A review by oneeye
The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo: A Child, an Elder, and the Light from an Ancient Sky by Kent Nerburn

3.0

I just read all 3 of Nerburn's "Dan" trilogy (The Wolf at Twilight, Neither Wolf nor Dog and this book) in about 10 days. I have mixed feelings about these books. On the one hand, they contain a lot of wisdom, supposedly passed to the author by a Lakota elder named Dan. Nerburn does a good job of using Dan to highlight differences between Lakota and White culture and he is not afraid to portray himself as a bumbling white man who makes every cultural faux pax in the book while visiting the reservation. There are parts of this book that are just plain uncomfortable for a White person to read, and I commend the author for that. Clearly, he didn't take the easy road.

That said, I am uncomfortable with Nerburn's use of fiction in telling the story and transmitting the wisdom of someone we are led to believe is real. My problem is that I don't know where the fiction ends and the fact begins, and for this reason, I can't quite trust these books, or the author in telling Dan's story.