A book thoughtful readers will surely return to again and again is Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name. The Red Indian philosophy, firmly rooted in nature, is both a challenge to modern man and an undeniable comfort…. As the book gets under way—the early pages are not very easily digested—the reader's view of life and sense of the passing years will change along with Mark's. For the acceptance of Mark by the Indians, their trust in him, and their quiet de...

In I Heard the Owl Call My Name a dying Anglican vicar is sent to minister to some British Columbian Indians, and to be made the occasion of many an easy reflection on how much he has got to learn to become truly Christian, as they are. The novel goes in for the sort of religiosity common to ages of unbelief. This coyly tear-jerking administration for the simpler life has already earned itself the screenplay fictions like this are usually designed to become. (p. 163) Valentine Cunningham, �...

Miss Craven has written what is probably the shortest autobiography since [Rudyard] Kipling's Something of Myself, and at that, much of it is devoted to the research and travel underlying her great success, I Heard the Owl Call My Name. With no emotional confessions, no extended descriptions, no lamentations about what must have been terrifying eye trouble, minimal information about family, friends, and finances, this is an extraordinarily modest reminiscence. Phoebe-Lou Adams, "P...

A small fishing village on the edge of the Canadian wilderness is the stage for ["I Heard the Owl Call My Name," a] shining parable about the reconciliation of two cultures and two faiths. When 27-year-old Mark Brian arrives in the Indian village of Kingcombe to take up his first ministry, he enters a world poised between the ways of the ancestral Cedar-man and those of a Christian God. He quickly takes the measure of their way of life: an enduring harmony with nature, the diminishing vitality...

Without too much sentimentality, Margaret Craven [in I Heard the Owl Call My Name] is inclined to idealize life in a Kwakiutl village on a Pacific inlet. This shred of an ancient culture practices enough of the old ways to keep it in harmony with the great chain of being. It is regulated fundamentally by the seasons, and secondarily by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police…. Miss Craven gives an epic quality to the fading tribal ways by viewing them through the eyes of a young Anglican priest, who happen...