“Created in Words”: Theorizing (Postmodern) Native American Survival through Story in James Welch’s Fools Crow

James Welch’s Fools Crow (1986) occupies a special position as a recognized landmark of Native American literature. The “pivotal” (McFarland, 167) “cornerstone” (Bak, 35) of Welch’s work, the novel equally represents the whole field as “the most radically Native American work yet attempted” (Bevis 1993, 33). Welch’s third novel weaves the perspectives and experiences of the Lone Eaters band of Blackfeet or Pikuni in the northern plains during the post–Civil War years of growing Amer-European contact and conflict with the maturation of one member of the band, White Man’s Dog/Fools Crow. Over the course of the novel, the youth earns a new name through success in a raid, marries, participates in the Sun Dance, and is guided by Mikapi the many-faces, or medicine man, and Raven to receive the power of Wolverine. The last part of the narrative juxtaposes a smallpox epidemic and massacre with Fools Crow’s dream-led journey to the mythic land of Feather Woman. The status accorded Fools Crow for bringing us “closer to the buffalo-culture Indian world than in any other novel to date” (Bevis 1997, 46) extends the impact of any reading from interpretation of the text alone to engagement with the critical discussion on Native literature more broadly. In challenging the standard reading of Welch’s novel as a celebration of authentic American Indian culture, then,¹ I argue that the novel theorizes the usefulness of post-modern theory for the field. A legacy of continued violence, oppression, and injustice raises the urgency of debate over the political and material value of elite, Western, language-focused postmodern theory. Minority/ethnic studies like Native American studies cast uneasiness over postmodernism into sharp relief by demonstrating the high stakes: effective resistance, self-determined identity, and cultural survival are all arguably threatened. Welch’s work refutes these common critiques of postmodern theory and elaborates how a (postmodern) understanding of experience, culture, and text can support effective identity and action.

Whereas Fools Crow’s historical subject matter prompts its reading as “the most profound act of recovery in American literature” (Owens, 166), I argue that the novel connects the Blackfeet past with the present as much by revising or creating that past as by recording it. What Gerald Vizenor calls the “ruins of representation” (1994b, 140), the problematizing of cultural referentiality, occasions not the loss of authority, but a reworking of materially effective, dynamic story and vision that extends to the novel itself. A story about stories, Fools Crow models literature in Simon Ortiz’s terms, as a living process “to bring about meaning and meaningfulness” (Weaver, Womack, and Warrior, 255), in stark contrast to the archaeology praised by commentaries on the novel. Primarily through Fools Crow himself, the novel foregrounds the active production of meaning that has made Ortiz’s view central to recent theorizations like American Indian Literary Nationalism, by Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior. Where the concept of “hybridity” suggests an externally imposed mixture/concept, this volume, written in reaction against Elivira Pulitano’s use of postmodernism in Toward a Native American Critical Theory, uses “transformation” or “adaptation” to assert “an Indian phenomenon” (xvii)—yet retains the focus on response. More than response to or conflict with non-Native cultures, Fools Crow focuses on conflict or, more precisely, multiplicity and uncertainty within a specific Pikuni community and individual. The novel moves beyond an acknowledgment of “hybridity” as the inescapable interrelation of different cultures to argue the inherent, constitutive indeterminacy of traditional culture. In so doing, Fools Crow refutes the equation of hybridity with loss of identity. At the same time, the novel’s emphasis on the specificity of perspective enacted in the production and interpretation of story works against an overly general or determinative understanding of Native experience. Fools Crow explores one answer to the question Womack asks postmodernists like Pulitano: “What does one do with one’s hybridity other than confessing it? . . . What is it good for?” (138).

On my reading, the production of Native identity through story within...