The American Century: Literature since 1945 787miles from the Laguna; and in Ceremony, Tayo, whose grandmother saw that
explosion, sees the bomb as uniting humanity under the threat of annihilation.
“Human beings were one clan again,” he reflects, “united by the fate the destroyers
planned for all of them, for all living things.” The redemptive ceremony is the
experience in the book, the one that Tayo undergoes, and the experience of the book,
as it incorporates everything, old and new, into an inclusive vision of peace.
Sitting among the rocks mined for uranium to make the atom bomb, Tayo sees in
the stars a pattern of convergence with “no boundaries, only transitions through all
distances and time.” That pattern the protagonist sees is one that this narrative
also performs, from its opening invocation to a close that repeats in a new key the
old songs and chants: “Sunrise, / accept this offering, / Sunrise.”
Several of the characters in the fiction of James Welch bear a haunting resemblance
to Tayo in Ceremony and Abel in House Made of Dawn. “I felt no hatred, no love, no
guilt, no conscience,” the protagonist and narrator of Welch’s first novel, Winter in the
Blood (1974), admits, “nothing but a distance that had grown through the years.” He is
a drifter, marked by a sense of alienation and loss. So is the protagonist of Welch’s
second novel, The Death of Jim Loney (1979). Both men, after promising athletic careers
in youth, now hardly live their lives. Estranged from their families, they see in their
fathers haunting omens of what they might become, outsiders living on the fringes of
white culture. Consumed by feelings of uselessness – “What use,” the protagonist of
Winter in the Blood keeps asking himself of everything – they are aimless, apathetic
creatures, seeking relief in drink and casual sex. Welch, who was half Blackfeet and half
Gros Ventre, has a far more laconic, terser narrative style than Momaday or Silko,
however. Plot matters less than mood in these two novels and, for that matter, in
Welch’s extraordinary last novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), which imagines
the title character adrift in Europe, with no money, no way of communicating and no
hope of returning home. Mood and tone are set by a bleak, oblique humor and a tightly
rhythmic, repetitive prose style that recalls the early fiction of Ernest Hemingway. That
goes for Welch’s fourth book, Indian Lawyer (1990), as well. As its title suggests, the
hero here is more materially comfortable. With a shiny Saab and finely tailored suits,
he has moved a long way from his impoverished childhood on a Blackfeet reservation.
Like Welch’s other sad young contemporary men, though, he moves between two
worlds, one white and one Indian, feeling adrift, out of place in both. Fool’s Crow,
published in 1986, is different from Welch’s other fiction. The year here is 1870, the
location is a Blackfeet camp. And the story, replete with Native American custom and
ceremony, retells an actual historical tale about the decline of tribal life. A young
medicine man, the Fool’s Crow of the title, sees the danger posed by the Napikwans, or
white men. He knows that his people must either wage a brave but futile war, or simply
surrender their land and way of life without a fight. Still, even Fool’s Crow has the dark
texture, the somber tone and shadowy humor that are Welch’s trademark. And, in its
own way, it acts as a supplement. It forms part of a tetralogy that sets the pride of the
Native American past against the pity of the present, and that suggests one small
recompense: in a world of drift and loss is a recovery of ancestry – to become aware, as
the narrator of Winter in the Blood puts it, of “the presence of ghosts.”GGray_c05.indd 787ray_c 05 .indd 787 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM