Kent Nerburn

I just received an email from a reader who asked me to say a few words about each of my books because she wanted to buy some for gifts and thought I’d be the right person to give her advice.

It seemed like something that many readers might like, so I’m doing it as a post.

Native American Wisdom

A selection of salient quotes from important Native speakers and thinkers on issues such as The Ways of the Land, the Ways of Learning, The Ways of the Heart, and The Ways of Leading Others. It also has some interesting quotes that reflect Native thinkers’ opinions of the direction of our culture and civilization. I co-edited this with my wife, Louise Mengelkoch. It is a wonderful primer for people interested in the best of Native thought presented in aphorisms and short observations.

Soul of an Indian

Here I took the writings of one of the men I discovered while doing Native American Wisdom — Ohiyesa, or Charles Alexander Eastman — and tried to present it almost as a “gospel” of his thinking. I consider him one of the most insightful and spiritually clear thinkers of any Native person who has ever put pen to paper. As I wrote in my notes about the book, he was someone to whom I would entrust my country or my son. Enough said.

Wisdom of the Native Americans

This book contains the complete versions of Native American Wisdom, Soul of an Indian, and a book now out of print entitled Wisdom of the Great Chiefs. Wisdom of the Great Chiefs contained three extended speeches — one from Red Jacket given at the time of first contact with the European, in which the true confidence and clarity of the Indian at the time of contact is eloquently revealed; Chief Joseph’s speech in Washington D.C. in 1878 in which he lays out the sad trajectory of his people from before contact to their exile in Indian Territory after their flight and capture; and the most trustworthy version of the very problematic but very beloved speech of Chief Seattle that is so widely quoted and well-known to contemporary audiences.

A Haunting Reverence

The most poetic and interior book I ever wrote. A spiritual geography about the power of the land to shape the spirit of those who live on it. Highly praised by Robert Bly and now, sadly, out of print.

Neither Wolf nor Dog

My story of travels with an Indian elder across the Dakotas that is quickly becoming a standard in high school and college curricula across the nation and a classic in the field of Indian studies.

Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace

An extended meditation on the famous prayer of St. Francis, in which I use anecdotes from my life and the lives of others to illuminate the spiritual heart of that magnificent prayer.

Letters to My Son

Another book that has become a classic in its own way. My thoughts on the most important issues in life — falling in love, death and dying, The miracle of giving, The gift of the elders, etc. This book was my “firstborn” (other than the collection of Native American Wisdom), meant as a bequest to my son if I should die before he reached adulthood. It has a purity of heart that only first works ever have.

Simple Truths

A more succinct and spiritually focused version of Letters To My Son, with fewer anecdotes and applicability to all ages and both sexes. It is really a book of spiritual meditations on life’s most significant issues.

Small Graces

A meditation on the ordinary events of an ordinary day, trying to let the spiritual dimension of life shine through. My most domestic and familial-feeling book.

Calm Surrender

A book that is almost out of print, in which I wrestle with the difficult issue of forgiveness. Unfortunately named to sound like a book of acquiescence to fate, it is really a book about the need for a strong, clear, muscular response to the inequities in the world. It is filled with anecdotes and stories that illuminate the struggle that we face when asked to live a life of forgiveness in a world that sometimes offers up seemingly unforgiveable events.

Road Angels

Another book that is effectively out of print. Quite unlike anything else I have ever written. It was intended as a look at America as embodied in the West Coast at the end of the 20th century. I called it a book about what happens when people reach “the end of hope and the beginning of dream.” Reads like a novel; chronicles my return to the West and a journey I took down the coast from our northern border to Big Sur, and all places in between. Sadly misinterpreted as a “white male mid-life crisis” book, it was actually an impressionist painting of America’s West Coast and the nature of the American dream cloaked in the narrative of a journey.

Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce

You’ve all heard enough about this by now. A story we all need to know, in the same way we all need to know about our Japanese internment camps during WWII. Told as a story, not a history, and as close to accurate as 4 years of study, research, and conversations with the Nez Perce could make it.

The critical response to Joseph is good thus far. I thought the History Channel interview went well, though who among us likes to see ourself on TV? I will be curious to see the C-Span talk. I was, as I am fond of saying, “cutting through tall grass,” and I have no idea if it came off as interesting or diffuse. But I assure you that the Q and A is interesting. Think, “Book TV meets Jerry Springer.” Enough said.

For now, however, I have to try to twist some cyber-arms. I know Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce is a long read. As you’re all well aware, it was a “long write” as well.

I now truly need to prevail upon those of you who are reading it to write reviews in Amazon.com. Those reviews tell potential readers if the book is worth their time and dime. I want this story to get out, and you are the folks who can help that happen.

So check your C-Span schedule for the Book TV talk. And, in the meantime, submit a review to Amazon if you are able. I will appreciate it more than you know.

Well, this is late. But for those who are interested, I will be on History Center on the History Channel tomorrow — Sunday — at 6:30 Mountain, 7:30 Central, 8:30 Eastern and Pacific times. These are, unfortunately, A.M. times. Sorry to be so late on notification, but I just got home and found this out myself.

Hope a few of you can see it.

I believe it was one of Richard Nixon’s press secretaries who made the legendary comment, “Previous truths are now inoperative.”

Well, previous truths about my History Channel appearance are now inoperative. Apparently the scheduling was changed — such things happen on interview shows.

I will try to let you know when the show will air. If you are so inclined, you can go to historychannel.com and navigate your way through their schedule to see what they list for History Center on a given Sunday.

I know they do not show my segment as part of next week’s show. My guess is that the show, since it is about things Indian, will probably air near Thanksgiving.

Sorry for the mixup. I know my brother-in-law rousted my 88 year old mother in order to have her ready to watch, while I, with full knowledge that the segment was not being aired, was comfortably asleep under a pile of warm covers. So those of you who got up to watch and felt a small burr of irritability at my bad information are assuredly not alone.

I’ll do better next time. You will be duly informed when future truths become operative.

Now is the time when I have to call on you, my readers, for the help that keeps me going as a writer. I asked a while ago to hear from any of you who would be interested in helping promote Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce. I passed all of your kind offers of assistance on to HarperSanFrancisco, my publisher.

Whether they contacted any of you, I don’t know. Behind the corporate face it is just folks like you and me trying to do what they can in the time they can allot to a project. They pick and choose their spots, as well.

So, now, it becomes our task — yours, as readers, and mine, as author — to get the word out. Here is what you can do: Once you read the book, go to its location at Amazon.com. Go down to the place where it asks for Reader’s comments or reviews and submit one of your own.

Believe it or not, these matter. They are the one place where a potential reader can go to find out what other readers think. And most readers trust other readers. So, if you can help people understand what it is they will be reading, it assists them in making the decision as to whether or not to put their money and time on the line for this particular book.

I ask this for myself, obviously, but for the Nez Perce and native peoples of America more. If this story needs to be heard, as I believe it does, and my telling is a worthy way of getting that story heard, you, as readers, can perform the service of alerting people to the book that tells the story.

It is all part of that difficult balancing act where those of us who are non-native readers try to do what we can to help give a presence to a people for whom we feel an affinity and a responsibility. And for the native readers, it is a chance to weigh in on a book that might just tell a story that needs to be heard, and tell it in a way that will allow readers to enter into the hearts and mind of a people and an experience.

Please help me, the book, and the Nez Perce and other native people in this regard if you are able and so inclined. It will mean more than you know, more than any of us can know. Yours could be the review that makes the one person pick up the book who can help a child, promote a government decision on policy, or pass the word along to a person in a position to create change and understanding in our society.

Of such hopes is a writer’s life made. And now are the few weeks when this hope can be given shape and life.

Next week I go out again for a stretch — the most intriguing being a chance to speak to a gathering put together by Birchbark Books in Minneapolis — Louise Erdrich’s bookstore. What good and interesting folks, and Louise first among equals. She was truly a generous soul to take the time to read Joseph and write a kind and meaningful endorsement of it. (The reading takes place at 6:30 pm at Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church, 2020 West Lake of the Isles Parkway. Following the reading, I’ll sign copies at the bookstore.

I hope I’ll be able to return the favor by bringing some attention to her wonderful bookstore at my reading/talk. It appears that C-Span will be there, and as much as I look forward to the exposure it will give the story of Joseph, I am equally as excited about the prospect of bringing exposure to her unique and delightful bookstore.

Barnes and Noble’s are great for getting coffee and finding books and sitting down for a quiet read. But only in bookstores like Birchbark do you find yourself engaged in conversations with travelers from Germany and store personnel who are both fascinating and knowledgeable. This was my experience last time I was there, and it is my experience in almost every small, independent bookstore I have the pleasure of visiting. These are treasures that we need to support — with our dollars, our presence, and our continued patronage.

It began with limo rides and the assembly-line interview process in the various hallowed halls of the New York media, and ended in a monastery in St. John’s, Minnesota. In between there were college convocations, radio shows, and classrooms full of students. All in all, a whirlwind tour — not the sort of thing that I normally favor.

But this one was great. When things happen fast, you don’t have time to brood over weak performances or puff up over good ones. You just go forward, moving from one interviewer or group of people to another. I just sort of rode the tide. I’m going to tell you my two favorite moments — and they were not what one might expect.

The first was in the high-buck hotel in New York where I was installed. As a man who is most comfortable with cheap road motels where I can back my car up to the door and throw a bag on a bed, this kind of colonial grandeur with endless doormen and bellmen and waiters and pillow-fluffers is not only foreign, but disconcerting. I don’t feel like a sahib and I don’t find pleasure in being treated like one. I’d rather hump my own bags, leave my room unserviced so I can spread my things around, and, generally, be left alone. The mysterious ghostly presences who turn my room into an orderly, antiseptic showpiece every morning are unsettling. I can’t help but feel that someone who is living on life’s margins is being poorly paid to service my life — something I neither require nor deserve. So, I end up talking with the help rather than utilizing them.

In this case, I got into a long conversation with a porter at the hotel where I was staying. He was from Ireland and, in the fashion of those with a solid European education, was conversant with American history in general and Chief Joseph in particular. When he heard I was there for an interview on the History Channel, he was most intrigued and impressed. Since I, myself, was also intrigued and impressed, I didn’t try to disimbue him of the notion. Instead, I gave him a copy of Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce, inscribing it to him with a note of appreciation for his interest. He was duly appreciative — what else would one be, at least in public? But he seemed genuinely interested and genuinely moved.

Later in the day, when I was sitting in the palatial hotel lobby waiting for the car service to take me to the airport, I saw him standing in a group of his fellow porters excitedly showing them the book and the inscription.

How much more that meant to me than the smiles and “thank you’s” of the various interviewers for whom I left a copy of the book — one book among a dozen they probably receive every day and never have the time to read; at best, shelving them like trophies, or passing them on to friends as gifts.

But my Irish friend had probably never received an autographed book before. The pride and excitement I saw in his face while he was showing it to his colleagues was so genuine that it almost brought me to tears.

Then there was an encounter that did bring me to tears. A woman at one of the talks I gave in the Midwest came up afterward and told me that she had just lost her husband a few weeks ago and hadn’t gone out since. She was clearly grieving and in great emotional and spiritual pain.

“You are the only author I would have come out for,” she told me. She was one of the devotees of the St. Francis, Simple Truths, Small Graces, Calm Surrender side of my writing personality, and somewhere, sometime, something I had written had touched her so deeply that she was willing to believe that coming out to see me read and speak would offer her some measure of healing.

Whether it did or not, I can’t say. But it offered me peace and healing. Her presence was a gift of inestimable value to me, as was the excited appreciation of the porter in New York.

There were other wonderful moments — the graciousness of the people at the History Channel and the old radical station, WBAI, in New York; the warmth of the students and faculty at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota; and the high level of intellectual curiosity of the folks who came to hear me at St. Benedict’s College in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

As always, it was the human contact that mattered. The people who came up with honest and heartfelt “thank you’s,” the various drivers of the car service vehicles in New York who had come from Egypt, Trinidad, and Romania to seek whatever it is that America embodies in their dreams, the students who were hungry to hear that there is someone out there who will tell them to follow their hearts rather than the money.

These are the people I brought home with me in my heart and memory.

So, this has been a fall of human contact, and appears that it will continue in the same vein. What a pleasure after the private, watchful, almost ascetic reality of several years of writing.

I’m a better man for these last few weeks, and a better person for the folks I’ve met.