Wolf Nor Dog Enterprises - Autographed books and gifts by Kent Nerburn

Kent Nerburn's Updates

Friends,

I spent the last week in South Dakota with filmmaker Steven Lewis Simpson, who is finally (fingers crossed), going to make the long-overdue film of Neither Wolf nor Dog. We spent the time visiting our respective friends in Pine Ridge and Rosebud, scouting locations, and going over the script line by line. Steve is a quirky and enigmatic character, a bit of a vagabond, but deeply insightful and well experienced in various aspects of film making. He is in the process of finishing up a documentary on Pine Ridge called "Thunder Being Nation" that gives one of the most clear-eyed looks at the reservation I have ever seen. He lets his camera tell the story, and it is, as anyone who spends time on reservations knows, a story that is at once tragic, joyful, and complex. Much like my friend, John Willis', book, Views from the Reservation, which I've mentioned before, it is the work of a man who understands his own limits of entry into a world not his own, yet has the capacity for sympathetic and even empathetic penetration into that world. I'm very excited to be working with him.
I'll write more about this as the project progresses.

--Kent
June 2011

New World Library is preparing to reissue The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life under the new title Ordinary Sacred. The cover will also be different. We will add the new image and title to our website when it is available. We still have limited quantities of the original cover and title available for purchase.

Six years ago I met a remarkable man. To meet him, you would not think there was anything remarkable about him. Quiet and unassuming almost to a fault, he fits seamlessly and unobtrusively into any situation in which you put him. And therein lies the story.

John Willis is a photographer. He photographs the world around him with the eye of the quiet watcher and the humility of one who understands the mystery of the ordinary. He is also a teacher, offering his skills to students at a small college in Vermont and taking students from New England, the Bronx, and the Navajo reservation in Arizona to work with students from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

It is there that I met him, and there that a collaboration began. This collaboration, of which I am only a small part, has resulted in Views from the Reservation, a remarkable book of photographs, essays, poems from young people, family snapshots, ledger drawings, and a CD of reservation music ranging from ceremonial songs to reservation hip-hop. It is an exceptional book, and one of which I am proud to be a part.

My essay in the book is one of the favorite pieces I have ever written. It has an honesty and intelligence about it, and captures, as best as I am able in words, some of the haunting majesty of the Pine Ridge reservation. It could not be otherwise; I had to rise to meet the profound honesty and respectful insight of John's imagery. In his work you see the reservation as it really is, not as you imagine it to be or want it to be. And you see it as if the photographer is not even there. My own work had to be the equal, as best as I could make it, of the imagery that the book contained.

If you, or anyone you know, has ever been to Pine Ridge, you know that in some indefinable way it contains the heartbeat of this country. You come away saddened, ennobled, confused, comforted, and changed. This experience is not reducible to words, and everyone who has shared in it struggles to communicate its effect.

Views from the Reservation comes the closest of any document I have ever seen to communicating that effect. To see the faces of the elders and the children, to hear the words of men like John Trudell and Gerard Baker, the first Native American superintendent of Mount Rushmore; to listen to the heartfelt struggles of reservation youth through their poetry and to see the never-before published snapshots taken by reservation residents of their home and family lives - is to come as close as possible to understanding the haunting power of the people and the place that is Pine Ridge. And the Native people who have seen the book agree.

I am proud to be able to offer a few copies of this book for sale. Look at the photos. Listen to the music. Allow the words and images to make their way into your heart.

They will bring those of you who know Pine Ridge back to this place that has worked its haunted magic on you. To those of you who have not been there, it will offer you a truth that needs to be told.