The Indian Novelist

...He always wanted to be a poet...

...Welch used the westward expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century, for instance, as the factual framework for the wonder, tragedy, and hope of his 1986 masterpiece Fools Crow and for his last and most mature novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, published in 2000, that tells the story of an Oglala Lakota man who must decide whether to remain in France as part of the bigger world in which he's been forced to make his life, or return home to Pine Ridge and his remaining family...

...A Pikuni leader named Owl Child and Bob Mercer is a newspaperman covering state government and politics in Pierre, South Dakota...

...So too humor, lust, commitment, and honor—not to mention summer breezes, star-filled nights, good greasy meat, and snow on the land...

...the demeaning changes in personality from alcohol misuse and abuse...

...Those are universal themes, and that really was James Welch's main point...

...Instead came five novels...

...She held her breath as she watched the moves that she still recog-nized—the left-handed jump hook, the delicate finger roll, and of course the raining jump shots from the top of the key, the corner, the flank...

...Injustice, revenge, despair, sorrow, the dark emotions, violence, all swirl through his writing...

...It was the Yellow Calf boy, who had led the high school team to two state championships and played to too much fanfare for his taste at the University of Montana...

...He had left to learn to be a lawyer at Stanford and came back to a Helena law firm, where he won a big injury suit against the powerful Anaconda mining company...

...At the end of The Indian Lawyer, a book that draws heavily upon his experience on the parole board, Welch describes elementary teacher Lena Old Horn driving home from a Sunday night dinner, content in her decision of a few nights past that she finally would leave Browning at the end of classes that spring—unable to stand any longer living in a place where she has to pull down the window shade to avoid seeing the inhumanity that people using alcohol were wreaking upon themselves at the edge of her backyard...

...His critically favored debut, Winter in the Blood, appeared in 1974...

...What man is capable of doing to man" is James Welch's constant theme...

...And hopefully he will have the toughness and fairness to present his material in a way that is not manufactured by conventional stance...

...It showed in his work...

...The Death of Jim Loney in 1979 spoke perhaps truest about Welch's own heart...

...Unfortunately, Heavy Runner and his people had made camp at the spot vacated a few days earlier by Mountain Chief, with whose people Owl Child had traveled at times in the past into Canada...

...In the Review, Milton not only published recognized talents such as Wallace Steg-ner but new voices, and it was there that Welch published his first poems in 1969 and the first half of his first novel under its original title in 1971, "The Only Good Indian...

...I served ten years on the Montana State Board of Pardons," he explained, "and just plain burned out on the gut-wrenching sadness of human experience...

...He also wrote a PBS film with Paul Stekler, Last Stand at Little Bighorn, in 1989, and a nonfiction book grew from the project, Killing Custer...

...Down at the University of South Dakota, professor John Milton meanwhile had created a new platform for Western writers, the South Dakota Review...

...Born in Browning, Montana, in 1940, he studied with the poet Richard Hugo at the University of Montana in the 1960s, who advised him to write about the people he knew best...

...She thought of all the basketball games she had seen in Browning, all the kids who played with grace and intensity, but there had never been another Sylvester Yellow Calf...

...She started her car and crept up and over the hill...

...He was going one on one against the only man who ever beat him...

...Impulsively, she pulled over to the side of the road and stopped...

...What happened at the Marias River that day—173 Pikunis were killed, including ninety women and fifty children, shot and burned to death— exceeded in its gruesomeness the better-known attack at Wounded Knee twenty years later...

...the weight of expectations...

...BY BOB MERCER Even revenge had been j slaughtered," James Welch wrote near the * conclusion of Fools Crow, his 1986 novel about the massacre on the Marias River in Montana on January 23, 1870...

...But as Welch diligently showed, both in Fools Crow and in the opening chapter of his 1994 Killing Custer, the Marias River massacre didn't happen out of the blue...

...His stature led to service on the parole board and then recruitment to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination to a congressional seat— before he fell into a seductive trap set by his inmates...

...Now he was working on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, handling a tribal water-rights case...

...and the good and bad of sexual desires...

...Along the way, Welch volunteered for public service...

...And Clark's death led to the army's attack upon the camp of Heavy Runner, even though he and several of the other Pikuni leaders had agreed they would help bring in Owl Child...

...their acceptance, or not, of family and social responsibility...

...That humiliation led Owl Child to murder Clark...

...As for his own life as a writer, Welch said, "For the most part only an Indian knows who he is—an individual who just happens to be an Indian—and if he has grown up on a reservation he will naturally write about what he knows...

...Indeed, that might be the most important thing to remember about the novelist...

...But it was not his poetry that made him a literary star, for no published collection followed his first, Riding the Earthboy 40...

...But Welch's characters were always people first, men and women who lived from the 1860s to 1980s on the northern Great Plains that form the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains...

...And the 1990 The Indian Lawyer, his best-known book, examines the suspense of congressional election politics and prison con games...

...the value of strong parents...

...but, at the same time, it was inevitable that people would refer to me as 'the Indian poet.' I have benefited materially from being an Indian poet, but I just hope that in twenty or thirty years people will take me seriously as a poet...

...He was home again, temporarily, in Browning for the funeral of his grandfather...

...He wrote much about American Indians: for the most part the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, among whom he grew up, as well as the neighboring Crow, Cheyenne, and Oglala Lakota...

...She glanced over at the basketball court, but Sylvester didn't notice the car...

...One of its funniest, too...

...Nor did he notice the sleet, the freshening of the wind from the north...

...Early in his career, he said, "Ever since I made the commitment I have just wanted to be a poet, without the 'Indian' label...

...The search for maturity runs throughout Welch's novels...

...As she drove through the late-April slush, on the street, she noticed a rangy man shooting baskets on the grade school's playground...

...the power of dreams and beliefs...

...The immediate events began when a trader named Malcolm Clark took revenge upon Owl Child for a past theft by whipping the outlaw in front of his own people...

...But in all his work the settings is the confusing emotional and social environment that is the legacy of the twists, turns, and reversals of the government's Indian policies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...Take away his beautiful and strong descriptions of the terrain, sky, and weather, and set aside the culturally destructive federal policies on land, treaties, language, and religion, you find that at their most basic, Welch's novels are about people's search for love...

...his gang had been on a rampage, murdering ranchers and teamsters, and raping women but purposely leaving them alive to spread the message of the terror...

...And Owl Child in turn justified his violence as standing up to the intruders while other Pikunis did not...

...James Welch's main characters for the most part are everyday heroes in an ageless struggle—the struggle for humanity—his America is one that most Americans would never know but for his work...

...As Lena watched, the clouds grew lower and thicker and the first splotches of sleet hit her windshield and she could not see the mountains anymore...

...When Welch died this summer at age sixty-two, the country lost one of its most fluently beautiful but plainly honest voices...