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Reviewed by:
  • The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories
  • Theodore Binnema
The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories. Hugh A. Dempsey. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Pp. 304, illus. $34.95

In 2002 Hugh Dempsey published Firewater, a first-rate narrative history of the whiskey trade of Montana and Alberta. The Vengeful Wife is Dempsey's book for 2003 (his fifteenth, if I'm not mistaken). Very unlike Firewater, The Vengeful Wife is similar to Dempsey's The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt (1994). In all of his books Dempsey combines his flair for biography and storytelling with his deep knowledge of and appreciation for the Blackfoot peoples and their past and with his vast knowledge of the documentary record and oral evidence to produce entertaining stories that resonate with an unromantic realism. But in books like The Vengeful Wife and The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt, Dempsey appears to relish the freedom that a semi-fictional prose style gives him to educate his readers even as he entertains them. It allows him to present some of his interpretations of Blackfoot history - rooted in many years of experience and research - for which he could not possibly provide citations. The vehicle of semi-fictional stories is not one that academic historians often find easy to deal with, and one they very rarely use, but The Vengeful Wife is not only a gift to the general reader but a contribution worthy of a scholarly press. [End Page 578]

The stories in The Vengeful Wife date from the period between the 1770s to the early twentieth century. In some ways the stories differ greatly. At least one is based purely on stories handed down by Blackfoot people from generation to generation, but at least one other cites only documentary evidence produced by non-Blackfoot people. Many include passages between quotation marks that are almost certainly not verbatim quotes of actual conversations. Some stories incorporate details (animal-human friendships, for example) that most contemporary readers will not accept as literally true, whereas others are rooted in attempts to reconstruct past events in ways typical of empirical historians. What connects all of these stories is Dempsey's desire to tell stories about the Blackfoot past in ways that draw upon authentic Blackfoot storytelling conventions. One can almost imagine each of these stories, if delivered orally, captivating and amusing a small audience gathered together to while away a long dark winter's evening.

The stories in this book deal with a variety of themes of interest to scholars, ranging from issues of childhood, gender relations ('They Acted Like Women'), and identity ('Was Mary White Really White?'), to the significance of warfare in Blackfoot life, and the challenges of adjusting to reserve life. Dempsey's stories do not portray the Blackfoot people either as noble or ignoble savages but as real people coping with the kinds of issues every human society faces. At the same time, Dempsey is a sympathetic and imaginative storyteller. Even those scholars who find it difficult to accept these stories as academic history might just find themselves lured and informed by the evocative and poignant stories. I suspect Dempsey would be pleased with that result.

Theodore Binnema
University of Northern British Columbia
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