From: Pat Enciso <ENCISO>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 95 14:03 CDT

I am Pat Enciso, an assistant professor of children's literature and reading at the UW-Madison and have been following the conversation about WTM with great interest and pleasure. What a lively, probing 'play' with the book and its making. Thank you to you all. I wanted to add my thoughts about Salamanca's mother s name and her detachment from her Seneca heritage.

I, too, would say that it is not a book that is a "quest for cultural identity", at least not from Salamanca's point of view. She is more in quest of her identity as a child who is separate, literally and metaphorically, from her mother. Yet her mother left, in part, to find a cousin who could remember the Seneca connections her mother knew were there and were important. Salamanca knows that her mother wanted to reconnect with her Indian heritage; she knew that her mother told stories that would give her a sense of connection with her Seneca people. Salamanca also understood that her mother lived precariously in her father's world which was both Anglo and just very different from her own upbringing. With these sub-quests layered into the main quest, Creech has made it possible for the reader to imagine Salamanca searching for the *meaning* of her mother's search for an Indian self.

The search for an Indian self is not unlike the search that many people (Anglo and Non-European) embark on in this country because so many of us are the children and great grandchildren of people who believed they had to assimilate to an Anglo, dominant culture. IN this ssense, then, I think WTM is very representative of a shared American experience of searching for a cultural identity that is held together only by threads of memory and tangled interpretations. I love the way Creech helps us see Salamanca's perceptions and acceptance of the weaving of these threads into her present self.

Pat Enciso enciso at macc.wisc.edu
Received on Mon 17 Jul 1995 02:03:00 PM CDT