[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 emotional vibrations of the writer as well as the cultural milieu, documenting historic events and the autobiographer's relationships with members of society, encompassing both the inner and public lives of the subject over a lengthy period of time" [Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives, 1984]. David Brumble does in fact claim that Sam Blowsnake ("Crashing Thunder") was making a shift in American Indian autobiographies parallel to the conversion narrative of St. Augustine. It most certainly is an account of salvation; but with Radin's heavy editorial control, the "autobiography" is difficult to evaluate. Radin described it as a "rake's progress" and compared Blowsnake to Candide. Such an imposition of Western categories on a non-Western text is understandable, but also mis-leading. Thanks to Arnold Krupat's detailed study of American Indian autobiographies as "original, bicultural composite composition" in For Those Who Come After, the complexities of rendering an "authentic" Indian voice (when no traditional Indian would even have thought of "producing"—I use the word advisedly, for most "autobiographies" were dictated through interpreters—an autobiography) can be understood as a process whereby Western culture appropriates "the other" in its own terms….

Bataille and Sands, in American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives, do accept Mountain Wolf Woman's narrative as "literary," by which they mean techniques usually associated with literature: "dialogue, expression of inner emotions and responses to events, a first-person omniscient viewpoint, latitude in handling time and sequence of events, and an awareness of audience." But such techniques are not limited to self-consciously literary artifacts, and Mountain Wolf Woman's is not such an artifact. When Mountain Wolf Woman narrated in Winnebago what she thought was her complete story, which Lurie then asked a grandniece of Mountain Wolf Woman's to translate into English, Lurie was very disappointed. Mountain Wolf Woman used no more than a half reel of tape, and this version is included as Appendix A…. Lurie transformed her aunt's seemingly random and schematic recollections (which to Mountain Wolf Woman, of course, were not) into a form familiar to Western readers. Unlike many previous bicultural composers, Lurie makes no claims of having had no influence on her narratee's story; she meticulously outlines every step (and also resorts to extensive notes to add information for us that Mountain Wolf Woman assumed, correctly, any Winnebago relative—such as her niece—would understand). The narrator's intended audience, then, is Winnebago, not us. In a sense, we eavesdrop on a private conversation. Unlike Radin, who borrowed from previous narratives by Crashing Thunder, including some which may not even be by Crashing Thunder but reflect Radin's understanding of Winnebago (male) culture over many years, Lurie scrupulously set out her own methodology and motivation. Also, Crashing Thunder's text (one of them, at least) was written in a Winnebago syllabary by Crashing Thunder, whereas Mountain Wolf Woman told her story as a favor to her niece. This composition process can illuminate … culturally differing notions of self, role, and society, and lead them to question what "literature" in a Western sense has conventionally meant.

One result of Lurie's and Mountain Wolf Woman's collaboration is, as David Murray has commented [in Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts, 1991]:

[a] typical multi-layered sandwich, where we are given a foreword, a preface, the text with extensive footnotes, then the first brief version of her life given by Mountain Wolf Woman, which she extended when she saw Lurie's disappointment—indicating the role of white expectations in the creation of such texts…. At several points Lurie refers to "literary" and "scholarly" criteria which decided the style of the English version. Unfortunately [and rather like Bataille and Sands] she never develops what she means by these terms, and when we look at all of the layers of the "sandwich," questions of authenticity [and, I would amplify, "authorship"] become even more confusing. What role … does a letter from Mountain Wolf Woman, written in non-standard English … ü play in the combination of voices?… We are offered either her poor written English—which leaves us at a distance from her "real" voice, though it is her own actual product—or a translation of her speaking Winnebago which uses all the (white) literary and scholarly resources available to recreate a sense of her real presence and speech.

However, rather than a static sandwich (in which Mountain Wolf Woman's contribution in English would represent a dab of mustard), what we have is a plurivocal, indeed intervocal text that does not pretend to answer, only to raise, issues of cultural translation. This is hardly a feature of American Indian texts alone, but exploring Krupat's principle of original, bicultural composition encourages students to ponder Western notions of "authorship" / ownership and textual authority.

Comparing Mountain Wolf Woman's two narratives reveals at least three constant themes in her life (and other Winnebagoes'): frequent travel to visit a wide network of kin separated by various Federal policies, and in search of work and a syncretically satisfying spirituality in a time of drastic change…. Both start with "Mother" (not with "I") and both show her own satisfaction as mother, wife, and provider. She is no proto-feminist, and women's studies courses will properly teach her narrative as an illustration of non-Western gender arrangements. The original narrative, moreover, suggests that she did not "love" her second husband, marrying, as she did the first time, due to the patriarchal constraints imposed upon her by her brothers, not her father. The expanded narrative contains moving descriptions of her grief when her second husband dies, as well as when her son is reported wounded in World War II. The extended introspection, which Bataille and Sands regard as "literary," is to my mind a Western convention satisfying our notions of individual subjectivity. Mountain Wolf Woman's own sense of self is more action-oriented: "This is what I do. That is the way I am."