Echo Loba, Loba Echo: The Metaphor of Wolf

(Hardback)

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A unique look at the cultural, environmental, historical, literary, metaphorical, and political role of the wolf.

Echo Loba, Loba Echo is a story about the metaphor of the wolf and how this is echoed in the lives and minds of people. A metaphor that embodies worldviews colliding, and the collision, the fallout, we live with still. It is a story about wolves own cultures, survival stories, acts of rebellion, and vital roles in maintaining healthy territories. And it is also a story about what we have been told to forget, or never even know, and what wolves show us about ourselves.

Through essay and poetry, the metaphor of the wolf, and loba for she-wolf is examined the way one might observe the light off a prism, in multi-dimensional ways. The associations are many and diametrically varied. Wolf as scapegoat, villain, outcast, blamed for human violence. Wolf as warrior, guide, mother to stray or orphaned children as well as her own pups. The Ojibwe word for wolf is maiingan: the one sent here by that all-loving spirit to show us the way. Wolf (Latin: lupus), which is another word for whore (lupa), for woman. Wolf, another word for backcountry. Yet the choice is not an easy duality, not simply between the notion of wolf as heroine or wolf as devil.

Author Bio

Sonja Swift is a writer and poet of hybrid forms. She has published a range of poems as well as various articles and photo essays. Her work has appeared in Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Langscape Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, the anthology Fire & Rain: Ecopoetry of California by Scarlet Tanager, Rock & Sling: a journal of witness, Barren Magazine, Wild Gods, an anthology by New Rivers Press, Kestrel Journal, and The Madrona Project: Human Communities in Wild Places published by Empty Bowl Press, among others. She is the author of Alphabet Atlas, a chapbook of prose poems published by Deconstructed Artichoke Press and Tarot of Transformation, a series of short stories published by True Story, a publication of Creative Nonfiction. She holds an MFA in writing from California College of the Arts, an individualized MA from Goddard College and a BA in cultural ecology from the University of California Santa Cruz. Sonja is Danish-American and comes from dusty, sometimes emerald, coastal hills amidst a chain of old volcanic peaks that stretch into the Pacific Ocean. Echo Loba, Loba Echo: Of Wisdom, Wolves and Women is her first book. Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabe writer, farmer and economist. She is the author of the novel Last Standing Woman, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming, The Militarization of Indian Country, The Sugar Bush, The Winona LaDuke Reader, and To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.