Muskrat Stew and Other Tales of a Penobscot Life: The Life Story of Fred Ranco (review)

Muskrat Stew and Other Tales of a Penobscot Life: The Life Story of Fred Ranco vividly recounts the life of Fred Ranco, a full-blooded Penobscot Indian born in 1932 and raised on a Maine reservation. Though just a hundred pages, this slim volume nicely illuminates the trajectory of Ranco’s life, a blend of traditional Penobscot upbringing with modern American life. The memoir consists almost exclusively of Ranco’s oral history recollections, told in extensive first-person passages punctuated with occasional explanatory blurbs by interviewer and author Tara Marvel.

Muskrat Stew’s strength lies in Ranco’s detailed accounts of his 70-plus years, which include the harsh realities of the Great Depression (born less than three pounds, he was “incubated” on a shelf over his family’s kitchen stove), a footloose childhood (swimming for hours with no adult supervision, playing with weasels and snakes), and immersion in Penobscot traditions (inheriting his mother’s psychic abilities, snaring rabbits, hunting deer, and canoe-building with his grandfather).

Among those Penobscot traditions was muskrat stew, Ranco’s favorite food and the inspiration for the book’s title. “Muskrat stew seems to be a kind of Penobscot soul food,” Marvel writes, “something eaten in hard times, when there wasn’t much else to eat, but remembered fondly as a taste of the old ways” (9). While Ranco’s description of preparing muskrat for eating is almost uncomfortably graphic, his overall descriptions of the natural world — whether gathering sweetgrass or identifying dandelion greens and skunk cabbage — reveal an understated and intuitive connection to living off the land that he learned from his immediate and extended family.

One example of Ranco’s connection to nature involves his description of cutting bark as “a tricky thing. You gotta slash your knife to the left and back away at a forty-five degree angle into the bark . . . . If you try to cut straight with a knife, you split it or rip it” (55). Indeed, oral history is useful here at juxtaposing Ranco’s simple, direct speaking style, as when he noted that “My Dad liked carving. He kept me at it. I carved designs on canes” (48) with his seemingly mystical understanding of his heritage, such as when he said that “The Penobscots had engaged in deer drives in the fall for centuries . . . . There was a deer for each person on the drive even if they didn’t see one” (78).

Interestingly, the book reveals an absence of resentment by Ranco over white people’s intrusions into Penobscot life, such as the Catholic Church’s educational and religious indoctrination. Perhaps it is Ranco’s strong-willed and sometimes rebellious nature that accounts for this, or perhaps it is his culture’s spirituality that guides him. “There is no difference between God and Great Spirit,” he says (50).

Muskrat Stew makes a significant contribution to readers’understanding of twentieth-century Penobscot life in northern New England because Ranco’s rich and detailed anecdotes reveal a fading way of life without glamorizing that life. The book also makes a strong case for oral history as a mode of inquiry because Ranco’s recollections — and their unmediated and undiluted power — form the backbone of the narrative. Here, oral history adds insights to Native American scholarship by balancing large-scale, top-down history with more quotidian experiences about Ranco’s marriages, military service, and varied job experiences.

Ranco and Marvel knew each other for decades before collaborating on this book and their relationship gives the narrative a casual, easygoing tone. Nonetheless, the book squarely places Ranco’s experiences within the social and political context of his life, whether it be his father’s work...