One of the most important Native American writers of the post-1968 generation, James Welch, to a large degree, established a genre. What he gave us was Native American Literature: literature unmistakably about Indian subjects, written by an Indian writer. His characters...
[more]One of the most important Native American writers of the post-1968 generation, James Welch, to a large degree, established a genre. What he gave us was Native American Literature: literature unmistakably about Indian subjects, written by an Indian writer. His characters were never drawn from sensationalist stereotypes or nostalgic romaticization. Speaking of the Blackfeet in "Fools Crow," Welch said this: "They weren't particularly noble Indians. They weren't particularly bad Indians. They were human beings. That's really what I wanted to get across, the idea that historical Indians were human beings. They weren't cliches." Hence, the world that Welch endeavored to write about wasn't rooted in bipartisan political fervor; it harbored no polemical motive. At it's core, it is simply great literature and he, like other great writers, simply wrote from what he knew.
Welch was born in 1940 in Browning, Montana to Blackfeet and Gros Ventre parents. Welch spent the earlier part of his life on the Blackfoot Reservation, his father's land, before moving to his mother's home on the Fort Belknap Reservation. His desire to write led him to a small poetry class at the University of Montana in 1966 taught by Richard Hugo. Welch admittedly knew nothing of Yeats, Coleridge or much of anything else mentioned in the graduate seminar; he claims to have been allowed into the class on the condition that he was a warm body filling a chair in a fledgling program. Although it was Hugo's first time teaching, it didn't take him long to determine that his young student knew nothing about poetry. Instead, Hugo asked him what he did know about. When Welch couldn't offer an answer, he was then asked where he was from: something he could answer; something he knew quite well.
Thus, Welch began writing about his home, however apprehensively. At the time, literature about Native American life was scarce. Scott Momaday's visionary work "House Made of Dawn" had not yet been published and contemporary literary heavyweights such as Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich were just babies - literally. Consequently, Welch was skeptical of Native American life as worthy or interesting subject matter for literature. He recalls: "Hugo, in his infinite wisdom and generosity, said, 'Go ahead, write about the reservation, the landscape, the people.' At the moment I thought that was a fine idea, but as I walked home that day, I became more depressed with each block. I knew that nobody wanted to read about Indians, reservations, or those rolling endless plains that turned into Canada just thirty miles north. By the time I got home, I began to think that maybe that country was bleak and that life on the reservation was hopeless."
Welch's personal consideration of place and identity enriched his writing and expanded his storytelling beyond the reservation, into the world of literature. Accessing a legacy of myth and metaphor, he seamlessly ushered the Native American experience into the mainstream without generalization or cliche. He redefined the tragic, presented complex protagonists that struggled with entagled existential questions and subverted historical perspectives all without compromising the quality of his craft. His writing is characteristically sharp and clean, but severely dexterous and rich with subtlety. Ivan Doig, author of "This House of Sky" praised Welch as "a master of words and nuance, with the ability to 'capture the essence of his characters in the sublime, deceptively simple art of storytelling.'" Hence, establishing him as a writer's writer, standing among such literary icons as Stegner and Steinbeck.
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