Reader:  Robert Hodson

Respondent:  Janice Strasser-King

"The Last Wolf"

By: Mary Tallmountain

Unsettling America pg. 33-34

Bibliographical information:

Mary TallMountain was a Native Alaskan writer and elder who lived for many years in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. She is remembered for her generous encouragement of aspiring writers of all ages, from inner-city San Francisco to remote villages in Alaska where she taught poetry to children in her later years.  She was born in 1918 in Nulato, a village along the Yukon River in Alaska, to a Koyukon/Athabaskan mother and a Scots/Irish father. When her mother became terminally ill, Mary was adopted by a non-Native couple and taken away from her village. Traumatized first by losing her family and homeland, then by the harshness of mainstream American culture, she felt like an angry outsider for many years. Writing was a way of going home, of reclaiming her ancestry, her family and her homeland, and a way of claiming her own proud native voice. She passed away in 1997 at the age of 79.  http://www.freedomvoices.org/mary.htm

Objectives:

1a. Forced particpation-  Indians had no choice and were forced to live under the conditions of the newcomers

3b. "Loss and Survival"

(Whereas immigrants define themselves by leaving the past behind in order to become American, the Indians were once “the Americans” but lost most of their land along with many of their people. Yet Native Americans defy the myth of "the vanishing Indian," choosing to "survive," sometimes in faith that the dominant culture will eventually destroy itself, and the forests and buffalo will return.)

5c. To regard literacy as the primary code of modern existence and a key path to empowerment.

Literary Terms:

Tone- The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms defines this term as “the attitude of the author toward the reader or the subject matter of a literary work” (482).  Mary Tallmountain's tone is a tone of humbleness and helplessness but also has a tone of distress.

Imagery-  Imagery is language that evokes one or all of the five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching.  Mary Tallmountain uses vivid and descriptful words that give the reader a mental picture of what she is writing.

-Poem Reading- "The Last Wolf"

Interpretation of poem:

Put simply this poem is about how the Indian's land was taken from them and then turned into something that the Indians did not want.  Land that was once frontier is now a metropolitan-like city that was bulit by the new-comers to America.  Being forced to live in the city is sadly described by Mary Tallmountain. There is an underlying theme in the poem that hints blame on the newcomer for doing what he has done.  A sense of change back to a natural state is implied through the use of negativley descriptive words about the city.

Discussion Questions:

1.  Does the mention of east and west have any importance in this poem?  If so, what?    

3.  What is so symbolic about the wolf in this poem?

2.  What is meant by the Wolf's blue eyes burning yellow?

4.  In this poem who are they and what exactly have they done?