James Welch: An Introduction

by Chadwick Allen, Linda Bolton, Phyllis Deery, and Mary Killary


 A time to tell you things are well. Birds flew south a year ago. One returned, a blue-wing teal Wild with news of his mother's love.

 Mention me to friends. Say
 Wolves are dying at my door,
 the winter drives them from their meat.
 Say this: say in my mind

 I saw your spiders weaving threads to bandage up the day. And more, those webs were filled with words that tumbled meaning into wind.

 --James Welch, "Snow Country Weavers"

James Welch was born in the snow country of Browning, Montana on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1940. Blackfeet on his father's side, Gros Ventre on his mother's, with Irish ancestry from both, Welch is in many ways representative of the mixed-blood experience of the northern plains. Welch did not grow up "traditionally," but spent time living on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations in Montana. Unemployment forced his family off the reservation for a time, and Welch graduated fom high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After attending several universities, he received his B.A. from the University of Montana and began working toward an M.F.A. It was at the University of Montana at Missoula that Welch met and worked closely with the poet Richard Hugo. Welch published his first poem in 1967. His collection of poetry, Riding the Earthboy 40, was published in 1971.

In making the transition from poetry to prose, Welch gave himself room to more fully render the varied experiences of Indians and mixed-bloods living on the northern plains. He believes that Indians should be shown in all their manifestations, and he has tried to do something different with each of his novels. Winter in the Blood was published in 1974. It and his second novel, The Death of Jim Loney (1979), depict contemporary Indians and mixedbloods living on depressed reservations and in violent border towns. In Fools Crow (1986), which won several awards, Welch recreates the experience of Indians of the last century living the "classic" horse culture of the American frontier and their increasingly violent encounters with white settlers and the cavalry. Most recently, in The Indian Lawyer (1990), Welch describes a "successful" Indian's difficult move off the reservation into the institutions of the majority culture. Running through all of Welch's prose work, linking it back to his poetry, is a strong, vibrant sense of the northern plains landscape and its inherent spirituality.

Welch's interests are now leading him into non-fiction. He recently co-wrote a documentary on the battle of the Little Bighorn which will air on PBS in October, and he is currently at work on a non-fiction book about the same subject. Welch lives in Missoula with his wife, Lois, who teaches at the University of Montana. His wife's teaching position allows Welch to write full-time, though he has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Washington and at Cornell University.

James Welch visited our "Native American Poetics" class in Tucson on March 23, the eighth writer in our series. Those of us familiar with his work were surprised at how soft spoken Welch is, how quiet his humor. In class Welch was friendly, articulate, open to our questions about his work. Over lunch at the Native American Graduate Center, Welch confided that he mostly avoids reading academic criticism of his work, though he does read reviews. Welch's primary concern is storytelling, not literary criticism, and he hopes his books will be read by a wide public audience, Indian and non-Indian, and not simply by specialist scholars.

Welch was the first novelist in our series, and the first to read in the Arizona Ballroom of the Student Union. That evening, to a very large audience, he read a passage from his novel Fools Crow. The passage centered around the concurrent dreams/visions of Fools Crow and his father's young third wife Kills-close-to-the-lake, and how their dreams/visions interact to bring Fools Crow greater spiritual power. Though those unfamiliar with the novel may have found the passage somewhat difficult to follow because of the many character names and because of Welch's innovative use of Blackfeet in translation, the reading was quite moving. By the end, we had all traveled with Welch to the Blackfeet's Montana snow country.