Across a great many Native American nations, the wolf is not an animal you hunt. It is closer to kin: a teacher, a relative, sometimes a brother.

That relationship is old, specific and worth understanding properly rather than in the vague way it usually gets described.

A caution before we start

There is no single Native American culture. There are hundreds of distinct nations across the Americas with different languages, different histories and different relationships to the animals around them.

The wolf matters in many of them. It does not mean the same thing in all of them, and any article that says the Native Americans believed one particular thing is flattening several hundred peoples into one. What follows are specific traditions where they can be named.

Why the wolf and not another animal

The recognition was practical before it was spiritual. Peoples living by hunting, fishing and gathering watched an animal doing precisely the same thing, in the same country, with the same seasons and the same problems.

Wolves hunt cooperatively and share the result. They raise young collectively, with animals other than the parents helping feed and guard them. They hold territory without exhausting it. They stay with one mate, frequently for life.

A society organised on the same principles looks at that and sees a relative rather than a competitor. The respect came from observation, not sentiment.

The wolf dance of the Nuu-chah-nulth

The best documented wolf ceremony belongs to the Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island, who call it Klukwana or Klukwalle.

It opens the sacred winter season, the period when the community turns inward and the older generation passes knowledge to the younger through story, song and dance. Participants take the wolf's form in costume, and initiates are ceremonially taken by the wolves and returned to the community changed.

The teaching is the point. What is transmitted are the values leaders identified in the animal, and the ceremony is how a child becomes an adult who understands them.

What the wolf is understood to carry

Across the nations where it appears, several qualities recur.

Loyalty. The most consistently cited, and the one with the firmest basis in observed behaviour. Wolf pairs commonly stay together for life and the family raises young as a unit.

Instinct. The wolf's judgement about where to den, when to move and which animal in a herd to test is read as a form of knowledge that does not require deliberation.

Freedom. An animal that cannot be owned, herded or made to work. For peoples whose own freedom was under sustained attack, that carried a particular weight.

Skill in the hunt. The wolf as the model of the warrior and the provider, admired for endurance rather than ferocity.

The dreamcatcher, and where it actually comes from

The dreamcatcher is Ojibwe in origin, later adopted by other nations and now reproduced worldwide with very little reference to either.

The traditional form is a woven web inside a hoop, hung above a sleeping place. Bad dreams are caught in the web and dissolve at sunrise; good dreams find the centre and travel down the feathers to the sleeper below.

It is worth knowing that origin rather than treating the pattern as generic decoration, and it makes the object considerably more interesting.

Brothers in what happened next

The parallel that gives this article its title is not metaphorical. Both were nearly destroyed, by the same people, in the same period, for overlapping reasons.

Before European colonisation, Indigenous peoples occupied nearly all of the Americas. Research published in 2019 estimated that around 56 million people died across the century following 1492, through disease, war and displacement, a collapse severe enough to be detectable in the global climate record as farmland returned to forest.

The gray wolf was subjected to deliberate extermination across the same continent, driven by ranchers whose livestock had replaced the wild herds the wolves depended on. Bounty schemes killed them in tens of thousands.

Two populations that had lived alongside each other for millennia were removed from the same land in the same period by the same expansion. The kinship in the traditions became a kinship in the outcome.

The wolf in dreams

Wolves carry meaning in the dreaming traditions of several nations, and the interpretation depends heavily on how the animal appears. Our article on what a wolf means in a dream covers the readings in more detail.

Carrying the imagery respectfully

Our wolf dreamcatcher collection covers hanging pieces built around the motif.

Our wolf painting collection includes pieces in this visual tradition.