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James Welch
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| Photo courtesy of The Missoulian |
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Born in 1940 in Browning, Montana, James Welch is descended
from the Blackfeet tribe on his father's side and the Gros Ventre tribe
on his mother's. Raised on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Indian reservations,
Welch writes about Native Americans in American society. As critic Don Lee
has commented, Welch "has made it his lifework as a writer to illuminate
the richness of his culture and the heartache of its dislocation."
Welch attended the creative writing program at the University of Montana.
Though his early attempts at poetry were, he says, "filled with majestic
mountains and wheeling gulls" -- the things he thought poetry was supposed
to be about -- his first poetry teacher, Richard Hugo, convinced Welch to
write about the world he knew instead. In 1971 he published his first collection
of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, about life on the reservation and
on the plains of Montana. Though he is best known as a novelist, the lessons
of poetry, such as the need for an economy of words, have always influenced
his fiction.
Credited along with N. Scott Momaday as one of the earliest writers in the
Native American literary renaissance of the late 1960s, Welch created realistic
novels that portrayed life on and off the Blackfeet reservation. The sense
of isolation and alienation from white society, the vast open spaces of
Montana, and the attempt to find meaning in the past recur as themes again
and again in his writing. Yet there is a strong undercurrent of wry humor
and an appreciation of the absurd that inform all of his works as well.
His first novel, Winter in the Blood, received much critical attention.
In it, and in his next novel, The Death of Jim Loney, Welch writes
about contemporary Native Americans who are caught between the white world
and Native American society, and feel a part of neither. Reynolds Price
has written that these two novels "provide steady and penetrating looks
at young Indian men whose spiritual blight and psychic paralysis are not
confined to reservation life but are universal in their nature and causes."
Welch's most recent works, The Heartsong of Charging Elk and Killing
Custer, draw on nineteenth-century, Native American history from a tribal
perspective.
"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," Welch says about the pressure he feels to be a spokesman. Yet
he also knows that "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 Native Americans got
the way they are today, and how they differ from one another, as tribes
and as individuals."
Works by the Author
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Work:
The Death of Jim Loney