Closure in James Welch's Fools Crow

In her study of Asian American cultural politics, Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe reminds us that the cultural institution of the novel performs a function in reconciling readers to the national social order. She points to the interruption of the novel form by immigrant writers, whose works “displace the representational regimes of the institutionalized novel and official historical narrative by writing out of the limits and breakdowns of those regimes” (101). Her analysis is helpful in understanding the elongated closure of James Welch’s Fools Crow and in addressing his legacy to writers and readers. As critics have long noted, Welch displaces the familiar “western” and the official historical narratives of the victory of the civilized over the savage.¹ He constructs the story of Indian-white contact from inside Indian subjectivity and redefines the meanings of religion, culture, and virtue for a diverse audience.

With Fools Crow, Welch has produced a bildungsroman, which Lowe calls “the primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity.” This form, she points out,

has a special status among the works selected for a canon, for it elicits the reader’s identification with the bildung narrative of ethical formation, itself a narrative of the individual’s relinquishing of particularity and difference through identification with an idealized “national” form of subjectivity.

(98)

If we see Welch as analogous to Lowe’s interrupting immigrant writers, we have to ask to what national order does he seek to reconcile his subject? Who does he conceive to be his audience, and how does he shape his material to engage the identification of each cohort of a diverse readership? Does his novel belong exclusively to a subcanon of Native American literature, or does it seek to insert itself into a national canon, helping us to reframe the meaning of citizenship in the contemporary United States?

It is my contention that Welch enters both the subcanon of Native American novels and the U.S. national canon, that his novel explores the gap between official national histories, earlier canonized novels by Euramericans, and the hitherto only partially expressed point of view of Native Americans on the history of their conflict with the colonizers. There is a Pikuni social order to which Fools Crow is reconciled and that is universalized in the world of the novel. The encroaching social system of the whites is seen as other, as incoherent or corrupt.² Just as, in Lowe’s argument, the reader of Jane Austen identified with Elizabeth Bennett even if he was reading in colonized Jamaica, so the reader of James Welch is forced by the novel form to affiliate with the subjectivity of White Man’s Dog, later Fools Crow. Welch makes this inevitable by developing a series of reflectors for his hero: his friend Fast Horse, his brother Running Fisher, his opposite, Owl Child. The narrative distinguishes Fools Crow from his foils by showing his choices as in line with Pikuni ethics. Moreover, the novel specifies band names, a level of accuracy not hitherto found in American novels. Names for the characters and their naming practices also enter the novel in substantial detail.

Welch sets his novel just at the moment at which Pikuni social order is under maximum stress, a period all readers know was followed by calamity: military defeat, epidemic, starvation. Yet for the first time in an American novel, the reader sees a broad picture of nineteenth-century Native-Euramerican conflict from within the Native subjectivity.³ Readers absorb the Blackfeet experience of encroachment on their lands, participate in their leadership’s counseling, walk with Fools Crow through the massacred camp. On another level, riskier for the author, they listen to Fools Crow’s conversations with Raven, experience the Sun Dance sacrifice with him, follow him into apprenticeship to the healer, and listen to the recalled stories of the Beaver Bundle and the fire-bearer. I call these narrative elements risky for Welch because, although the novel form can incorporate them, they represent a bold challenge to its conventional realism.

It is to the shared concept of...