The history of the speaker's home state of Oregon reveals the conflation of laws targeting wolves and laws excluding people of color. The early government meetings placed a tax bounty on editors to kill wolves, reflecting the founding of the state on the expulsion of wolves. These early laws were followed by black exclusion laws, allowing only white people in the state. The speaker observed that the same people voting against wolves were also excluding people of color and Asian Americans, highlighting the embedded conflation in the language. The speaker also highlighted efforts to control hunting, profit from the land, and the parallel between wolf packs and human communities, suggesting that humans have learned from wolves for thousands of years.
The wolf carries an almost unbearable amount of symbolism in western culture, encapsulating the predatory, the carnal, the supernatural and the ravenous. But in her book Wolfish, Erica Berry suggests that it’s time to understand wolves differently: as tender, as hunted, as guardians of the landscape.
What’s more, those evil qualities may be better attributed to ourselves than to wolves. Berry weaves memoir with natural history, cultural critique, folklore and conservation to show that wolves have too often been a cypher for all our fears, and that this has left them under threat of extinction.
In this fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, recorded as part of Katherine’s True Stories Book Club, Erica discusses her experiences with wolves real and imagined.
Katherine's new book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
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