The Heartsong of Charging Elk (review)

The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch. Doubleday, 2000

James Welch has no pretensions to the throne of Henry James as a novelist of the American in turn-of-the-century Europe in this his fifth novel, and in fact he does not confess to having read more than one or two of James's novels in his life. Some readers, however, will be reminded of such works as The American (1877) and even The Ambassadors (1903) when they encounter Welch's latest novel, which features an Oglala Sioux left behind in Marseilles by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Ill and injured in a fall, the twenty-three-year-old performer finds himself in 1889 in a France that is far more foreign and intimidating than that which the naive young millionaire, Christopher Newman, or the more sophisticated Lambert Strether, encountered. Charging Elk is not an unsophisticated American, but an unsophisticated Native American who has fled the prospects of life on the newly created reservation. As a result, when he leaves the group holding out in the Black Hills to join the Wild West Show, he does not speak English, but Lakota, and no one in the daunting port city on the Mediterranean speaks his language. He does not even have at his disposal that last resort of the stereotypical ugly American: just say it in good English, a lot louder next time.

About a dozen years ago, when William Bevis described the "homing" motif in Native American fiction, he never intended to suggest that all novels about Indians would necessarily follow a circular pattern. Certainly this one does not. The Heartsong of Charging Elk might be described as a novel of estrangement and adaptation. Other terms suggest themselves: assimilation, acculturation. But these terms are politically ionized and may carry with them the implication of the qualifier "forced." While it could be argued that Charging Elk is a victim of circumstances, an example of a New World innocent (of sorts) abroad in the frightening, decadent Old World, Welch makes it clear that most of what happens to his protagonist results from choices he makes. The novel begins, however, with a brief prologue that focuses on the historically definitive moment that might be said to circumscribe Charging Elk's free will: the surrender of the Oglalas by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse a year after the Battle of the Little Bighorn (the Greasy Grass as translated from the Lakota), which occurred in 1876. Charging Elk is eleven in the opening scene, and although he realizes that the world around him is changing utterly, that the men of his tribe will no longer go to war or to the buffalo ranges, he finds himself singing along with the others because they are alive and at peace: "It was a song the boy would not forget for the rest of his life" (11).

This acquiescent opening must enrage the Indian militant even more than did the serenely, perhaps even naively, optimistic conclusion of Welch's 1986 novel, Fools Crow. After all, this "heartsong" is one of surrender and implicit compliance. For some readers, The Heartsong of Charging Elk must be the predictable culmination of Fools Crow's vision of Pikuni (Piegan Blackfeet) children, "quiet and huddled together, alone and foreign in their own country" (386). Historically, the alternative was that stated in Fools Crow by Black Prairie Runner: "We would rather be killed by the Napikwans [whites] than live in their world" (385). Of course, many Indians did die fighting. But Welch's new novel is also historical. He created Charging Elk as a composite of several Indians who were stranded in Europe at the turn of the century, and he conducted careful research, including interviews with relatives. Welch also visited Marseilles on several occasions, and his reputation as a novelist is especially high in France, where he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des...