A Tribute to James Welch

Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, I always knew I wanted to have a creative career. From before I can accurately recall, my sentiments leaned toward becoming a writer, filmmaker, or anything in the arts that would allow me to express myself. My hero was John F. Kennedy. Of course, I wanted to be president of the United States like him, but I was also intrigued that Kennedy was a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. Now this was a goal! A novelist president! A presidential novelist!

Most of my life, I hoped to leave my home, forget about my past, and write great screenplays, essays, and novels. Being an Indian was more of a hindrance than anything else. I needed life experience. I needed to see the world. New York. Los Angeles. Seattle. Traveling through Europe and everywhere else I could think of. These would be events to write about. Stories to tell. Who wanted to read about Indians anyway? Who would read anything written by some nobody from Cut Bank, Montana? The thought of living in a big city as a famous writer was so compelling to a little Indian farm hick from Montana that I nearly emoted tears at the precious thought.

I spent most of my life writing poems about loves I never had. A broken heart that was not mine. My stories consisted of places I had never been. I wrote about sunrises and sunsets, peoples and cultures I never saw or knew anything about. I never imagined anybody would want to read anything about the Montana Hi-line or Blackfeet Indians.

The first James Welch novel I ever read was Winter in the Blood. This was the story of a Blackfeet Indian, lost in life, struggling for an identity and tormented by visions of his past. A novel of extraordinary beauty, tinged with pain, yet wrought with the clarity of contemporary Indian life. Up until this novel, I never identified with most characters in Indian literature. But this was real. I knew people similar to the unnamed narrator; I saw them every day. Maybe I was a little like him myself. This novel changed my life and my art forever.

Wind blowing over my parents’ farm. Snow blanketing the landscape. Mountains in the distance overlooking a vast plain. The tinny taste of snowflakes stinging the tip of my tongue. I hear singing. Dancing. Voices calling stories in the night. Here I am, in the waking hours, envisioning at my dining table, but not there—in another world. Images scorched into my eyes from a place far away. Insomnia grips me. Holds me tight. I cannot sleep when language haunts me, when allure seethes inside my bones, when my pen has stories to tell.

When James Welch was attending the University of Montana, his writing professor pulled him aside to his office and questioned his knowledge of poetry. Until then, Welch wrote rhyming poems about “majestic mountains and wheeling gulls.” He wrote of an ocean he had never seen. Later in his one work of nonfiction, Welch mentioned how he always wanted to move to New York or someplace in another world far away from an Indian reservation. He wanted to be famous, to achieve literary greatness. Welch did not want to be an Indian writer but a writer who happened to be an Indian. “The mere thought,” he said, “was nearly enough to move me to tears.” Now his professor, the legendary poet Richard Hugo, challenged him to write about what he knew, about where he came from. When Welch said he was an Indian, Hugo said, “Go ahead, write about the reservation, the landscape, the people.” And so this is what he did.¹

My deep impression of the Blackfeet Reservation is one of bleakness. Hopelessness. I had constantly felt my home was a place where dreams have been left to die, a location in which the populace was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty. The winters are harsh and unforgiving, the employment scarce, and the culture roiling in torment. But somewhere in all this is an undeniable charm, an allure that held...