James Welch (1)Recensioni

A teacher recommended this book and I dutifully picked it up and inhabited another world, a Montana reservation where members of the Gros Ventre and Blackfeet tribes live outside of towns such as Harlem, Dodson, Havre, where they grow grain and run cattle. James Welch writes with humor and truth. His dialogue skills are rich and authentic: "Why don't you settle down?" I said to my hands. "Pay up," said the bartender. When he left, I said, "If you settled down you'd be a lot better off; you'd be happier, believe me, Agnes." "You bore me," she said. "You should learn a trade, shorthand," I said. "There's a crying demand for secretaries." She looked at me as if she didn't recognize me. "Shorthand?" she squealed.
His images of nature and characters put you right out on that flat grazing land of the West. "Evening now and the sky had changed to pink reflected off the high western clouds. A pheasant gabbled from a field to the south. A lone cock, he would be stepping from the wild rose along an irrigation ditch to the sweet alfalfa field, perhaps to graze with other cocks and hens, perhaps alone. It is difficult to tell what cocks will do when they grow old. They are like men, full to twists." Welch started as a poet and is quoted in Louise Erdrich's introduction: "we are storytellers from a long way back. And we will be heard for generations to come." The book was published fifty years ago and I am as excited about reading it as if it were just out, a new discovery. And his storyteller credentials are evident in the braided tale describing a cattle drive perfectly paced with a bar spree. The narrator describes his mother, "she had always had a clear bitter look, not without humor, that made the others of us seem excessive, too eager to talk too much, drink too much, breathe too fast...I saw...how much she had come to resemble the old lady." Highly recommended.

Considered a founding text in the Native American Renaissance, James Welch’s 1974 debut novel (he was already a poet) received a 2021 Penguin Classics reissue with new remarks from Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich giving it context. The unnamed narrator is a 32 year old member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana. While his mother owns a successful ranch on the reservation, it’s fair to say he is somewhat lost and weighed down with grief, personal but also, surely, historical. Welch explores this grief with a taut poetic prose that is at turns realist and slightly surreal, grim and humorous, in a series of structured scenes over a short period of time that lead to new understanding.

In one such scene, the narrator visits a native elder, now blind, who lives alone in a crude cabin on the grassland. The elder claims he does not feel alone as he has the animals to talk to. Mockingly asked if the deer talk to him about the weather, he dismisses the jibe, but replies that the deer are not happy. The conversation continues:

“Not happy? But surely to a deer one year is as good as the next. How do you mean?”
“They are not happy with the way things are. They know what a bad time it is. They can tell by the moon when the world is cockeyed.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“They understand the signs. This earth is cockeyed.”

One thing I think I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that this earth is always cockeyed. It’s always a bad time. People are always seeing the end. That’s not wrong; the world as we know it does and always will end, though it’s also only a part of our story here and should not exclude awareness of the rest of that story. I think from reading this book that Welch would agree. Erdrich writes in her introduction, “I think it annoyed Welch that this book was called bleak. That world of bones and wind may be stark but it is filled with life, and life is stories.” Life, stories, spirit: these things endure and always will.

General George Custer’s 1876 attack on a huge camp of Plains Indians has gone down as the most disastrous defeat in American history and yet for many years Custer was portrayed as heroic and the Indians as merciless savages. The placing of Custer on a pedestal has definitely faded in recent years as much like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” historians and history buffs alike have spoken out about what lead up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and it’s after effects.

Killing Custer by James Welch is an insightful book that deals with the above issues, as well as the personalities of those involved. Custer, Reno, Benteen, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and many others played a part that is detailed in this book. The indigenous author presents a fair account of what happened and why and explains how the politics of the day ensured that Custer became the doomed hero of the event.

I have long been interested in the Battle of Little Bighorn and have visited the site three or four times over the years. While Killing Custer doesn’t add anything new to the mix, I did appreciate that Welch represented both sides in a realistic and thoughtful manner.

Unusual story about a Oglala Indian, Charging Elk, who as a very young man refused to be put on the reservation and spent three years with a friend out on the frontier basically by themselves. Returning to the reservation, he somehow was selected by Buffalo Bill to join his touring company and go to France. While in France, he enjoyed participating in the show but was accidentally thrown from his horse and wound up in a French hospital unable to speak the language. Buffalo Bill's group had left him.

The story actually begins at this point with his confusion and fear at the "sickhouse". He manages to escape and lives on the street but is found and turned over to the American embassy. One bureaucratic bumble after another prevents his return to America. He is eventually placed into the home of a fishmonger who treated him well and he learned some French and learned to love the family. After a while, however, he moves to his own place and yearning for a wife and family begins to visit a whorehouse. He falls in loves with a woman who isn't quite sure what to think of him. Earlier at the fish market a well known homosexual chef had eyed Charging Elk and he forces the whore to give him a drug so that the chef can molest him CE wakes up during the encounter and stabs the man to death. A very unfair trial follows and CE winds up in a remote prison where he becomes a model prisoner and learns to garden. He is eventually released again to a home of a farmer who treats him well. Natalie, the daughter falls in love with CK and they sort of "live happily ever after." Many more complications although the ending might be a bit too pat. Still a very good read and interesting look at the European fascination with the American West and the sad story of a man forced to leave everything behind and forced into a totally new culture.

'Winter In The Blood,' for a Welch novel, is intriguingly enough quite lackluster. The plot follows a few days in the life of a Native American man straddling his family's traditional world by day and a hedonistic/seedy underworld by night. The narrative leads to a climatic finale but this is only a metaphor. There is neither attraction nor passion in Welch's writing for this novel.

My personal belief is that Welch portrays the cynicism and directionless life of youth divorced from their heritage and history in 'Winter In The Blood.' But while his prose is excellent, his plot is exceptionally blank. Excessively bland for my taste. Would I recommend 'Winter In The Blood' to you dear reader? For its historic merit, yes. For its literary merit? No.

An amazing coming of age tale set against the backdrop of a civilizational clash. "Fools Crow" follows the tale of White Man's dog (later Fools Crow after blooding himself in a raid), a young Blackfeet Indian charged with great mystic powers and his struggle to preserve his people in the face of manifest destiny.

Welch creates a surreal world in which the past and the present, myth and reality amalgamate to weave a mystical tapestry in which humanity confronts itself. Fools Crow and his tribe of Lone Eaters are the Earth's children, humble in sophistication but intelligent in their living. The juxtaposed whites meanwhile are afflicted by hubris and possessed of the belief that the end of the Indian is neigh.

The distinctiveness of Welch's work can be gauged from the fact that his Indians are not the stereotypic monochromatic naturists of the Occidental purview. They are progressive in their own right, have property rights and are astute statesmen among themselves. They are able to discern the true intent behind the settler's design for them, but are not possessed of a keen insight into the white psyche to adjudge their next course of action.

While their fellow Indians take to their weapons to confront the whites, Fools Crow and the Lone Eaters emphasize co-existence. The novel ends with two poignant events. The 1870 massacre of unarmed friendly Blackfeet by the US 2nd Cavalry, and Fools Crow's resolve that the Blackfeet will preserve their culture while living in the White Man's world.

"Fools Crow" is a warrior's story, a tale of necessary sacrifices for a better future and the pursuit of justice in a changing world.

Winter in the Blood by James Welch. The days of a Blackfoot man who lives and works at his mother's Montana ranch.
The story begins with the man's mother, Theresa, informing him that his live-in girlfriend has not only left him but she's taken the only items of value he had, his electric razor and his shotgun. The news matters little, he seems to be an even-tempered young man though he wishes she hadn't taken his things. At some point this level-headedness becomes more clearly an indifference that extends to nearly everything around him. He sees his elderly, silent grandmother who never leaves the living room, yet there's no connection, and he gives no opinion, good or bad, when his mother suddenly comes home with a new husband who is now the boss in the ranch work.
The man, who is still referred to by many as his mother's boy, has to remind people that he's thirty-two years old. He and everyone he knows drinks heavily, switching bed partners and fighting, though these things are clearly just ways for killing time. It's when he allows himself to think about the deaths in his family that we find old wounds that haven't healed and have surely led to the indifference he seems to feel for everyday life.

I read this book when it was first published in the 1970s and held onto it, recognizing that it was a good novel. Rereading it some forty years later, I am stunned with its beauty and precision. Welch was a poet and it shows in his careful use of language. Every vignette of the narrator's life is shown as it unfolds with such attention to detail that you can see it all laid out before you. With his drinking and his sexual encounters, he is trying simultaneously to numb himself still further and to connect with an always elusive sense of meaning and value. This futility, of course, is rooted in the history of the Indian people, which Welch makes personal through the stories of the narrator's grandparents who were both young adults when the White men came and rounded up the Indians into reservations. Anyone who wants to write should study this novel for how Welch builds the tension and reveals why the narrator lives the life he does. Then they should go back and read it again for the beauty of the language.

I read this in graduate school, shortly after I left my work teaching public school. I remember liking it, even wrote a paper on it. However, I don't recall as much of it now. May have to reread it someday. I read it for a course in Native American literature, which was one of the first courses I took for my masters. Out of the list of books in that class, this was one of the better ones.

Fools Crow is a truly excellent novel. Although it took me a few chapters to really get into the rhythm of the novel, Welsh maintains a distinct tone throughout the narrative that is distinct and feels like a first-hand account of the events. The pacing was excellent and the end of the book encapsulates the sorrow at the changing future and the hope and resilience of this tribe of Blackfeet.

I finally read this book because so many of the authors of my favorite books from the Native American Renaissance had cited it as an influential text. It was rough, but beautiful. Not a happy read, but definitely one worth reading.

This leisurely-paced and character-driven novel tells the story of a young Blackfeet man coming of age at the time when his tribe’s way of life is slipping away from them as white settlers steadily encroach on their Montana homelands. Though Welch does not take the timeline as far as the Little Big Horn battle, it looms on the horizon.

Although to overall sweep of the novel is tinged with the foreshadowing of the end of the great tribal plains society, the individual scenes are often sweet, quiet, domestic ones. Violence is also there, as matter-of-fact as the rising and setting of the sun. His characters follow the traditional ways, or depart from them to their grief, and each one works out his own destiny inside the circle of seasons.

Overall, it's a somewhat melancholy read, but well worth the journey.

Beautiful, Powerful, Captivating, Heartbreaking

I've been intentionally trying to read more Native authors, and James Welch was at the top of my list after listening to a panel on his works at a local book festival last year. He writes with brutal honesty about the hardships of life, specifically for Native Americans. I can't say if I enjoyed this book, since it's not the most uplifting of stories, but it is extremely well-written.

James Welch has given us a wonderful account of Native American life in the late 1800s. Things are changing in northern Montana as more settlers discover the area, infringing on the hunting grounds of the natives. Fools Crow is a young brave in the Pikunis branch of the Blackfeet Indians. Specifically, he is part of the Lone Eaters, a close-knit band deeply rooted in the earth. The members "help each other, depend on each other…fight and die beside each other." (187) Welch gives the reader an in-depth look at the daily lives of these people and makes us privy to the dreams that guide them on their hunts and determine their personalities. We tend to lump people we don't understand into a group, forgetting that they have their strengths and weaknesses as we all do.

As their hunting grounds shrink and the white settlers bring disease west with them, a hard life becomes a fight for survival. The smallpox epidemics shrink their numbers and sap their strength. Fools Crow has seen a vision of what will become of his people and he is helpless to stop it. Honor and the blackhorns (buffalo) make his people what they are, and both are slipping away. It's a story we know well, but Welch makes it seem personal to me.½

Somewhat pleasantly surprising. Author James Welch was primarily a novelist, and Blackfeet/Gros Ventre. I guiltily admit I had expected an AIM-style polemic; instead this is an insightful history and personal essay. Welch was hired as a screenwriter for a documentary film on the Battle of the Little Bighorn; the first and last thirds of the book narrate that project. Welch and filmmaker Paul Stekler have some difficulty getting Native Americans around Little Bighorn National Monument to cooperate with the filming, and Welch isn’t shy about calling one of them a con artist trying to extort money. However he also isn’t shy about pointing out that past films at the site promised compensation for native’s time and land and never delivered. Film maker Paul Stekler gets a short section at the end and is rather more circumspect in discussing Native American relations than Welch.


Welch is also even-handed in discussing Native American relations with settlers and the United States Army. He makes some of the same points raised by Andrew Isenberg in the recently reviewed The Destruction of the Bison; bison and natives hunting them on horseback are both relatively recent phenomena. He also notes that Plains Indian treatment of captives wasn’t up to Hague Convention standards – but neither were US Army tactics against villages full of women and children.


The centerpiece is, of course, the battle; Welch gives one of the best and clearest descriptions I’ve read, with an excellent map. Surrounding the battle section Welch gives the lives of the major players – Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and George Armstrong Custer. Welch, of course, isn’t very enthusiastic about Custer but he doesn’t demonize him either; Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse do get hagiographic treatment. Sitting Bull comes across as almost the stereotypical wise Indian leader; Crazy Horse gets praise, but also seems to be about a quarter bubble off level. Welch isn’t afraid to note that the deaths of both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were at least half the result of Native American politics and perfidy rather than being solely white treachery.


An easy read. Photographs of the participants when available, and ledger drawings of the battle. Page notes (i.e., a note section with page numbers but no in-line note numbers. No bibliography but sources are given in the page notes. As mentioned, one of the best maps of the battle I’ve seen.½

A beautifully written novel. The narrator is a young Native American man living on his mother's cattle ranch. He is intelligent but self-destructive and emotionally distant from his family. He describes with precision and clarity everyone and everything around him and also frequent flashbacks to his youth when his father and older brother were still alive. A chance encounter with an elderly blind man reveals an important truth about his youth and his grandmother.

When bank robber Jack Harwood goes up before the Montana parole board, he knows it's a long shot that he'll be released. He can't go into the greater prison population either, as an American Indian gang has attacked him several times and they're waiting for another opportunity. Of the three members of the parole board that turned him down, Harwood picks the youngest, Blackfoot lawyer Sylvester Yellow Calf, as a way out.
Yellow Calf is a success, a former basketball star who went to college, became a lawyer at a prestigious firm and is now being scouted to run for political office. He's also in a long-term relationship, but when a new client, beautiful Patti Ann, comes through the door, he's quickly hooked. That Patti Ann is married to Harwood, who pulls the strings from prison, may undo all the years of Yellow Calf's honest work.

I picked this one up after it was recommended on "Well Read", and I'm glad I took that recommendation. The story of good, careful man who finally makes a bad decision really stayed with me.

Review: Fools Crow by James Welch. I found this book full of adventure, traditions, beliefs, trials and tribulations of the Native Americans of the 1870’s an inspiration of their ways of life.

The story consisted of many tribes living in Montana and on the Canadian borders at the time when the white people started moving into the Indian territory’s. Many tribes wanted peace but it only took a short time and some white men and young Indians to betray that trust.

The Indians didn’t stop from stealing horses from other tribes because the young eager scouts found this as an initiation into manhood. Their wound also be a mild war between tribes once in awhile but the many different tribes still came together once a year for a ritual ceremony. It was like taking a week-end to be civil to one another or at least try. Then it would go back to the leaders to take their tribes home and begin another year of hard edge living and magical motivated beliefs.

Then the white people came and threatens their existence in the homelands of the Indians and bring small pox’s to their nation. No medicine man could find a cure for this so many Indians died. The white people claimed they had a cure and it was being transported to that area of Montana. The Indians didn’t know if there was any truth in this because the white men had promised them blankets, medicine, better horses to settle in their territory and they never kept their word which was written on the peace treaty that both sides agreed upon.

As day’s go on and more Indians died and some tribes got washed out by the invading of their land, the guns of the white men shooting them down or the abrupt infliction of the small pox’s spreading like wild fire….

What interest me was the types of belief’s they followed, their different event dances and song, the dreams they had, believed in, and how they followed through with the messages the dreams brought and most of all their talks with the spirits, raven’s and coyotes’ which the author had the reader believing what they were reading was reality.

It's difficult to talk about books one reads when they correspond to the area of research that individual is involved heavily in. I picked up The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch on the recommendation of a mentor of mine and I knew, going in, that there would be a lot of times I would want to stop reading and start really diving into what I was reading and analyzing it and driving myself crazy with new research thoughts and ideas. But, about a chapter in, I put that part of my mind back into a box and I decided that I would give Jim Loney my full attention: as someone who was reading the book to listen to the story of this character.

Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife.

Fools Crow is a fascinating depiction of Native American life at the end of the 19th century. It tells the story of Fools Crow, a young man who is initially a bit of a bumbling outcast, but gains confidence and the trust of his tribe as he succeeds in horse raids, hunting, and medicine. Fools Crow and his tribe are dealing with the incursions of white people into their territory: the book portrays the culture clash between the Native Americans and the whites, and the utter hopelessness and bafflement of the Natives in dealing with whites.

The depiction of Native American culture is very vivid and in-depth: marriage practices, dream visions, hunting, raiding, discipline, relations between tribes. It is a very complete view of Native American life. Unfortunately, there is less coherence in the story line. The story meanders, and the ending feels very sudden and unsatisfactory.

Overall, this was a very interesting book, and I'm glad I read it, but it was more interesting as a study of Native American life than as a story.

The book has a higher level of mastery of English than one usually finds in a book with such a sensational title. It is less about the battle of Greasy Grass (the winners get to name the battle!) than about the fate of the tribes of the plains in the following fifteen years. USA's Indian policy was a short sighted, violent exercise, and it's compelling/horrifying reading. One should couple this with watching the film "Cheyenne Autumn".½

Could be the story of an lawyer, trying to get ahead, fight for his causes. However, the main character gets set up by the wife of a man in prison. This set up changes his whole future. No more without giving it away. Good book but it dragged in parts.

Together with other authors such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Robert Vizenor, James Welch was one of the first American Indian authors to spur a Renaissance of Native American literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Published in 1974, Winter in the blood juxtaposes the depressing contemporary life of the Native American main narrator, living in a reservation in Montana, with memories harking back to the narrator's youth, when the people in the community stood close to nature. In his life, the narrator moves from bars to motels, from drinking to meaningless sexual encounters, a life of drunkenness, void of essence. The flashbacks evoke powerful images of nature, but cannot reconcile the main character with his identity as an American Indian, because they are mere references to the death of his father and younger brother. Through their deaths he feels cut of from his true identity.

The depth of the narrator's identity crisis is best characterized by the following citation from the novel:

The distance I felt came not from the country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon. (p. 2)½

Fools Crow by James Welch is an historical novel which culminates in the Baker (or Marias) Massacre of 1870. For those who are unfamiliar with this massacre it was the end result of a series of events involving the Pikuni Owl Child and Major Eugene Baker. The slaughter covered 217 of the Pikuni, most of whom were women and children.

In Fools Crow, we're introduced to White Man's Dog, a young Pikuni man who has yet to distinguish himself within the tribe. Through a series of events, the major characters of the book are introduced to White Man's Dog, and in a sort of coming-of-age story, we follow the progress not only of White Man's Dog, but also the Pikuni tribe as they struggle against the changes being brought by the United States Government.

Fools Crow provides eye-opening examples of the importance of dreams to the Pikuni culture, the horrors of assimilation of one culture into another, and the injustice of the actions against the Native Americans during the building of the United States as we know it.

Reading this book should be done slowly and thoughtfully, as the story itself (while interesting) holds so many meanings revealed through careful inspection of the dreams and connections drawn from them to the narrative.