Every year for the past 12 years Gustavus first year students have been encouraged to read the Reading in Common Book.  Traditionally, books are chosen based on recommendations and the availability of the author to speak at Gustavus.  This year, the book The Wolf at Twilight has been chosen as the Reading in Common Book. Despite its title, it does not run the parallels that one would think it to have with the popular Twilight series. In fact, the novel sends a completely different message about Native Americans and what it means to be different.

The story begins with a note left on a car windshield, an old dog that 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.

The Wolf at Twilight is actually a follow-up of sorts to Nerburn’s nationally acclaimed book Neither Wolf Nor Dog, which was published in 1994. The Wolf at Twilight follows the author as he rekindles a friendship with a Lakota elder named Dan. The story reveals the Native American way of teaching and learning and also unmasks the complicated relationship between a white American and a Dakota Indian. Nerburn also uncovers a common occurrence in the late 19th and early 20th century when many Native American children were taken from their families and sent away to boarding schools where teachers forced them to abandon their tribal traditions and learn English.

“I didn’t know this was a sequel,” Sophomore student Blia Xiong, who has read the book recently, said. “I actually think it read pretty well on its own. I thought it was so good that I even wanted to read the first book. I think a lot of what the author talked about was insightful and would fit perfectly well with the new first-years next fall.”

She also said that last year’s Reading in Common book Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet did well in helping students be proud of who they were and facilitated the assimilation of moving into college culture, this new book will present a different, often, unexplored side of Native Americans.”

Junior Management Major Alaina Ramsburg, Gustie Greeter and head of the committee that picked this book back in November and December, explained how the book was chosen: “We took in books based on submissions of ideas and voted on 5 or 6  different books. The committee consisted of both students and faculty, all of whom met together and read the books. We discussed them at length and finally chose The Wolf at Twilight. We chose it because we had never had a book concentrating on the Native American population before. Especially in this area, it’s really important to note the significance of that. Next year is the sesquicentennial anniversary as well, and it’s worth teaching students about the massacre of hundreds of Native Americans.

Other books considered were This I Believe which is a collection of essays. Listening is an Act of Love, and The House at Sugar Beach. It became a unanimous decision that The Wolf at Twilight would be chosen.

“Out of those,” Ramsburg said, “it was a pretty natural choice; the committee gravitated towards the book. It’s a fictionalized account based on true events. You get what happened in actual history, but written in a way where it grabs your attention right away. The Gustavus community would definitely like it. It reads great and it’s suspenseful, you actually want to read until the end.”

One of the goals of the Reading in Common books is to introduce new students to what college reading is all about. “We want to impart knowledge [on] these students,” Ramsburg said. “The Indian Boarding Schools were things that were skipped out of in history. Some people don’t even know about this huge part in history.  A lot of time, people don’t have the time to read just a good piece of fiction, and we’d like to encourage that.”

The author, Kent Nerburn, will be coming to campus, bringing along two friends of his who are Native American providing both perspectives—that of the “white man” and those of the Native American, as well.