"A Happiness That Sleeps with Sadness": An Examination of "White Scabs" in Fools Crow

A prolific and popular writer, James Welch has captured the attention of both Native and non-Native readers since his first publication of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, in 1971. Welch continued to dazzle and captivate his readers into the twenty-first century with several highly acclaimed novels presenting stories about tribal lives and culture in both the past and present until his untimely death in 2003. He mesmerized his audience through his ability to create a sense of participation of writer and reader, storyteller and listener. This was noted by prominent Native writer Louis Owens who commented that Welch was "the storyteller committed to rediscovering and preserving this lost [Pikuni] identity . . . [and that] the role of storyteller is crucial to cultural and individual psychic survival, for stories confer meaning and identity in the Indian world."¹

One of Welch's stories that is of particular interest to me as an academic researching Native Americans and health is Fools Crow with its epic representation of the lives of the Pikuni (Blackfeet), especially their contact with "white scabs" (smallpox).² The story of the coming of disease among the Pikuni in Fools Crow was not Welch's first literary focus on this topic, however. Welch's powerful poem "The Man From Washington," published in his 1971 book of poems, introduces his readers to the coming of disease and other destruction,

The end came easy for most of us.
Packed away in our crude beginnings
in some far corner of a flat world,
we didn't expect much more
than firewood and buffalo robes
to keep us warm. The man came down,
a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,
and spoke to us. He promised
that life would go on as usual,
that treaties would be signed, and everyone—
man, woman and child—would be inoculated
against a world in which we had no part,
a world of money, promise and disease.³

This poem set the foundation for Fools Crow, for it tells of the ending of traditional Pikuni life through the coming of the "man from Washington" who signed treaties that promised a new way of life filled with opportunity and possibility, but in reality brought the destruction of traditional life, disease, and death.

Fools Crow begins with the introduction of the protagonist, White Man's Dog, a Lone Eater (a Blackfeet band) living in the Two Medi-cine Territory of Montana. White Man's Dog is "restless" and "not so lucky . . . he had little to so show for his eighteen winters."⁴ The story, which can be interpreted partly as a coming-of-age story, follows the life and transformation of White Man's Dog from a young man to be pitied to one who earns the new name Fools Crow and becomes a well-respected tribal member. Fools Crow is more than a coming-of-age story, however, because as the life of Fools Crow unfolds, so does a Blackfeet story of epic proportions.

Welch brings an emotional realism to Fools Crow and requires the reader to pay attention as he draws readers deeply into the Pikuni world. Mixing both real and imagined stories, people, and events, Welch brings readers a world filled with love, unity, disunity, conflict, death, and survival. The reader travels the Montana landscape of the 1800s with the well-developed characters. We, the readers, become attached to people who suffer trials and tribulations as they fight for their survival and way of life in the face of white encroachments, intratribal and intertribal conflict, and disease.

The multidimensional Fools Crow provides a wealth of information about the Pikuni and their representation of sickness. The story humanizes the impacts and devastation of illness, raises questions of morals and values, and illustrates the historical and cultural contexts of disease and care. Both Native and non-Native illnesses...