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.

The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch

Then, looking down into the hand mirror on the box of drawers, he lifted the brush to his hair, then stopped, shocked to see that his hair had been cut off to just around his ears. Of course, he had touched the short hair in disbelief many times since yesterday morning, but to see it now filled him with fear. How would Wakan Tanka know him? Charging Elk suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He had gone from being a wild Indian to this creature in the mirror. He glanced down at his new clothes, his new rough shoes. What had happened to him? Just a few sleeps ago, he had possessed his father's hairpipe breastplate, his own badger-claw necklace, his skin clothing--above all, the long hair that had never been cut. Even when he put on the washichu's blouses and pants, he wore brass armbands, earrings, and the two eagle feathers in his hair. He wore moccasins and wrapped his braids in ermine and red yarn. Now, this creature that looked back at him in the mirror didn't look like the Oglala from the Stronghold. The face had grown thin, the eyes seemed unsure, and the mouth looked weak. How would Wakan Tanka know that it was Charging Elk? How would Charging Elk again become the man he once was?

 A man wakes up in a sick ward in Marseille. He doesn't understand where he is, and no one can tell him, because he doesn't speak their language. He is Charging Elk, a young Lakota man who has traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill and the famous Wild West Show, pretending to hunt buffalo--and Custer--for admiring audiences. But he takes ill, the Wild West Show leaves Charging Elk behind, and through a series of legal mishaps and a great deal of mutual misunderstanding, it seems no one can figure out how to get him back to America, or even Rome, where Buffalo Bill is. It's the beginning of a long exile for Charging Elk, who will spend at least the next sixteen years of his life in France.

The Heartsong of Charging Elk reminded me a great deal of Caroline Dodds Pennock's book On Savage Shores, which I read last year, and which is about the experiences of Indigenous people from the Americas visiting Europe. In a way, it turns colonial narratives on their head: here, it is Marseille that is the strange and exotic place and the Indigenous man the traveler. But no, not quite, because the prejudice that Charging Elk experiences in Marseille is colonial to its core; even those who seek to help him are convinced that he is a "savage" who will never be able to adjust to civilized European life. And they are right insofar as life in Europe is bewildering for Charging Elk, one to which he has much trouble adjusting, especially because he knows no French (and of course there is no one in France who speaks Lakota). He ends up in the home of a kindly fishmonger, who adopts him as a kind of second son, and little by little Charging Elk finds himself adopting French ways--chiefly, drinking wine.

When he arrives in Europe, Charging Elk is young, and has little experience with women, even back home in America. As many of the Lakota in the Wild West Show, he has a profound interest in European women. Out of both deep lust and deep loneliness, he begins patronizing a prostitute named Marie, even falling in love with her, but she is blackmailed by an unscrupulous restaurateur into drugging Charging Elk so that he might rape him. During the act, Charging Elk wakes up and stabs the man to death. At his trial, he struggles to explain himself: though a sympathetic jury looks to him to explain the mitigating circumstances, he is only able to say that he killed a siyoko, an evilness, as any Lakota might have done. This, of course, is taken as more proof of savagery, of an incompatibility with the civilized world. Ironically, Charging Elk becomes a cause celebre in the papers; most of the French seem to believe that he has been unfairly charged, and yet this is only enough to save him from the guillotine, not a sentence of life imprisonment. The French may sympathize with him, or pity him, but there is no one who truly understands him.

Welch passes over the many years that Charging Elk spends in prison with relative swiftness. Eventually, he's released on a grimly ironic technicality--something about him not being an American citizen and thus not able to be tried. (I forget.) Life improves for him after prison: he is placed with a farmer, and eventually falls in love with the farmer's daughter, and marries her. It is a bittersweet development; Charging Elk finds love at last, and someone in this immense and frightening continent who understands him, but he knows all too well that to marry a French woman means to give up the dream of return. It means to become, irrevocably, French--to live between two worlds. The novel treats this with a touching ambiguity, which suggest perhaps that there is much to be gained by becoming "civilized," though much, too, is lost. The novel's most affecting moment comes at the end, when the Wild West Show returns after sixteen years and Charging Elk finds himself among a new generation of Lakota. The story they tell is a horrible one, of boarding schools and forced assimilation, of the desperation of the Ghost Dance and the death of both Charging Elk's father and the great Sitting Bull. The bitter irony is that the home Charging Elk left is rapidly being Europeanized, and that there's no guarantee that, had he stayed in the Badlands, he might not have been forced to cut his hair and adapt to European ways anyhow. Here, in Marseille, at least, he has his wife and child-to-be waiting.

The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch

As he tried to strike another match to light a cigarette, he realized that his hands were trembling. He wanted to believe that they trembled because of the cold, but he knew without thinking it that they trembled because there was no real love in his life; that somehow, at some time, everything had gone dreadfully wrong, and although it had something to do with his family, it had everything to do with himself.

Jim Loney lives a quiet life at the edge of the Blackfoot reservation in Montana. Once a star high school basketball player, his life has shrunk down to almost nothingness. He feels detached from it, detached from himself; he feels, as the protagonist of Welch's Winter in the Blood does, "as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon." Materially, things are not so bad for him: he doesn't seem to be especially hard-up or poor, and is well-liked--his old teammate Myron Pretty Weasel is constantly trying to get him to go hunting--and he has a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, a white Texan named Rhea. And yet these things seem unable to penetrate the solitude of his spirit.

In one sense, The Death of Jim Loney is a "half-breed" story like Solar Storms or Ceremony: about a half-white, half-Indian person trying to find their place in a divided world. Rhea believes that it must be sort of nice to have two sets of ancestors: "you can be Indian one day and white the next. Whichever suits you." But Loney feels just the opposite, unable to connect to either of his lineages, not the family of his alcoholic white father, nor his absent Indian mother and the "reservation families, all living under one roof, the old ones passing down the wisdom of their years, of their family's years, of their tribe's years, and the young ones soaking up their history, their places in history, with a wisdom that went beyond age." There is a parallel to this divided life in the way that Rhea and Loney's sister Kate, a successful bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., spend the middle of the book in a cold war over who will get to take Loney away from Montana. Rhea wants to move to Seattle, Kate to take him home to D.C.; and Loney is split between two coasts (two Washingtons) even.

But Loney is unmoved; he doesn't want to go to either place. He is already in the place he feels he needs to be to figure out the nature of his life and his self; he is home, and yet these things remain hidden to him. In a sense, The Death of Jim Loney is a rejection of the "half-breed" narrative, in which resolution and healing can be found in embracing one's indigenous side. In Winter in the Blood, the narrator returns to himself by returning home and helping to dig a horse out of the mud (think I'm remembering that right), but the people who need Loney are all headed elsewhere.  Being in Montana, that ancestral homeland, provides no answers:

He had been thinking of his life for a month. He had tried to think of all the little things that added up to a man sitting at a table drinking wine. But he couldn't connect the different parts of his life, or the various people who had entered it and left it. Sometimes he felt like an amnesiac searching for the one event, the one person or moment, that would bring everything back and he would see the order in his life. But without the amnesiac's clean slate, all the people and events were as hopelessly tangled as a bird's nest in his mind, and so for a month he had been sitting at his table, drinking wine, and saying to himself, "Okay, from the very moment I will start back--I will think of yesterday, last week, last year, until all my years are accounted for." But the days piled up faster than the years receded and he grew restless and despondent. But he would not concede that his life had added up to nothing more than the reality of a man sitting and drinking in a small house in the world.

I suspect there's something of a feint happening here, that The Death of Jim Loney suggests that these healing processes are not so easy. While both an earlier and a simpler book than Winter in the Blood, it seems almost like a response or refutation. We start to suspect that Loney has been sold, through cultural osmosis somewhere, a kind of lie, that knowledge of your past will make you whole. He searches for the name of the woman who took him in after his mother left and his father abandoned, but knowing it does nothing for him. He sees his father in the bar every day, but when they finally speak after decades, nothing is revealed. And in the process Loney passes up on not one but two opportunities to take control of his life and make it into something different. The result is not that Loney gets to know himself better but that he gets to know the world less, and the preordained "death" of the title--spoiler alert, a violent suicide-by-cop--is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about his own deeds and their relationship to the law, to the world of others.

Winter in the Blood by James Welch

I had had enough of Havre, enough of town, of walking home, hung over, beaten up, or both. I had had enough of the people, the bartenders, the bars, the cars, the hotels, but mostly, I had had enough of myself. I wanted to lose myself, to ditch these clothes, to outrun the burning sun, to stand beneath the clouds and have my shadow erased, myself along with it.

The unnamed narrator of James Welch's Winter in the Blood returns home to his mother's house on the Ft. Belknap Reservation in Montana with a hangover and a bum knee. His girl has left him, running off with his gun and his electric razor. His mother is set to marry a man who covets her land more than he does her, and she may be a little too close to a white priest who refuses to set foot on the reservation. He barely knows or understands his aging grandmother, referred to mostly as "the old lady," and who was once the teenage bride of a renowned Blackfoot chief. In this inhospitable environment there is, unsurprisingly, no rest, no solace, and he cruises back out into the street again. He zips between small towns like Malta and Havre, looking for his girl, his gun, and his razor, drinking too much and slipping into bed with strange women.

More than anything, the middle of Winter in the Blood reminded me of the kind of drugged-out spacemen you find in the books of Denis Johnson. The narrator's wanderings are episodic, peripatetic; he does things without giving a reason, or without having one. In a barroom a man offers to give him a car if he'll drive him to Calgary, where he can elude the police; they plan it as they play the bar's punchboard game, winning box after box of chocolate-covered cherries. Welch skirts close to stereotypes about Native Americans and alcohol, but like any good novelist, imbues his narrator with a specificity and detail that brings the link between alcohol abuse and trauma--both personal and historical--to life. "They were the same faces I had memorized so many years before," the narrator says of the wanted posters at the Havre post office. "Only the names were different."

The secret to Winter in the Blood is that the scattered nature of the narrator's boozing and bar-hopping conceals a more conventionally causal story, running through it like an underground stream. The clue is in the title: although the novel itself takes place during a stiflingly hot summer, the narrator cannot shake the memory of a fatal wintertime accident--involving a horse and a car--that took his brother's life. His grandmother, too, the "old lady" has "winter in the blood"--she carries with her the experience of being blamed, after her husband's death, for the wintertime starvation of her people, the Gros Ventre. This story goes untold until the narrator hears it from the blind hermit Yellow Calf, who turns out to know more--and be more entangled--with the narrator's family history than he knew. In this you get glimpses for the first time of the mythic-historical epic that Welch would later write in Fools Crow, which seems otherwise like a very different book.

I didn't realize it while reading, but looking back, I see that Winter in the Blood is, at least in some part, about the narrator's need to reconcile himself with the women in his life. His relationships with them are largely rotten: he's ambivalent at best toward the girl he claims to be searching for, and the sexual dalliances he gets into during his bar-hopping are pathetic, even violent. He claims to have "no particular feelings" toward his mother or grandmother, and he identifies that disinterest as a distance with himself: "But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon."

Yellow Calf's story points the way forward, but still his grandmother dies before he can talk with her about her experience. The novel ends, not with a final engagement between grandmother and grandson, but with the narrator rescuing a wayward cow from drowning in the mud. There's something there about the feminine principle, about women as the physical links to history and lineage--the cow's calf looks on, panicked--but the symbolism seems slippery, partial, troubling. It seems not enough, and perhaps that's why it's so perfect for such a slippery and troubling book.

Fools Crow by James Welch

"Where are the seizers now?"  Fools Crow's voice was sharp.  Anger welled up within him, an aner that was directed at the futility of attempting to make the seizers pay.  He had always thought that the Pikunis would fight these hairy-faces.  He had prepared himself for this fight, he was ready to die a good death to defend this country.  Now he knew that his father had been right all along--the Pikunis were no match for the seizers and their weapons.  That the camps were laid low with the white-scabs disease did not even matter.  The disease, this massacre--Sun Chief favored the Napikwans.  The Pikunis would never possess the power to make them cry.

I've been trying to read more Native American literature.  I'm thinking about teaching a class on contemporary Native writers next year, if I can figure out how to do it with sufficient humility and respect.  Again and again, the news seems to serve as a chorus to my reading: the Dakota Pipeline fight, the derecognition of the Wampanoag, and now the President's crude "Trail of Tears" joke about Elizabeth Warren.  For Donald Trump, the genocide of hundreds of thousands is dumb joke material, as fundamentally unserious as, say, the life of Pocahontas.  Meanwhile, I was reading James Welch's novel Fools Crow, a book about what genocide looks like from the ground.  It's a reminder that the atrocity of the Trail of Tears is only part of the larger story of American genocide against Native Americans, a story that continued after the civil war with westward expansion.  Fools Crow tells the story of the Pikuni Blackfeet of Montana, who were decimated by white expansion and smallpox, culminating in the massacre of a non-hostile community at the Marias River in 1870.

Fools Crow is the story of White Man's Dog, a Blackfoot brave of the Lone Eaters band.  When the novel begins the white settlers, called Napikwans or "seizers," are more rumor than anything else, and we are given a glimpse into the traditional life of the Blackfeet before their decimation.  They survive by hunting buffalo, here called "blackhorns" (as distinguished from "whitehorn" cattle, imported by Napikwans), but they aren't exactly the peaceful close-to-the-earth people that Native American fetishists imagine: the Pikunis are horse-takers, and the first third of the book is taken up by the thrilling account of a horse-stealing raid against the enemy Crow people.  In that raid, one of the leading chiefs, Yellow Kidney, is taken prisoner and his fingers cut off, an act that brings cascading repercussions to the Lone Eaters.  White Man's Dog gets his new name--Fools Crow--during the raid that is revenge for Yellow Kidney's dismembering, when he kills a Crow after seeming to be dead.  Welch brings the same kind of ambiguity and nuance to the Lone Eaters' violent excursions that we might expect from a modern war narrative:

Fools Crow.  The naming ceremony.  Three Bears had named him Fools Crow after hearing how he had tricked Bull Shield into thinking he was dead and then risen up to kill the Crow chief.  But was that how it was?  The story of how he had earned that name had been greatly exaggerated, despite his initial protests, until many thought he had tricked the whole Crow village, that his medicine contained some magic that made another man's eyes see wrong.  The story of how Fools Crow had killed and scalped the man who had mutilated Yellow Kidney was even more embellished.  Now Fools Crow had made the man cry, had laughed and spit on him, had made love to his wife, then killed him and stuffed his bloody genitals in his mouth.  The men of the warrior societies laughed and kidded Fools Crow, but in their eyes he had become a man of much medicine.

The conflict with the Crow--and the careful identity-making among the Blackfeet that is predicated on that conflict--is quickly supplanted by conflict with the Napikwans.  A rogue band of Pikunis led by Owl Child (a historical figure) and Fools Crow's old friend Fast Horse leads violent raids against the white settlers.  Reading Fools Crow is like reading a fictionalized version of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.  We know that debate will rage among the Pikunis, deliberating between war and appeasement, and that in the end these arguments won't matter one bit: the U.S. Army will attack innocent Pikunis for what Owl Child has done, and ultimately, that's exactly how the massacre occurs.

Fools Crow reads, in some respects, like a fantasy epic: Fools Crow is the young underdog destined to lead his people, the Napikwans are the forces of Sauron.  But we know that there's no possible way that the story can end with victory for Fools Crow and the Pikunis, and that makes the novel a deflated, ragged affair.  It never recaptures the thrilling nature of the Crow raid at the beginning; no real showdown with the Napikwans ever comes (the massacre occurs "off-stage"); in the end, it's the slow massacre of smallpox that does Fools Crow's people in.

Instead, Fools Crow asks, how does a man lead his people through defeat?  Like Erdrich and Silko, Welch treats the myths and traditions of the communities he writes about with literal seriousness; toward the end of the novel, Fools Crow is compelled by a dream to travel to the house of Feather Woman, a mythological figure who shows him a vision of the future.  It's bleak.  Fools Crow sees the massacre, the smallpox, and the ultimate assimilation of his people through boarding school regimes.  But Fools Crow also sees that he and his ancestors will survive, and that there is a victory of sorts in remembering, and in that way the vision becomes Fools Crow's argument for itself: that as long as the story of the Blackfeet is told, then the victory of white Napikwan society can never be entirely complete.  It's small comfort, but it's what's available.  And while it's a different story, a different massacre that the President thinks is funny, Fools Crow is a reminder that it's important to remember what actually happened and just how horrible it was.