SOURCE: "Culture Change and Continuity: A Winnebago Life," in their American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, pp. 69-82.

Bataille and Sands are both American critics, educators, and editors who specialize in Native studies. In the following excerpt, they survey Mountain Wolf Woman's life, work, and heritage.

The purpose for the writing of Mountain Wolf Woman is different from almost all other ethnographic autobiographies. Where other recorder-editors often recorded women's stories as an incidental part of fieldwork, Nancy Lurie specifically requested the story and did so as an adopted niece of Mountain Wolf Woman [whom she knew as "Aunt Stella"]. With Mountain Wolf Woman in the position of aunt, and with the power of age and wisdom such a position connotes, it was both appropriate and necessary that she instruct her niece in the ways of the tribe. The association was one of long duration...