Erené With Wolf Medicine

There are many surprises in this book. In Erené With Wolf Medicine Irene I. Blea skillfully introduces us to her Native American, Chicano, and dominant cultural experiences. She carries us with her when she moves from a mountain to rural farm life, to an industrial city, and produces an intense memoir about growing up in an extended family during an era when women were expected to fit into prescribed ways of being and seeing the world. This is also a story about the complexities of being tri-cultural in a dominant society that does not frequently validate a young girl with wolf medicine. Nevertheless, Blea grew into a woman when People of Color broke out of the old constrictive ways of being. She introduces us to the concept of genízaro and highlights how she used wolf medicine to navigate the intersection of race, class gender, and to define her own life while obtaining academic positions not normally held by those of her tri-cultural background. She did this in employment and as a Chicana poet, scholar, and feminist in the social justice movements of her era. Erené With Wolf Medicine demonstrates how difficult it was and still is for women to advance in the face of patriarchal and colonizer procedures, expectations, ways of thinking, and doing. One must rely on their inner power to overcome immense obstacles to redefine their own life.