Fred McTaggart, doctoral student at the University of Iowa, came to
the Mesquakie Indians as a romantic and exploitative intruder in
the great white tradition. He wanted to capture their ancient
stories on his tape recorder, and he wanted, typically, to "help"
the Mesquakies preserve what he thought of as the last fragments of
a dying culture. He found out that the Mesquakies' oral tradition
was very much alive, and that it irrevocably excluded him. What he
did learn from the gentle but firm indirection of the Indians was a
great deal about himself - about his own acquisitive and
inattentive attitude towards experience. He portrays himself
truthfully and without mercy as he first bumbled around the
reservation, embarrassed and overeager. Then, as the Indians forced
him to listen and wait, he began to sense something of the
many-faceted function of their sacred stories - which teach both
wisdom and discipline - and to receive some of the same parabolic
instruction through his own experiences with them. The reader must
judge that he did not fully overcome his wistful romanticization of
Mesquakie culture, but did learn to respect its privacy, its
difference, and its resiliency; and he does convey a rudimentary
sense of its preservation of communal identity through living
history and its reverent intimacy with the natural world. His book
carries a quiet, useful message for white readers, much of it in a
new style: between the lines. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Mesquakies--popularly known as the Fox, or Sac and Fox,
Indians--were a large and powerful people in the Great Lakes region
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now they live on
approximately 3,000 acres of communal property near Tama, Iowa,
surrounded by white middle-class farmers.
"Wolf That I Am" is the story of a young white academic's
encounter with the Mesquakies whom he got to know while collecting
folklore for his dissertation. Fred McTaggart had expected to find
a dying oral culture. Instead, he found a thriving way of life
based on families and clans, linking the present-day Mesquakie
Indians with previous generations, including ancestors who lived
before the world was created in its present form. This encounter
with a people who live ideas instead of thinking them inspired
McTaggart to unlock secrets within himself.
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