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The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows by Kent Nerburn
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The Wolf at Twilight Quotes Showing i-18 of xviii

"The Creator stopped beingness a teacher who filled the globe with lessons. Instead you turned him into some kind of judge or policeman who'south sitting style up in sky keeping track of everything. When you die, if he thinks y'all've been good he sends you to a adept place. If he thinks you lot've been bad he sends you to a bad place. I don't like that. I like our style, where the Creator was a teacher who gave usa the earth to discover. I'd rather think of the Creator as a instructor than a policeman."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"THE Twelvemonth WAS 1988. I had taken a job helping young people on the Cerise Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota to collect the memories of the tribal elders. It was a wonderful job, and tremendously rewarding. As well as working with young people, I had the good fortune to meet and share time with the elders. I sabbatum at their tables, heard their stories, shared their laughter, and felt their sadness. It was a profoundly human time, and I valued it more than I can express."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"Information technology was the very fact of the note, stuck on my windshield on the Ruby Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, hundreds of miles from where Fatback had lived and, plain, died. That, and the small deerskin pouch of tobacco that was tied to information technology. Fatback was a blackness Lab — a skilful domestic dog — who had belonged to Dan, an elderly Lakota man who lived far out on the Dakota plains. Years before, as a result of a book of elders' memories I had done with students at Red Lake, Dan had contacted me to come out to his habitation to speak with him. His request was vague, and I had been both skeptical and apprehensive. Only, reluctantly, I had gone, and it had changed my life. We had worked together, traveled together, and created a volume together in which the old man told his stories and memories and thoughts virtually Indian people and our American land."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a State of Ghosts and Shadows

"Okay, let me try to lay this out straight for you," Dan said. "I'1000 not saying any of this is your error or even that your grandparents did any of it. I'one thousand proverb information technology happened, and it happened on your people's watch. You're the 1 who benefited from it. It doesn't matter that you're way downstream from the actual events. You lot're still drinking the water. "I don't intendance if you lot feel guilty. I but intendance that yous accept some responsibility. Responsibility's about what y'all practice now, not nearly feeling bad almost what happened in the past. You lot can't erase the footprints that have already been made. What you've got to practise is take a close look at those footprints and brand sure yous're more conscientious where you walk in the future."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elderberry's Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"We must end looking at life as if we humans are at the top of everything. There'southward spirit in everything, not but in people. If the Creator fabricated it, at that place is spirit in it. And if information technology has spirit in it, it has a office to play in creation. "Here is where your people have lost the path. You have spent too much fourth dimension thinking that nosotros humans are at the top of everything. You have spent likewise much fourth dimension trying to learn about things and non enough fourth dimension trying to acquire from them. You have thought too much and honored too picayune."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder'south Journeying through a State of Ghosts and Shadows

"Grover seemed to read my mind. "Listen," he said. "I don't know if your grandparents came on boats or if they were a agglomeration of farmers. But you've got to understand something nearly the old man. His folks weren't more than a few years from Wounded Knee. The authorities still shot people. It stole the kids, performed experiments on them, sterilized the piddling girls. If yous made too much noise you merely disappeared. That's just the mode information technology was. You didn't make problem." "Sounds like the Nazis," I said. Grover just shrugged. "I'm just trying to make you understand. This is a large thing he's doing. I'm telling y'all once again, he'due south counting on y'all because you're the only white human being he trusts."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journeying through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"It's a way to plough your mind to the Creator and to make sure you're dedicating everything to him. Get up in the morning, give thanks to the Creator. Have a chance to do some good, give cheers to the Creator. Whatever you lot exercise, make a little gesture to remind yourself that you are doing it in the presence of the Creator."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journeying through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"Then, sadly, Dan died. Information technology was a loss to me and to everyone who knew him. It seemed like an advisable time for me to withdraw and let the book make its own way. Only it was not so simple. Dan had captured peoples' hearts and imaginations. His story had touched readers who had never before given a idea to Native America. He had articulated the feelings of many Native people who had been seeking a voice by which to explain themselves to their non-Native friends. Most of import, his story had contributed in some modest fashion to the reshaping of the American cultural narrative that for too long has depicted Native peoples every bit savages on horseback, drunks in gutters, and wisdom-bearing elders possessed of some mystical earth knowledge. People wanted to hear more from Dan and more than about him. They wanted me to tell more of his story. I resisted. I was proud of what we had accomplished. But Dan was gone, and I was uncomfortable serving as a spokesman for a Native point of view and weary of trying to explain the literary method of the projection nosotros had undertaken. The book spoke for itself. At that place was no need to say more. But then came that chance coming together in the café. In that old human being's elementary, off-handed comment, I heard the echoes of all the"
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder'southward Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"yearning and struggle in the voices of the elders at Red Lake. They, too, had lost their identities. They, also, were no longer themselves, and it was this fate that they then wanted to help the young people avoid past sharing their stories. More than anything else I had written, Neither Wolf nor Dog had let people be themselves and see themselves. Was I breaking my own hope and abdicating my moral responsibility past refusing to tell more of Dan'southward story, simply considering I did not want to bargain with the questions and challenges that it posed?"
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journeying through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"I idea of the young people at Red Lake, sitting rapt at the tables of the elders, trying to take in the truth of what they were hearing. I idea of the elders themselves, so hungry to assist shape the lives of the young people with their stories. I thought of the serenity words of the man in that dusty café: "I am no longer myself. I am somebody else." And I thought of Sitting Bull'south earnest entreaty, "Come, let us put our minds together to run into what kind of lives we can create for our children."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder'due south Journey through a State of Ghosts and Shadows

"I had to tell it because it was the but honorable fashion to fulfill the promise that I had fabricated on the Ruddy Lake Reservation about twenty years earlier. This, then — The Wolf at Twilight — is the fruit of that promise. It is the part of Dan's life I had left untold. Information technology takes united states to places that for too long have been subconscious in shadow and reveals truths about what has been taken from Native people and what the residual of usa take lost in that taking. But it also reveals what we may all withal get if we heed Sitting Bull's poignant entreaty and put our minds together to see what kind of lives we tin create for the children. I hope you notice it worthy of your time. If information technology opens your optics to another way of understanding, I am grateful. If it simply entertains you, I am pleased. But what matters near is that information technology touches you. For it is, above all, a story of Native America, and its goal is to lodge deep in your heart."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder's Journey through a State of Ghosts and Shadows

"1 mean solar day a human being came to picket him work on a painting he was doing of Jesus and his disciples. The human sabbatum there all 24-hour interval, and Leonardo only made i stroke the whole time. 'Y'all stood there all day and only fabricated one stroke,' the human said. Leonardo merely looked at him. 'Yeah, but it was the correct stroke,' he said." Dan sabbatum quietly for a 2d. I was non sure if he was angry or if he didn't run across the relevance of the analogy. Then, suddenly, he burst out laughing. "That'south pretty skilful, Nerburn," he said. He reached over and pushed me playfully. "What was that guy'south name?" "Leonardo da Vinci." "I've got to retrieve that. Leonardo Duvishhi. You lot sure he wasn't an Indian?" "Might have been Wapashaw'southward long-lost uncle," I said. Dan laughed heartily. "This is a practiced twenty-four hours, Nerburn. I'm glad you came to visit me." The hawk cut corking arcs against the towering sky. The eastern horizon was filling with pinks and lavenders. "And so am I, Dan," I said. "It's been too long."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder'southward Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"Grover spit expertly between his teeth. "You know, Nerburn," he said, "you're similar those treaty negotiators we used to have to bargain with. Always in a bustle. Sometimes there are preliminaries."
"There are preliminaries and there are evasions," I said. "Wait out there." I swept my mitt across the blazing, parched horizon. "We've got to get moving if we want to become up at that place before information technology'southward a hundred and ten degrees."
"Only relax. He's just doing it the Lakota mode, past laying out the history. That'southward how we call back our history, by telling our story,"
"Merely does every story have to start with Columbus?"
"Everything starts with Columbus. At least everything to exercise with white people."
"But what's with the French fries?"
"He likes to get rid of the salt."
"No, the piles. First he insists on getting exactly twenty-viii, then he divides them into piles. It doesn't make whatever sense."
A small grinning crept across Grover'southward face. "How many piles?" he asked.
"4."
He spit one more fourth dimension onto the ground. It made a small puff of explosion in the dust. "Mmm. Twenty-eight French fries. Four piles of vii."
He fabricated a not bad charade of counting on his fingers. "Let's run across. Four seasons. Four directions. 4 stages of life.
"Seven council fires. Seven sacred rituals. The moon lives for twenty-eight days. Yep, I guess that doesn't make whatsoever sense."
"That'south crazy," I said. "What is it? Some kind of Lakota French fry rosary?"
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elderberry'south Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

"Only hither's what you've got to empathize. When you expect at black people, y'all see ghosts of all the slavery and the rapes and the hangings and the chains. When you expect at Jews, yous see ghosts of all those bodies piled up in the death camps. And those ghosts keep yous trying to do the right thing. "But when you wait at usa you don't see the ghosts of the little babies with their heads smashed in by rifle butts at the Large Hole, or the erstwhile folks dying by the side of the trail on the fashion to Oklahoma while their families cried and tried to make them comfortable, or the dead mothers at Wounded Knee or the little kids at Sand Creek who were shot for target practice. You lot don't run into any ghosts at all. "Instead y'all see casinos and drunks and junk cars and shacks. "Well, we see those ghosts. And they make our hearts pitiful and they hurt our little children. And when we try to say something, you tell u.s.a., 'Get over information technology. This is America. Look at the American dream.' But equally long as you're calling united states Redskins and doing tomahawk chops, nosotros tin't look at the American dream, considering those things remind us that we're not real human beings to you. And when people aren't humans, you tin turn them into slaves or kill six million of them or shoot them downwards with Hotchkiss guns and throw them into mass graves at Wounded Human knee. "No, we're not looking at the American dream, Nerburn. And why should we? We withal oasis't woken up from the American nightmare."
― Kent Nerburn, The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder'southward Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows

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