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Adolf Hungry Wolf interview (1997)
Literary loner Adolf Hungry Wolf, 52, is a classic B.C. backwoods do-it-yourselfer. From his 1922 CPR caboose number 436788, about 20 minutes north of Skookumchuck and 50 kilometres from Cranbrook, on a grassy meadow overlooking the Kootenay River, without electricity or a telephone, working by the light of a kerosene lamp, the California-educated railway buff and Blackfoot Confederacy spiritualist has created more than 50 books. Translated into four other languages, he's one of Canada's most prolific self-supporting authors. But if you've never heard of him, you're hardly alone. Adolf Hungry Wolf isn't famous for two good reasons. Having married a Blackfoot Indian from the Blood Reserve near Fort McLeod, he avoids seeking publicity in deference to teachings they've received from Native elders. "I feel free to go along with p.r. when it comes my way," Hungry Wolf says, "but not to actively seek it out." Hungry Wolf is also leery of those who would denigrate his beliefs. Once stung by a reporter at the Frankfurt Book Fair who dubbed him a 'Teutonic Grey Owl', he has been the subject of a 'wanted poster' circulated by a militant Native group in the 1970s and more recently he's been called a 'plastic shaman' by Greg Young-ing of Penticton.
"To all that," he replies, "I'm happy to say that my wife, children and I continue to be keepers for two of the Blackfoot tribe's sacred medicine bundles, whose teachings regarding life in harmony with nature we've been learning for the past 30 years... Through all these years of attending the tribal ceremonials, we've never seen any of our critics there, so I'm left to wonder upon what they base their comments about our cultural life."
In 1996, Beverly Hungry Wolf, who has been designing and teaching a new Native language course at Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana, published a sequel to her bestseller, The Ways of My Grandmothers, called Daughters of the Buffalo Women: Maintaining the Tribal Faith (Canadian Caboose Press $14.95). Also in 1996, AHW released his 50th book, Mountain Home: Tales of Seeking a Family Life in Harmony with Nature (Canadian Caboose $14.95), along with two new books based on his recent trips to Cuba, Trains of Cuba: Steam - Diesel & Electric (Canadian Caboose $16.95) and Letters From Cuba; Simple Living with Vintage Cars, Old Trains and Friendly People (Canadian Caboose $17.95).
BCBW sought out Adolf Hungry Wolf in July of 1997.
Adolf Hungry Wolf was born Adolf Gutohrlein [meaning 'Good Little Ear'] in southern Germany in 1944 to a Swiss father and a Hungarian mother.
"I grew up without any sort of personal roots," he says. "My parents lived in a foreign country and I never met my grandparents." One grandfather had been a railway man; his father loved the Alps; and like many boys raised in the devastation of post-war Germany, 'AHW' romanticized the life of North American Indians. His writing career would incorporate all three influences. At age ten, in 1954, he moved with his parents to southern California. Having Adolf as a first name, as a German immigrant, didn't exactly help matters. Four years later, mostly with his paper route earnings, he bought a small parcel of remote mountainous land and began listening to the stories of an elderly Indian couple and befriending a park ranger.
In his late teens he jettisoned plans to be a lawyer and sought the spiritual compensations of nature and the wisdom of Native elders. "This was before the cultural revival," he says. "In those days the elders where delighted to have someone, even a non-Indian, show an interest in something they thought would be lost when they died."
While studying Native history at university he also visited tribes in the U.S. and Alberta, meeting the likes of Jim 'Last Gun' White Calf, the last surviving Blackfoot buffalo hunter. In 1969 he published his first spirituality booklet, with hand-lettered captions, called Life in Harmony with Nature, which has been through 12 printings.
A self-appointed acolyte, Adolf began dressing in moccasins and braiding his hair. While eating stew one night with an Indian family, the wife mentioned he ate like a hungry wolf -- and the name stuck. Legally, he became Adolf Hungry Wolf but he was still an outsider. Beverly Little Bear changed all that.
Little Bear had left the Blood Reserve to attend college in Lethbridge. Accompanying her brother to a Blackfoot powwow in Montana, Beverly Little Bear was intrigued to see a white man listening intently to Indian elders.
"I soon realized he knew a great deal more about my heritage than I did," she says.
That night, at the Montana powwow, when she talked at length with the strange Californian with the German name, Beverly Little Bear was inspired by his hopes and plans to revive tribal culture. They married a year later and spent two years in an old log house on the Blood Reserve, near the home of Beverly's parents. They moved to Good Medicine Ranch at Skookumchuck Prairie in 1973.
"Good Medicine is the theme of my life," he says.
With the arrival of children, AHW obtained a 1922 CPR caboose for his office. Beverly, who also writes and edits books, subsequently acquired her own caboose. In 1975, as described in Equinox, the couple became involved in an historic event that brought back to the Blood Tribe its its ancient and revered Longtime Medicine Pipe Bundle.
Adolf Hungry Wolf dreamed that a Blackfoot elder named Many-Gray-Horses was conducting a strange ceremony on the lawn of the Provincial Museum of Alberta. This museum had previously purchased the bundle for $3,000. Inspired by this dream, Many-Gray-Horses and his wife drove with Beverly and Adolf Hungry Wolf to the museum and walked away with the bundle.
This 'retrieval' of the medicine bundle helped spark a revival of Blackfoot beliefs. Hungry Wolf has since been initiated into the Brave Dog warrior society and his family has been entrusted with two medicine bundles.
As well, the Hungry Wolfs have assembled some 20,000 photographs and archival images of Blackfoot culture, including nearly 4,000 from the 1800s and early 1900s, all currently locked in a fireproof vault. They hope to one day publish an exhaustive pictorial history of all four divisions of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
The couple have also raised four fully grown children -- three sons, Wolf, Okan, Iniskim; and a daughter, Star. All were taught school by correspondence; and all were taught to respect nature.
With herds of elk grazing on the property, the Hungry Wolfs will delay early morning trips to the outhouse until the various animals move back into the trees. The children were also taught prayers at mealtimes and are learning the Blackfoot ceremonies to mark the passing of each season.
Over the years the whole family has helped to fulfill mail order book orders for Good Medicine Books and Canadian Caboose Press from the family's caboose warehouse. Okan Hungry Wolf, now 24, has provided book illustrations, produced a series of railway cards, developed a series of railway videos and has accompanied his father and his brother Iniskim on research trips.
"Most of my books have been slow but steady sellers," says Hungry Wolf. "They've been just enough to support my family in our simple lifestyle. I don't think the business would have survived these past 28 years had we been in Toronto or Vancouver.
"I hardly know any other writers and I take no part whatsoever in the publishing world's social life. Most of my friends live within the fields that I write about -- nature, Native culture, railroading and Cuba -- and most of them don't read books, including mine."
The Hungry Wolf acreage includes four cabooses and five vintage boxcars, a collection which constitutes the Rocky Mountain Freight Train Museum. Usually not open to the public, it's operated by the family-controlled Good Medicine Cultural Foundation and Historical Society.
As a lifelong railway buff, AHW released the first of his many books in 1964, Rayonier, Inc.: Railroading in the Northwest Pines (Trans-Anglo Books, Los Angeles), a project he began as a high school student at age 16. Although he hasn't lived in his caboose since 1991, Hungry Wolf continues to avidly conduct research as one of the world's foremost experts on old trains, having most recently made several forays to Cuba.
Cuba has the world's biggest assortment of operational American-made steam locomotives, making Cuba a Mecca for train worshippers. Railway afficionados will appreciate Hungry Wolf's newly published guide to 331 steam engines for 63 sugar mills; 76 of which are operating on narrow gauge rails. Engines include an 1878 Baldwin 0-4-2T and a 1925 Alco-Cooke Mikado.
"This is the book I wish I could have had for my first visit to Cuba in 1993," he says.
Based on three more trips since 1993, his Letters from Cuba presents Cuba beyond the tourist enclaves. "Cubans are the friendliest people I've ever encountered," he writes. "I had expected to find fiery-eyed, bearded revolutionaries quoting Marx and Engels on every street corner, or carrying machine guns and shouting 'Death to America'."
Ostensibly a series of holiday letters sent to friends and family, Letters is an off-the-beaten-track travelogue that mixes history and cultural observations with informal encounters and humorous asides. Adolf Hungry Wolf and his sons were warmly welcomed by rural Cubans who appreciated their fascination with antiquated machinery as well as their compatible attitudes towards community.
Forsaking Havana's nightlife in favour of railway outposts, Hungry Wolf gleaned a sympathetic view of the Cuban people, many of whom are increasingly dependent on tourist dollars and the black market for their basic supplies. It's an economic formula that breeds vice and degradation. "Beach, cigars, rum and women," he says, sadly. "Those are the four reasons most tourists go to Cuba these days. Not necessarily in that order."
While he is sometimes critical of the Cuban government, he is far more distressed by current American policies, such as the Helms-Burton Law. "America has seen fit to expand ties with communist China which is more totalitarian than Cuba," he writes.
To express his camaraderie with the Cubans, Hungry Wolf acquired written permission from the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa to bring 40 copies of Letters and 32 copies of Trains to present to the people he has written about. This spring he returned to Cuba for a fifth time to make the deliveries.
"Imagine the reaction of my friends when I handed them a brand new book with their picture inside -- or, in the case of my adopted family -- with their group portrait right on the front cover, in full colour. These are dirt poor peasants who've never been to Havana, much less seen the rest of the world.
"'People everywhere will know us!' they said. "They had never seen a book in their house with North American mass market quality. Several put their hands to their mouths in amazement when I nodded to their inquiries if the $17.95 price on the cover was real. They don't see that much money between them in a month."
Cubans are eager to have their lives documented, unlike many contemporary Natives. If a financial backer can be found, Hungry Wolf's next project will be a coffee table book celebrating Cuba and its people. Meanwhile he was able to attend a political rally and sit within 50 feet of Fidel Castro, taking pictures, and he realized a lifelong fantasy -- to turn back the clock and work as a locomotive engineer on a narrow gauge railroad.
"During my two weeks at the throttle of a 1910 Baldwin Consolidation," he says, "we had several minor derailments, one near-disaster of a breakdown and one dangerous collision with a bull that we hit and killed on a bridge. I got callouses, the darkest tan I've ever had, even with sunscreen protection, and a new appreciation of what it takes to keep ancient transportation functioning."
Hungry Wolf's love of old trains and old cars -- which he says make Cuba's streets resemble movie sets -- is matched by his disinterest in newfangled computers.
"I'm fascinated by the potentials of computers and things like CD-Rom but I have no interest whatsoever to get one of them or learn how to use them," he says. "My Swiss father was a precision machinist who was always designing and making things. Maybe I got my drive from him. I've always got six or seven writing projects going. But whereas he was fascinated by technology, I've spent much of my life trying to live with little of it.
Without electricity, Hungry Wolf relies on a pair of heavy Olympia manual typewriters for all his output, often keeping a big pot of stew simmering on the wood stove. He takes frequent breaks from writing, sometimes running in the woods with his dogs or riding his kayak through the backwaters of the Kootenay River. Other times he makes the six-kilometre round trip on his mountain bike over an old logging road that connects his homestead to the nearest highway.
It's a frugal life, rich in nature. Part of the year he bathes in the Kootenay River; the rest of the year he heats buckets of crystal clear mountain water on the stove, raised from a well by an always-reliable hand pump.
"I hope my final pages are written on an old office typewriter," he says, "and lit up by kerosene lamps."
Daughters 0-920698-56-5; Home 0-920698-54-9; Trains of Cuba 0-920698-46-8; Letters from Cuba 0-920698-52-2. These Canadian Caboose Press books are distributed in Canada by Heritage House.
[BCBW 1997] "Interview"
"To all that," he replies, "I'm happy to say that my wife, children and I continue to be keepers for two of the Blackfoot tribe's sacred medicine bundles, whose teachings regarding life in harmony with nature we've been learning for the past 30 years... Through all these years of attending the tribal ceremonials, we've never seen any of our critics there, so I'm left to wonder upon what they base their comments about our cultural life."
In 1996, Beverly Hungry Wolf, who has been designing and teaching a new Native language course at Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana, published a sequel to her bestseller, The Ways of My Grandmothers, called Daughters of the Buffalo Women: Maintaining the Tribal Faith (Canadian Caboose Press $14.95). Also in 1996, AHW released his 50th book, Mountain Home: Tales of Seeking a Family Life in Harmony with Nature (Canadian Caboose $14.95), along with two new books based on his recent trips to Cuba, Trains of Cuba: Steam - Diesel & Electric (Canadian Caboose $16.95) and Letters From Cuba; Simple Living with Vintage Cars, Old Trains and Friendly People (Canadian Caboose $17.95).
BCBW sought out Adolf Hungry Wolf in July of 1997.
Adolf Hungry Wolf was born Adolf Gutohrlein [meaning 'Good Little Ear'] in southern Germany in 1944 to a Swiss father and a Hungarian mother.
"I grew up without any sort of personal roots," he says. "My parents lived in a foreign country and I never met my grandparents." One grandfather had been a railway man; his father loved the Alps; and like many boys raised in the devastation of post-war Germany, 'AHW' romanticized the life of North American Indians. His writing career would incorporate all three influences. At age ten, in 1954, he moved with his parents to southern California. Having Adolf as a first name, as a German immigrant, didn't exactly help matters. Four years later, mostly with his paper route earnings, he bought a small parcel of remote mountainous land and began listening to the stories of an elderly Indian couple and befriending a park ranger.
In his late teens he jettisoned plans to be a lawyer and sought the spiritual compensations of nature and the wisdom of Native elders. "This was before the cultural revival," he says. "In those days the elders where delighted to have someone, even a non-Indian, show an interest in something they thought would be lost when they died."
While studying Native history at university he also visited tribes in the U.S. and Alberta, meeting the likes of Jim 'Last Gun' White Calf, the last surviving Blackfoot buffalo hunter. In 1969 he published his first spirituality booklet, with hand-lettered captions, called Life in Harmony with Nature, which has been through 12 printings.
A self-appointed acolyte, Adolf began dressing in moccasins and braiding his hair. While eating stew one night with an Indian family, the wife mentioned he ate like a hungry wolf -- and the name stuck. Legally, he became Adolf Hungry Wolf but he was still an outsider. Beverly Little Bear changed all that.
Little Bear had left the Blood Reserve to attend college in Lethbridge. Accompanying her brother to a Blackfoot powwow in Montana, Beverly Little Bear was intrigued to see a white man listening intently to Indian elders.
"I soon realized he knew a great deal more about my heritage than I did," she says.
That night, at the Montana powwow, when she talked at length with the strange Californian with the German name, Beverly Little Bear was inspired by his hopes and plans to revive tribal culture. They married a year later and spent two years in an old log house on the Blood Reserve, near the home of Beverly's parents. They moved to Good Medicine Ranch at Skookumchuck Prairie in 1973.
"Good Medicine is the theme of my life," he says.
With the arrival of children, AHW obtained a 1922 CPR caboose for his office. Beverly, who also writes and edits books, subsequently acquired her own caboose. In 1975, as described in Equinox, the couple became involved in an historic event that brought back to the Blood Tribe its its ancient and revered Longtime Medicine Pipe Bundle.
Adolf Hungry Wolf dreamed that a Blackfoot elder named Many-Gray-Horses was conducting a strange ceremony on the lawn of the Provincial Museum of Alberta. This museum had previously purchased the bundle for $3,000. Inspired by this dream, Many-Gray-Horses and his wife drove with Beverly and Adolf Hungry Wolf to the museum and walked away with the bundle.
This 'retrieval' of the medicine bundle helped spark a revival of Blackfoot beliefs. Hungry Wolf has since been initiated into the Brave Dog warrior society and his family has been entrusted with two medicine bundles.
As well, the Hungry Wolfs have assembled some 20,000 photographs and archival images of Blackfoot culture, including nearly 4,000 from the 1800s and early 1900s, all currently locked in a fireproof vault. They hope to one day publish an exhaustive pictorial history of all four divisions of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
The couple have also raised four fully grown children -- three sons, Wolf, Okan, Iniskim; and a daughter, Star. All were taught school by correspondence; and all were taught to respect nature.
With herds of elk grazing on the property, the Hungry Wolfs will delay early morning trips to the outhouse until the various animals move back into the trees. The children were also taught prayers at mealtimes and are learning the Blackfoot ceremonies to mark the passing of each season.
Over the years the whole family has helped to fulfill mail order book orders for Good Medicine Books and Canadian Caboose Press from the family's caboose warehouse. Okan Hungry Wolf, now 24, has provided book illustrations, produced a series of railway cards, developed a series of railway videos and has accompanied his father and his brother Iniskim on research trips.
"Most of my books have been slow but steady sellers," says Hungry Wolf. "They've been just enough to support my family in our simple lifestyle. I don't think the business would have survived these past 28 years had we been in Toronto or Vancouver.
"I hardly know any other writers and I take no part whatsoever in the publishing world's social life. Most of my friends live within the fields that I write about -- nature, Native culture, railroading and Cuba -- and most of them don't read books, including mine."
The Hungry Wolf acreage includes four cabooses and five vintage boxcars, a collection which constitutes the Rocky Mountain Freight Train Museum. Usually not open to the public, it's operated by the family-controlled Good Medicine Cultural Foundation and Historical Society.
As a lifelong railway buff, AHW released the first of his many books in 1964, Rayonier, Inc.: Railroading in the Northwest Pines (Trans-Anglo Books, Los Angeles), a project he began as a high school student at age 16. Although he hasn't lived in his caboose since 1991, Hungry Wolf continues to avidly conduct research as one of the world's foremost experts on old trains, having most recently made several forays to Cuba.
Cuba has the world's biggest assortment of operational American-made steam locomotives, making Cuba a Mecca for train worshippers. Railway afficionados will appreciate Hungry Wolf's newly published guide to 331 steam engines for 63 sugar mills; 76 of which are operating on narrow gauge rails. Engines include an 1878 Baldwin 0-4-2T and a 1925 Alco-Cooke Mikado.
"This is the book I wish I could have had for my first visit to Cuba in 1993," he says.
Based on three more trips since 1993, his Letters from Cuba presents Cuba beyond the tourist enclaves. "Cubans are the friendliest people I've ever encountered," he writes. "I had expected to find fiery-eyed, bearded revolutionaries quoting Marx and Engels on every street corner, or carrying machine guns and shouting 'Death to America'."
Ostensibly a series of holiday letters sent to friends and family, Letters is an off-the-beaten-track travelogue that mixes history and cultural observations with informal encounters and humorous asides. Adolf Hungry Wolf and his sons were warmly welcomed by rural Cubans who appreciated their fascination with antiquated machinery as well as their compatible attitudes towards community.
Forsaking Havana's nightlife in favour of railway outposts, Hungry Wolf gleaned a sympathetic view of the Cuban people, many of whom are increasingly dependent on tourist dollars and the black market for their basic supplies. It's an economic formula that breeds vice and degradation. "Beach, cigars, rum and women," he says, sadly. "Those are the four reasons most tourists go to Cuba these days. Not necessarily in that order."
While he is sometimes critical of the Cuban government, he is far more distressed by current American policies, such as the Helms-Burton Law. "America has seen fit to expand ties with communist China which is more totalitarian than Cuba," he writes.
To express his camaraderie with the Cubans, Hungry Wolf acquired written permission from the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa to bring 40 copies of Letters and 32 copies of Trains to present to the people he has written about. This spring he returned to Cuba for a fifth time to make the deliveries.
"Imagine the reaction of my friends when I handed them a brand new book with their picture inside -- or, in the case of my adopted family -- with their group portrait right on the front cover, in full colour. These are dirt poor peasants who've never been to Havana, much less seen the rest of the world.
"'People everywhere will know us!' they said. "They had never seen a book in their house with North American mass market quality. Several put their hands to their mouths in amazement when I nodded to their inquiries if the $17.95 price on the cover was real. They don't see that much money between them in a month."
Cubans are eager to have their lives documented, unlike many contemporary Natives. If a financial backer can be found, Hungry Wolf's next project will be a coffee table book celebrating Cuba and its people. Meanwhile he was able to attend a political rally and sit within 50 feet of Fidel Castro, taking pictures, and he realized a lifelong fantasy -- to turn back the clock and work as a locomotive engineer on a narrow gauge railroad.
"During my two weeks at the throttle of a 1910 Baldwin Consolidation," he says, "we had several minor derailments, one near-disaster of a breakdown and one dangerous collision with a bull that we hit and killed on a bridge. I got callouses, the darkest tan I've ever had, even with sunscreen protection, and a new appreciation of what it takes to keep ancient transportation functioning."
Hungry Wolf's love of old trains and old cars -- which he says make Cuba's streets resemble movie sets -- is matched by his disinterest in newfangled computers.
"I'm fascinated by the potentials of computers and things like CD-Rom but I have no interest whatsoever to get one of them or learn how to use them," he says. "My Swiss father was a precision machinist who was always designing and making things. Maybe I got my drive from him. I've always got six or seven writing projects going. But whereas he was fascinated by technology, I've spent much of my life trying to live with little of it.
Without electricity, Hungry Wolf relies on a pair of heavy Olympia manual typewriters for all his output, often keeping a big pot of stew simmering on the wood stove. He takes frequent breaks from writing, sometimes running in the woods with his dogs or riding his kayak through the backwaters of the Kootenay River. Other times he makes the six-kilometre round trip on his mountain bike over an old logging road that connects his homestead to the nearest highway.
It's a frugal life, rich in nature. Part of the year he bathes in the Kootenay River; the rest of the year he heats buckets of crystal clear mountain water on the stove, raised from a well by an always-reliable hand pump.
"I hope my final pages are written on an old office typewriter," he says, "and lit up by kerosene lamps."
Daughters 0-920698-56-5; Home 0-920698-54-9; Trains of Cuba 0-920698-46-8; Letters from Cuba 0-920698-52-2. These Canadian Caboose Press books are distributed in Canada by Heritage House.
[BCBW 1997] "Interview"
Submitted on August 21, 2003 in By David.
