Two Cent Review #2

Review of Wolverine Creates the World: Labrador Indian Tales

Wolverine Creates the World: Labrador Indian Tales
Collected and retold by Lawrence Millman
1993
Capra Press, Santa Barbara
P.O. Box 2068, Santa Barbara, CA, 93120, USA
ISBN 0-88496-363-2
paperback: $12.95
152 pages


Well folks this is a good one if you have an interest in the boreal north,
cannibals, or trickster tales.  Unlike the ethnographers of an earlier era,
Millman retells these tales in a blunt, straight forward manner.  No polite
euphemisms to protect the blushing reader from the crude images of the
savage story teller.  Millman respects the native storey tellers, their
stories and the reader alike by retelling them much as he heard them.

There are 64 stories representing a wide range of themes from this very
ancient oral tradition.  So old that one of the monsters, when described
sounds remarkably like a mammoth.  

I was struck over and over by just how alien the culture that produced these
stories really is.  And I am fascinated by how they reveal the strains and
anxieties felt collectively and individually.  As a people living in widely
dispersed small bands, often just a caribou hunt away from starvation they
were clearly obsessed with the threats of cannibalism, incest and the
general unpredictability of nature.  Yet even the stories about these
topics, while carrying a serious cautionary message, are laced with wit and
humor. 

I loaned this book to my friend Gordon Willis who works in the admissions
office of the Bangor Mental Health Institute.  He enjoyed it himself and
reports that many of his co-workers at the Institute did as well.
Apparently several female psychiatrists were the most enthusiastic about the
book.     


>From a conversation between Millman and one of his sources:

        "You believe these old stories, tshinish?
        "No, I don't believe them.  But they're true anyway."