Reading Diary A: Blackfoot Stories

This week I read the Blackfoot unit, which focused on stories from the Blackfoot people. All involved animals in some way, but my favorite was The Wolf Man. In the story, a man has two wives who do very little to serve him. They don't cook or clean because they're too busy having a good time, and so the man decides to move them out away from other people so then women won't be distracted. They move and he continues to provide, but the women grow bored quickly. They decide to build a trap for the man and trick him into falling in a hole. When he does, they run back to the village and pretend he disappeared while hunting. What they don't realize, though, is that the man is still alive. He's dug out of the hole by a pack of wolves, and they use magic to make his head and hands like a wolf's. The man shows the wolves how to steal food from the humans, until he's finally captured and it's revealed that his wives had tried to kill him. I enjoyed the story because of the mix of supernatural and folktale. I liked that in many of the other stories as well, but I thought this story was particularly interesting because of the betrayal by the wives, and then the semi-betrayal by the Wolf Man in stealing food from people that used to be his neighbors.

What Wolf Man looked like, probably

Blackfoot Stories