SOURCE: "Iterative Score from a Singulative Motif: Mountain Wolf Woman's Song of Herself," in A/B: Autobiography Studies, Fall, 1992, pp. 254-72.

In the essay below, Hearn discusses the existence of rhetorical devices, particularly the use of an iterative narrative style, in Mountain Wolf Woman, which she describes as "a series of teaching stories" about Winnebago history, customs, and beliefs.

Scholars have concluded that anthropologists often have imposed their Euro-centric biases on Native American life stories and that educated Native people have often followed certain European narrative forms. However, anthropologist Nancy Lurie, who recorded and annotated Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, belongs to a group of post-World War II anthropologists who [according to Hertha D. Wong in her 1992 Sending My Heart Back Across the Years] "are acutely self-conscious about the personal and cultural assumptions they bring to their examination of other...