The Indian Lawyer by James Welch

Now, as he remembered to look out at the small crowd, he saw the posters bobbing over the faces, red and blue with white lettering, YELLOW CALF FOR CONGRESS, and the large buttons on topcoats and wool jackets, and he became excited by what he was actually doing. All the planning, the strategy, the issues, which had seemed so academic to him, gave way to the reality that he was actually running for office, that he was qualified, not in the politician's way but in his own beliefs and values. He felt a great wave of anticipation through his body and he thought, I am on my way, I will make a difference because I am Sylvester Yellow Calf and I do count. He suddenly felt as though his life had inexorably led him to this moment and he wanted it to be momentous.

Sylvester Yellow Calf is a successful lawyer in Helena, Montana's capital. As a teenager, he was the star of the high school basketball team in Browning, on the Blackfeet reservation; this success marked him as a leader and made him what he is--which is to say, it got him off the reservation. Now he's on the precipice of considering a run for Congress, in which he hopes to become a strong advocate for the issues that affect Indians like those back home. But Yellow Calf also sits on the parole board, and a devious inmate named Jack Harwood has cooked up a plan to obtain his freedom by convincing his wife, Patti Ann, to seduce Yellow Calf and blackmail him.

It's interesting to compare Yellow Calf to the protagonists of James Welch's four other novels. (This is his fifth, and last--sad for me.) There are the historical figures of Fools Crow and Charging Elk, both caught in moments of great upheaval and change. Then there are the heroes of Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney, whose life on the reservation seems never-changing, only a dead end. Yellow Calf, by contrast, is the one who got out and made something of himself, but with the success comes the conflicted feelings of having left one's community behind. This is underlined for Yellow Calf when he sits on the parole board for another Indian his own age, whom he distantly remembers from the reservation. This man is not, perhaps, a frightening reminder of what might have been, but a reminder that not everyone had Yellow Calf's luck, or ability to shoot a basketball, and that success has meant becoming somewhat alien to the community whose hero he once was.

As a political thriller, The Indian Lawyer isn't much. It might have benefitted from a James Patterson-type, who could have turned the blackmail into something that fits a little better the desperation and deviousness we are meant to see in Harwood. Welch does try to ratchet up the intensity of the conflict; Harwood loses control of his scheme when a pair of reckless accomplices decide to take matters into their own hands. Harwood himself, though, provides an interesting contrast to Yellow Calf. Whereas we're told that Yellow Calf did all he good to "make good" on his difficult upbringing, Harwood is a shrewd, intelligent man--and a white one--who seems to have turned to crime out of pure pique. He's neither as stupid nor violent as his accomplices, but he's made an active choice to embrace criminality, perhaps for no better reason than he can. Together, the two of them seem to illustrate that the limitations of one's birth--geographic, economic, racial--are not absolute.

I don't know much about Welch as a person, but I wonder if this image of a fellow Blackfoot who transformed himself by leaving the reservation behind resonated with him. I wonder if Sylvester's success, and his grappling with it, emerged from Welch's own relative success and prestige as a writer. In any case, it's not Welch's best novel (it's probably the least interesting and effective of the five), but it's worth reading for the way it stands alone.