Circling Back, Closing In: Remembering James Welch

Introductions, like conclusions, draw time into a circle, moving clockwise or counterclockwise. Beginnings are revivified like the favorite old tunes we love to dance to again and again. Paying tribute to James Welch, for me, brings to mind dancing: James Welch as the poet/would-be fox dancer of his poem “Two for the Festival” (Riding 55). “Fox, the awkward dancer,” is the descriptive phrase he uses for the younger persona in that poem. In pulling that metaphor from his work, I do not mean to romanticize Welch, for “dance” takes on deeply nuanced meanings in Native cultures, from social dance to Sun Dance, from celebration to sacrifice. Dance as a complex metaphor figures into the writing of poetry also. As James Tate writes in his introduction to Riding the Earthboy 40, poetry is “that magnificent dance of language that cannot be translated into prose” (viii). Jim Welch began as a poet, though he moved freely with and within many rhythms of language. When asked why he did not write poetry anymore, Jim often commented that he would like to believe poetry resides within his prose. I believe it does.

Paying tribute to James Welch concludes, yet oddly opens again, those fundamental questions about the meaning of life he posed in his poems. As Gail Tremblay’s reading of his poem “Getting Things Straight” so tenderly shows, our questions shape our vision, and vice versa, what we are able to see, even when we do not necessarily understand it fully. Although clearly an extraordinary poet, Welch also had a great deal of the philosopher in him, one who sought another discourse, a different way of “explaining”—through narrative and humor—the ways, whys, and wherefores of Indian life and struggles. He was a man of deep passion and commitment, who shunned easy sentiment. Thinking of him as tough-minded, kind-hearted, and doggedly determined to avoid easy solutions to or sloppy thinking about human dilemmas and sorrows, I remember Jim’s invaluable contribution to Indian people. He has touched so many people’s lives through his writing and his being, as the stories and essays that follow will tell. How difficult his path was at times, and how cleverly he negotiated that path! In an interview in the 1970s, Jim talked about the “tyranny of expectations” he faced (Jahner 343).¹ He said,

People expect you to do things a certain way, their way. Members of the arts councils think it’s nice that a young Indian can express himself so eloquently on “the Indian experience.” They secretly know that most Indians have trouble writing their names in mud with a sharp stick and are hence ineloquent, or uneloquent, noneloquent. And the young Indians you meet at colleges and high schools wonder why you are wearing a bow-tie and smiling so much at the people who are oppressing them and paying you to dance.

(Loy 30)

Through his own self-deprecating humor, Jim expressed an understanding of the awkwardness of his position in the world as an Indian writer, and in doing so, he gave the rest of us courage.

He often talked about “getting it right” so that Indian people would recognize themselves and their realities in his writing, and again and again Indian people told him that he had indeed gotten it right. He had his detractors, as all of us do, but he attempted not to shrink from the brutal truths of cultural loss and sorrow. He always tried to look ahead, to read the magical hide of winter counts. He got something so right in Winter in the Blood, at least for me as an Indian reader in the early 1970s, that on a first read I experienced it as profoundly depressing. Its reality I knew in my heart and soul. The second time I laughed all the way through; that is how fundamentally Indian it seemed to me, capturing as it does life on the hi-line where I grew up, with its fragile hope and sometimes pathetic longing and despair yet doing so with a certain richness of human perspective...