1973: JULIE OF THE WOLVES by Jean Craighead George
Miyax pushed back the hood of her sealskin parka and looked at the Arctic sun.
Kazakhstan is home to the world’s largest population of wolves. The reason that I know this fact is because the Kazakh tourism industry once included it in a mid-2000s full-page newspaper ad intended to convince Americans to come visit the country. Now, it’s possible something got lost in translation here, because at first glance, “come to our country, we have so many wolves” does not sound like the selling point you want to open with. But they had to come up with something to make Kazakhstan look like a great place to visit. Why was the country of Kazakhstan running ads to attract American tourism in the mid-2000s? Well,
2006 was the year that the Academy-Award-nominated film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan came out in theaters and was a huge hit with American comedy audiences. Sacha Baron Cohen’s character of the Kazakh journalist Borat was pretty obviously an over-the-top satire of how English-speaking audiences viewed foreigners that was not attempting to be accurate at all1, and while some Kazakhs were upset with their extremely unkind depiction in the film, it seems like most people understood what Cohen was going for. Kazakhstan was depicted as a backwards, misogynist, anti-semitic hellhole, but most Kazakhs and especially Kazakh-Americans seem to have been on board with the joke, and it was still less annoying than hearing bros go “very niiice!” for a full decade afterward2.
But here’s the thing: American interest in visiting Kazakhstan skyrocketed after Borat came out. The Kazakh foreign affairs minister, in an address to his country’s parliament, literally said “With the picture’s release, Kazakhstan increased the number of visas it issues by 10 times. This is a great victory3, and I am grateful to Borat for attracting tourists to Kazakhstan.”
So, could the world’s largest population of wolves actually be a selling point for the sudden influx of American tourists? As long as the yankees are coming here anyways, should they make sure to check out the wolves? Well, what it comes down to is the question “are wolves awesome?” to which the answer is “yes”. Wolves are awesome, in terms of their social structures and heightened senses and intelligence. I hate to keep bringing up the Animorphs series in these essays4, but Cassie’s battle morph is a wolf, and based on those books, being a wolf seems cool as hell.
But wolves were not always cool as hell. In fact, wolves only became cool about fifty years ago; thankfully, this gave Kazakhstan plenty of time to come up with “check out all of our wolves” as a pillar of their tourism industry. There was a point in recent history, really up until the middle of the twentieth century, when wolves were seen as mindless lone predators, and not highly intelligent and social mammals. And one of the people who was able to change these cultural assumptions about wolves, leaving behind a Jane-Goodall-like influence in how we view these animals, was a writer named Jean Craighead George.
While Jean Craighead George had written several children’s novels, including a Newbery finalist, before finally winning the medal in 1973, Julie Of The Wolves became a children’s novel by accident, as George was really trying to write a nonfiction article. A large part of her career was spent working as a journalist, including as part of the White House press corp for the Washington Post. In the early seventies, she was working as a writer and editor at Reader’s Digest, and had embedded herself at a naval research station in Barrow, Alaska for what was supposed to be an article summarizing the relatively new body of research on how wolves communicated and organized their societies.
What George found in the Arctic floored her. Wolves were very smart animals, she was expecting that. Wolves had some level of organization to their packs, she was expecting that. But what she wasn't expecting was that wolves had language. They could communicate with each other in ways that an observant human could understand and imitate, as George and her son did when they stayed out there. George was also in awe of the Inuk indigenous people she met in Alaska, who possessed a profound understanding of the complexity and interconnectedneas of the tundra biome itself. As George put it during her Newbery acceptance speech, "The ecology of the Arctic is like a Chinese wooden puzzle; each piece locks into the others, and if one is not right, the whole thing falls apart." At the end of her trip, George was overwhelmed by how much she was able to put together in her research, and got to work putting together a comprehensive piece for the Digest to introduce this incredible world to readers.
Amazingly, Reader’s Digest never ran the original piece that George drafted; they ran another piece on wolves by someone who was a scientist by trade, which is fine, although it strikes me as weird that they were commissioning multiple wolf pieces at the same time. Regardless, this all left George sitting on a novel’s worth of material on wolf societies, indigenous Alaskans, and tough questions about whether we can really share a fragile world with each other. That turned into the stunning Julie Of The Wolves, one of the strongest novels I’ve read so far out of the thirty-some Newburied entries. The obvious Newbery winner to use as a comparison point is fellow survival narrative Island Of The Blue Dolphins, but Julie blows past it.
To some degree, both novels have the same flaw: if you were looking for someone to tell these stories today, you'd probably want to start by looking to indigenous authors. But George's exhaustive research, the project that required her to live in the middle of a tundra, puts her on more solid ground than O'Dell. George went into the project expecting the final product to be a work of narrative journalism, and the painstaking research is apparent in how she writes about the wolf pack at the center of the story, as well as “Julie”’s backstory with her indigenous community. What I found lacking in Island Of The Blue Dolphins was the absence of pretty much all dialogue, and also the absence of a lot of internal monologue; there just wasn't enough character development to hook me, because there wasn't enough communication.
But Julie Of The Wolves is all communication. The novel begins in media res as a 13-year-old indigenous girl named Miyax who has somehow ended up alone and lost on the Alaskan tundra. Her only hope for survival is to convince the nearby wolf pack to take her in, and her only hope for doing that is to watch how the wolves communicate among themselves and imitate it herself.
It's a painstaking process that makes for riveting and tense reading, as Julie names and ingratiates herself to the pack's alpha, the pack's omega, and the pups, as she learns how to ask for food, how to show respect to the alpha, how to assert her dominance over the omega. Through it all, George effectively captures Julie's frustration and fear of starving to death, her exhilaration at finally breaking into the pack, and awe at the complex dynamics of the pack. As a survival story, it's brilliant.
Things get darker - a lot darker - when we learn how Miyax got into this situation in the first place.
Miyax is also Julie, a 13-year-old Inuk girl whose father vanished and was presumed dead in a fishing accident, sent off to live with her aunt and navigating the tension between the shrinking indigenous community and the incoming white "gussaks"5. While the entire first third of the novel is dedicated to Miyax's life among the wolves, the second part jumps back in time to tell the story of Julie, who is miserable living with her aunt and agrees to an arranged marriage - at age 13 - to get some level of independence. Her husband, Daniel, has some unspecified intellectual disability, and most of their marriage is spent platonically but pleasantly.
Daniel, however, is infuriated by his peers' teasing him for having a sexless marriage, and eventually tries to rape Julie out of frustration. Julie, understandably horrified, abandons her gussak name in favor of her original Inuk name, and runs away onto the tundra, initially hoping to get to a port so she can head to California, but quickly becoming lost and in danger of freezing and starving, unless she can convince these wolves to take her in. I told you it got dark.
Miyax's salvation is found with the wolves. As George laid out in her 1973 Newbery acceptance speech, our salvation may lie with the wolves, too. George was initially impressed by the Alaskan wolves' capacity for communication and language, but didn't know how impressed she actually should have been:
"I was now convinced that wolves and men have much in common. Both have leaders, population problems, are hunters, and live together all year round. Both have language. So the difference, I said to myself, is that man shares and cares about his fellow man. Then I heard this:"
What George heard from her naval scientist roommates, of course, was that wolves do share, and do care about each other. They're probably better at it than we are. An alpha's heart rate is elevated when a member of his pack needs help:
"When I heard this, my image of a wolf began to change. Here was an animal who assumed responsibility with such conscious effort and concern that it affected his heart rate. This, I said to myself, is a trait heretofore attributed only to man…Upon hearing that story, I felt that the line that separates man from beast had faded forever. For me it was replaced by a sense of continuity. Even brotherly love, I said to myself, has evolved from the animals. To realize this was at first disconcerting, then very exciting. Perhaps we are, after all, traveling a beautiful road. Perhaps we are evolving toward a mutual aid and not toward killing and destruction. Perhaps the growing attitude—that we must share the earth wisely with plant, beast, and man—is much more deeply rooted than we suspect."
Miyax is part of a people dying out and losing their native land to white settlers, and that loss is happening against the backdrop of a beautiful and complex ecosystem that's only going to survive if we can find a way to cooperate with each other, and I have, in past essays, expressed my pessimism that humanity can actually do that. What's remarkable about Julie Of The Wolves is that it suggests that we actually can, and that if we did so, we wouldn't even be the first to pull it off. There's hope for us, if mutual aid, if care for each other, if being able to communicate, is so deeply rooted in us.
Now, of course, I'm in awe of wolves. I feel like I should be going out to find some so I can learn from them and take some notes on how to save the world. First chance I get, I'm booking a flight to the country that advertises itself as the home to the world's largest population of wolves.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1985 medalist, The Hero And The Crown by Robin McKinley.
The parts of the movie set in Kazakhstan were actually filmed in Romania, and while Borat sounds like he’s speaking Kazakh at times, that’s actually just Baron Cohen speaking Hebrew, which adds an additional layer of comedy given how wildly anti-Semitic the character of Borat is.
A bartender unironically said that to me in, I kid you not, 2015.
Enormous missed opportunity to just yell “Great success! High fiiiiive!”
I don’t really hate that.
Gussaks, Miyax's term for white European settlers in Alaska, is a bastardization of the term for the first white people to show up in Alaska, the Cossacks.