed subsistence change and incorporation had far-reaching social and environmental consequences for native peoples and native lands. This study explores the experiences of three groups - Northern Utes, Hupas, and Tohono O'odhams - with settled reservation and allotted agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each group inhabited a different environment, and their cultural traditions reflected distinct subsistence adaptations to life in the western United States. Each experienced the full weight of federal agrarian policy yet responded differently, in culturally consistent ways, to subsistence change and the resulting social and environmental consequences. Attempts to establish successful agricultural economies ultimately failed as each group reproduced its own cultural values in a diminished and rapidly changing environment. In the end, such policies and agrarian experiences left Indian farmers economically dependent and on the periphery of American society.

A haunting dream that will not relent pulls author Kent Nerburn back into the hidden world of Native America, where dreams have meaning, animals are teachers, and the “old ones” still have powers beyond our understanding. In this moving narrative, we travel through the lands of the Lakota and the Ojibwe, where we encounter a strange little girl with an unnerving connection to the past, a forgotten asylum that history has tried to hide, and the complex, unforgettable characters we have come to know from Neither Wolf nor Dog and The Wolf at Twilight. Part history, part mystery, part spiritual journey and teaching story, The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo is filled with the profound insight into humanity and Native American culture we have come to expect from Nerburn’s journeys. As the American Indian College Fund has stated, once you have encountered Nerburn’s stirring evocations of America’s high plains and incisive insights into the human heart, “you can never look at the world, or at people, the same way again.”

When Kent Nerburn received a letter from Jennifer, a young woman questioning her calling to spend her life in the arts, the writer and artist was struck by how closely her questions mirrored the doubts and yearnings of his own youth. Nerburn resolved that he would write his own letter: a letter of welcome and encouragement to all young artists setting out on the same strange and magical journey, sharing the wisdom of a life spent working in the arts. From struggles with money and the bitterness of rejection, to spiritual questions of inspiration and authenticity, Dancing With the Gods offers insight, solace and courage to help young artists on the winding road to artistic fulfilment. Tender and joyous, it is a celebration of art's power to transform the darkest of human experience and give voice to the grandest of human hopes.

The teachings of the Native Americans provide a connection with the land, the environment, and the simple beauties of life. This collection of writings from revered Native Americans offers timeless, meaningful lessons on living and learning. Taken from writings, orations, and recorded observations of life, this book selects the best of Native American wisdom and distills it to its essence in short, digestible quotes — perhaps even more timely now than when they were first written. In addition to the short passages, this edition includes the complete Soul of an Indian, as well as other writings by Ohiyesa (Charles Alexander Eastman), one of the great interpreters of American Indian thought, and three great speeches by Chiefs Joseph, Seattle, and Red Jacket.