About James Welch: A Profile

James Welch refers to himself as an Indian -- not a Native American, not an American Indian -- and he is often amused that, while the simple ethnic designation is used as a matter of course on reservations, it causes a furor on university campuses. Part Blackfeet, part Gros Ventre, with some Irish mixed in, Welch has always been concerned with the place given to Indians in American society, and he has made it his lifework as a writer to illuminate the richness of his culture and the heartache of its dislocation.

Yet being a writer -- much less being credited, alongside Scott Momaday, as a forerunner of the Native American literary renaissance -- was the last thing Welch could have imagined for himself as he grew up in Montana, where he has lived nearly all of his life. He was born in 1940 in the town of Browning, and raised on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Indian reservations, only leaving the state to attend high school in Minneapolis, where his father worked briefly as a welder. Despite the extreme poverty around him, Welch remembers his childhood with fondness -- particularly the beauty of the Montana landscape and the physical labors of feeding and putting up hay on the cattle ranch and farm that his father ran for a time. Admittedly, he was not a very ambitious kid, and he thought he would eventually get some sort of government job, similar to his mother's stints as a stenographer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or his father's work as a hospital administrator for the Indian Health Service, or his brother's job
as a forester -- something, Welch says, "where you didn't have to display a lot of originality." He was a mediocre student, preferring sports to studying, and he didn't read much, other than comic books and the occasional Western (Welch, like other Indians on his reservation, always cheered on the white heroes in cowboy and Indian movies, never seeing any irony in it). But in high school, Welch found a hobby, an avocation, as a closet poet. A teacher required her class to memorize a poem every week, and Welch began writing his own -- imitations of "Gungha Din" and "a lot of mushy love poetry and nature poetry about the stately pines." He kept the poems in a notebook, never showing them to anyone, afraid of being teased. "I wrote a lot of them in study hall to while away the hours," he says, "and I would always have one hand over what I'd written."

After two years at Northern Montana College, he transferred to the University of Montana. There, he took a short story course on a whim, and he found he wanted to take more. The university had just started offering an M.F.A. degree in creative writing, and Welch decided to apply, not knowing what else to do. His grades were terrible, but he was admitted because there were so few applicants. He enrolled in a poetry workshop conducted by Richard Hugo, whom Welch extols as a master teacher, a sensation: "I was so inspired by him that I just kept writing."

Welch and Hugo became fast friends, and one afternoon, they went on an ice fishing trip together with J. D. Reed. They stopped by a bar in the town of Dixon afterwards, and under the influence of a few drinks, they exuberantly challenged one another to write a poem about the bar. They set a deadline of two weeks, and pledged that the three poems had to be published simultaneously in one magazine. "The title of the poems was 'The Only Bar in Dixon,' " Welch recalls. "Somehow we sent it out to
The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue." Thus began Welch's somewhat improbable career as a poet.

He was lucky enough to have a wife, Lois, who agreed to support his endeavors, and while she taught in the English department at the University of Montana (she now directs the creative writing program), he worked on his poems. In 1971, he published his first collection,
Riding the Earthboy 40, a title which referred to the forty acres of land adjacent to his parents' ranch, leased from a family named the Earthboys. The volume, especially when it was revised and reissued by Harper & Row in 1976, was very well-received, drawing admiration for the melding of Blackfeet visions and dreams with surrealistic techniques, as well as for his descriptions of contemporary life for Indians in Montana, their detachment from their tribal past and their concomitant clashes with the surrounding white world, which would become a consistent theme for Welch. "The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians," he says, "which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves. But nobody would take checks from Indians, nobody would give them any credit, and nobody would let them drink in the bars. There was a rudeness, a brusqueness, with which the Indians were treated constantly. At a very young
age, that had entered my consciousness."

As much as Welch appreciated the reception of his book, one thing irked him: nearly all of the critics emphasized the "bleakness" of Montana when addressing his poems, a common perception of the land he loves. Perhaps the vast distances between towns and people create a feeling of isolation, Welch admits, but the scenery itself is majestic. "So many people who come to northern Montana tell me," Welch says, "without realizing that it's insulting, that they drove like hell to get to the mountains, because the plains are so boring. It's amazing to me that people don't take the time to get off the highway and really notice what's there. I guess their idea of beauty is too inflexible." He began writing a long poem, a travelogue of sorts, listing Montana's virtues, but as he went along, he became interested in delving into a narrative about the state's inhabitants, and he turned the poem into a novel,
Winter in the Blood. He showed it to his friend, the writer William Kittredge, who found something wrong on every page. "We stayed up one whole night, and he pointed out all these things to me, and of course I was discouraged and put it away."

Shortly thereafter, Welch's wife took a leave of absence, and they spent a year in Greece, where Welch doggedly revised the book. In the meantime, Ted Solotaroff, the prominent Harper & Row editor, called Dick Hugo, scouting around for novels. "I think Jim Welch is working on one," Hugo told him. "He took one with him."

Solotaroff published
Winter in the Blood in 1974. In it, a nameless Indian narrator flounders on a reservation, and is only able to attain a sense of identity when learning the names and history of his grandparents. A second novel,
The Death of Jim Loney, followed in 1979, and portrays a "half-breed" with a similar existential crisis, haunted by a biblical passage and an image of a black bird, which in Indian tradition presages a benevolent, guiding spirit or, alternately, a warning. But Loney cannot interpret either symbol, alienated as he is from both white and Indian cultures. The two novels are written with a spare, episodic style, laden with absurdism and black humor, and share a narrative arc that requires the characters' return to the reservation, and hence to their ancestral pasts, for them to find any meaning in their lives.

Welch himself does not discount the possibility of assimilation, but he acknowledges the difficulty of it, and he encourages the neo-tribalism that has developed in recent years. "Before, Indian people had been so defeated, they were always looking for outsiders, for the government, to somehow come in and fix things," he says. "But now, they seem to realize that they're the only ones who can save themselves. The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions."

Welch returned to his own traditions in the novel
Fools Crow, which was released in 1986 and chosen as the year's best work of fiction by
The Los Angeles Times. The book is a historical record of a Pikuni Blackfeet tribe that was massacred at the Marias River by white settlers in 1870. One hundred seventy-three Indians, mostly women and children, were killed, but among those who escaped was Welch's great-grandmother, of whom Welch heard stories from his father. Virtually nothing tangible about the incident had survived. Even the site of the massacre was unknown until Welch, his wife, and several friends located it, with a photograph as their single clue.
Fools Crow focuses on the coming of age of White Man's Dog, who grows into a hunter, warrior, and healer. He is renamed Fools Crow and is on the verge of becoming a great leader of the Pikuni. But with the advent of the repeating rifle, the buffalo herds are disappearing, and the Indians are being eliminated just as quickly by smallpox and the U.S. Army. Fools Crow is given the responsibility of foreseeing and witnessing the cultural genocide of his tribe.

Evoking the tribe's way of life proved to be a challenge for Welch. Not only did he have to research small, everyday details, like how the Blackfeet tanned hides and performed ceremonies of worship, he also had to make their belief system plausible -- the visions, superstitions, prayers, and ghosts -- a considerable task, since Welch was raised as a Catholic and now calls himself an agnostic. "I do believe in the viability of Indian spiritualism, however," Welch says. "Even though in a lot of Indian societies, it's in danger of being lost, or has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians -- better than any organized religion in this country" (there are quite a few
fundamentalist Native Americans, Welch reports, who believe that tribal religions are pagan).

Welch's fourth novel,
The Indian Lawyer (1990), forced him to confront his political beliefs. If he had received any criticism from Native Americans during his career, it was that he had not presented any contemporary role models in his books, as he never shied away from the alcoholism and violence on reservations. So he created Sylvester Yellow Calf -- college basketball star, Stanford Law School graduate, partner in a Helena law firm, and candidate for Congress. Yellow Calf also serves on a parole board, and is seduced by an inmate's wife and then blackmailed. Welch himself served on a parole board for ten years. A friend, the dean of the University of Montana law school, called him one day and asked if he wanted to be appointed to the board. Welch first told her no, but she convinced him. "If you don't do it," she said, "some redneck rancher from eastern Montana will." The experience was rewarding for Welch in many ways: "In the general population of Montana, it's about seven to eight percent Indian. But the population
in prison is always between twenty and twenty-five percent Indian. I think I helped some of the other board members understand Indians better. One of their attitudes had been not to return Indians to the reservation, because that might encourage them to get into trouble again. But sending them to Billings or Great Falls or wherever, without a tribal support system, would only guarantee trouble." Yet the years of service took a toll on Welch. He was frequently depressed after hearings and had nightmares. "When I first got on the board, I was kind of a flaming liberal, and I didn't think anyone was inherently bad. But after you meet some of these inmates who'd committed violent or deviant acts and you read their psychological evaluations, you conclude that there are some people who are just plain evil."

As a change of pace, Welch switched to historical nonfiction for his next book,
Killing Custer, which will be published by W.W. Norton in October. Leading up to the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, it explores the post-Civil War period of western expansion, told mostly from the Sioux and Cheyenne points of view. In addition, a quarter of the book is from Welch's perspective, plumbing his personal ruminations as he watched the filming of the PBS documentary
Last Stand at Little Big Horn, which he had co-written.

Welch has some ambivalence about the continual pressure on him to be a Native American spokesman. "I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians. I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal." Sometimes, he wishes he could write as he does now in his house in Missoula, working in afternoon and late-night shifts, but feel free to do any story he wanted, one set in Seattle, say, which touches on Indians only peripherally. On the other hand, he accepts the necessity of clarifying and debunking stereotypes. "Most people in America have a clichéd idea of Indians, that they're all alcoholics and lazy and on welfare. Maybe through literature, people can gain an understanding of how Indians got the way they are today, and how they differ from one another, as tribes and as individuals." Besides, the
history and culture of Indians are endlessly fascinating to Welch. "I'd like to explore as much of it as I can, each piece of it," he says, "and of course that will take me the rest of my life to do."

-- Don Lee