the last book I ever read (The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, excerpt twelve)

from The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman:

St. Mary’s exerted a great influence on the tribe. By the time Rose attended, it had become less repressive. “We did do pow-wows and dances,” Rose said. “They saw that as social instead of spiritual.” But the school discouraged Native languages, ceremonies, and religion. Rose is still scarred from the school’s suppression of his Native identity.

“They used to tell us only humans had an immortal soul,” Rose said. “Nothing else in the natural world had a spirit. My mother would take my brother and me out to these ceremonies back in the woods. We’d learn from the elders that everything in the creation had a spirit. That was one of the first conflicts as a grade-school kid that I had trouble understanding.” The wolf, who the elders taught Rose was a blood brother to the Ojibwe, was soulless in Catholic theology. Rose sees a reason for that. “The wolf is always vilified in the Western tradition,” Rose said. In European literature, you can go all the way back to children’s fairy tales—‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ‘Three Little Pigs.’ Then you get into some of the adult tales, like the werewolves of Transylvania. The wolf is one of the most powerful symbols of wilderness, and that’s what they want to exploit as a resource. They can do that in good biblical conscience.”