SOURCE: Highwater, Jamake. “The Myth is the Medium.” Commonweal 112 (22 March 1985): 183, 187-88.

In the following excerpt, Highwater provides a laudatory assessment of The Way of the Animal Powers, calling the volume a “masterful presentation” of aboriginal folklore and mythology.

Speaking of his painting, the American artist Arthur Dove said: “We cannot express the light in nature because we have not the sun. We can only express the light we have in ourselves.” It is not by accident that we have invented imagery that overcomes the limitations of language. Common to all of us is the manipulation of truth we call “poetic license.”

Our lives are filled with every conceivable ploy to escape or penetrate the “ordinary.” Even those of us who are most mundane despise our condition, and when we recount the simplest story it inevitably becomes something else: a “tall tale,” or a “fish story.” These terms are...