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  • Irony, Pattern, MysteryThe “Tribal Traditional” in The Death of Jim Loney
  • Lincoln Faller (bio)

People have told me this: “You are a role model. Go in and talk to these people and let them know that an Indian can write.” I know most of my Indian friends who are writers or activists or whatever, are also considered role models. So you’re reduced to this group of people with their few role models instead of all the people rising up. . . . It’s hard to identify with a role model, incidentally.

James Welch, 1982

(Bevis, “Dialogue” 178)

Of James Welch’s five novels the most problematic and, arguably, the least understood is The Death of Jim Loney. Or so the long history of commentary on it would indicate. This essay delves first into questions that have so far largely defined discussions of the novel, which have been dominated by what it means for Jim to arrange his own death after he kills Pretty Weasel. It then goes on to consider aspects and qualities that previous considerations have overlooked or insufficiently explored, among other things the novel’s chronology, how it maps the movement of its protagonist across its landscape, and, in general, its often highly occulted allusions to the traditional cultures of the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre peoples. The Death of Jim Loney is far more finely nuanced, far more superbly crafted, far more profoundly ironic, far more polyvalent and mysterious than we have so far understood. In being all these things, to a very high degree, it puts its readers in a difficult position, and this, I’ll suggest, is crucial to Welch’s concern, still early in his career, to demonstrate his craft—and power—as an Indian writer. But as an Indian writer, it needs to be added, not easily or comfortably assimilable to even the most well meaning and appreciative—but at the same time offputting, even potentially demeaning—notion of what that conjunction of terms, surprising to some people at least, might mean. [End Page 1]

No Epiphanies: The Ending and Its Ironies

Two related questions have long bedevilled readers of The Death of Jim Loney: How “Indian” is the novel? How “Indian” is Jim Loney? Kathleen Sands, one of the first to raise these questions, resolved the former by arguing, with reference to the latter, that however deracinated and clueless he may be, what Welch has called the “orchestration” of Loney’s suicide by tribal cop represents his choice to die “like a Gros Ventre warrior” (131).1 This point, taken up and repeated in subsequent commentaries on the novel, aims at countering the “depressing” impression it might otherwise leave; “this dark novel is ultimately consoling,” Sands says (127).2 Loney in this reading is not just another instance of an all too familiar stereotype but something of a tragic hero. Indeed, something of an existential tragic hero. Faced with the absurdity of his accidental killing of Pretty Weasel, a crisis in his otherwise meaningless and directionless life, Loney chooses nonetheless to take responsibility for that act and in so doing defines himself as he never has been able to before.3 The man who “never felt Indian” (Jim Loney 89), who didn’t feel like anything, really, certainly not white either, determines to die as an Indian, and does. He heads for Mission Canyon, where despite his earlier alienation from the landscape he feels now the presence of his maternal ancestors, and where he presents himself to be shot on Indian land by an Indian policeman.4 In doing so he elevates himself above the anomie and ennui that characterizes life in Harlem, Montana, a small town almost at “the end of the world” where even a privileged white person—in this case Jim’s girlfriend, Rhea—can feel little or no “possibility of spirit” (10).

For all its attractions, this argument ought to sit uneasily with careful and attentive readers of the novel. Perhaps not quite for the reasons it does so with Ernest Stromberg, who argues that “Indian” itself is an ambiguous and problematic category, made in the novel all the more ambiguous and problematic because Jim Loney is himself in...

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