The Wolf at Twilight

The book offers many criticisms of white people’s values. 

The Indians say white people are controlled by clocks (and bells.) In what way does the clock control your life? Did you share Nerburn’s anxiety when the Indians took so long to get ready to go places?

It bothered Nerburn not to know where they were going. How easy is it for you to just go with the flow and let someone else lead the way when you don’t know where you’ll end up? Could you have stuck with this journey in the face of Nerburn’s frustrations?

As part of a soliloquy, Dan says “You were always trying to change things, to make them better, to make them different. It was like the world that the Creator had made was not good enough for you…This seemed to us like an unhappy way to live.” How do you look at this? How might the country we live in be different if white settlers had adopted Indian ways?

What did you think of Dan? Was he too preachy? Did it matter to you that the character was based on a real Lakota elder? The Wolf at Twilight is the middle book of a trilogy. Did reading it make you want to go back and read the first book, Neither Wolf nor Dog, or continue on with The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo?

The Indians joked that Spam is the “white man’s pemmican.” (Pemmican=dried meat and berries pounded and mixed with rendered fat.) Do you like spam—and if so, how do you eat it—does a slab on white bread with a little ketchup work for you? What did you think about the rest of the Indian diet as depicted in the book?

Dan’s Indian friends conspired to create and install a grave marker for Yellow Bird without telling Dan or Nerburn. What did you think about that? Was it patronizing? What difference would it have made if they had brought the headstone to install with Dan’s knowledge instead of pretending it was there all along? Why do you think they installed the marker in the woods instead of in the graveyard where the cross was found?

 What did you think of the description of the sweat? Would you like to experience one for yourself?

The Indians expected Nerburn to pay their expenses along the way and he accepted it that. How did you feel about this? Was it fair?

Nerburn accepted the task of finding Yellow Bird, but it brought him a great deal of anxiety. He constantly worried that he would or had already failed. What do you think drove him to continue?

The Indian Nerburn encountered in a café told him that going to boarding school, “changed me. I am no longer myself. I am someone else.” What do you think he meant? How would life be different for Indians if there had been no boarding schools, but the world continued to change around them?

Those who attended Indian boarding schools have a variety of perspectives. Native Americans Chester Nez (Code Talker) and, Joy Harjo (Crazy Brave) wrote about the positive aspects of their experiences in spite of hardships they endured. On the other hand, William Kent Krueger (This Tender Land) and Kent Nerburn (this book), wrote fictionalized accounts of terrible abuse. How do we reconcile these differing reports or do we need to?

Two dogs play significant roles in the book, beginning with the burial of Fatback and ending with Charles Bronson pointing the way to Yellow Bird’s grave.  How did they add to or distract from the story for you?  Any thoughts about why Grover disliked Bronson for much of the book?

Nerburn said he chose to start the narrative with the white guy to help ease white people into the story. Did that approach work for you?

In what way, if any, did this book contribute to your understanding of Indians?