First Nation Literature Units Senior 1 - Victoria School District 61

About the Author
First Nation Non-Fiction Unit
Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman
by Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe
8
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Wiebe was born at Speedwell, near Fairholme, Saskatchewan in what would later become
his family’s chicken barn. For thirteen years he lived in an isolated community of about 250
people, as part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian west. He did not
speak English until age six since Mennonites at that time customarily spoke Low German at
home and standard German at Church. He attended the small school three miles from his farm
and the Speedwell Mennonite Brethren Church.
He received his B.A. in 1956 from the University of Alberta and then studied under a
Rotary International Fellowship at the University of Tübingen in West Germany, near Stuttgart.
In 1958 he married Tena Isaak, with whom he had two children. In Germany, he studied
literature and theology and travelled to England, Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
Wiebe's novels include Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), First and Vital Candle (1966), The
Blue Mountains of China (1970), The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), The Scorched-wood
People (1977), The Mad Trapper (1980), My Lovely Enemy (1983), A Discovery of Strangers
(1994), and Sweeter Than All the World (2001). He has also published collections of short
stories, essays, and children's books. In 2006 he published a volume of memoirs about his
childhood, entitled Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest.
Wiebe taught at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana from 1963 to 1967, and he has travelled
widely. He is deeply committed to the literary culture of Canada and has shown a particular
interest in the traditions and struggles of people in the Prairie provinces, both whites and
Aboriginals.