SOURCE: "'And Here I Am, Telling in Winnebago How I Lived My Life': Teaching Mountain Wolf Woman," in College Literature, Vol. 19, No. 3 & Vol. 20, No. 1, October, 1992 & February, 1993, pp. 233-36.

In the excerpt below, Gardner discusses the literary aspects of Mountain Wolf Woman.

[Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder] enjoys an unusual popularity for academic texts; it has been continuously in print for 31 years. Reasons for its enduring reputation include the upsurge of interest in American Indian literature and women's studies. Originally its editor, anthropologist Nancy Lurie, thought that an autobiography by her adoptive aunt Stella would be interesting in itself and, as the subtitle indicates, as a gender-specific comparison with the autobiography of Mountain Wolf Woman's brother Crashing Thunder produced by Paul Radin. But neither of these is an autobiography in such conventional Western senses as "confessional in form, exploring the inner labyrinth of the psyche, recording the...