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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
vii
Introduction
ix
hearing, reading, and remembering
james welch (1940– 2003)
Kathryn W. Shanley Interview
3
Owen Perkins Interview
14
Cindy Heidemann Interview
19
From James Welch’s The Marseilles Grace
21
On Researching Marseilles Grace/Heartsong, 1994–96
Lois M. Welch
44
Welch Relations: Uncovering the History,
Recovering the Story
John Purdy
58
reprinted essays
“A World Away from His People”: James Welch’s The
Heartsong of Charging Elk and the Indian Historical Novel
James J. Donahue
Ghost Dance Literature: Spectrality in Heartsong
Ulla Haselstein
Tribal or Transnational? Memory, History,
and Identity in Heartsong
Hans Bak
65
88
111
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original essays
The Unexpected Indian in Heartsong
Amanda Cobb-Greetham
“Looking for the Way Back”: Displacement,
Diaspora, and Desire in Heartsong
Kathryn W. Shanley
143
167
Issues of Identity
Arnold Krupat
196
The Fatal Blow Job
Craig Womack
213
History, Language, and Culture in Heartsong
Arnold Krupat
242
Native Presence and Survivance in Heartsong
James Ruppert
263
Contributors
277
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INTRODUCTION
Arnold Krupat
Born in Browning, Montana, in 1940 of a Blackfeet father and a Gros Ventre
mother, James Welch grew up on the Fort Belknap reservation in north-central
Montana. He died at his home in Missoula, Montana, in the year 2003. Welch’s
first publication was a volume of poems called Riding the Earthboy Forty, which
appeared in 1971. Although he would publish more poetry and the nonfiction
work Killing Custer (with Paul Stekler, 1994), he is best known for his fiction.
This consists of the novels Winter in the Blood (1974), The Death of Jim Loney
(1979), Fools Crow (1986), The Indian Lawyer (1990), and The Heartsong of
Charging Elk (2000), the last novel he would publish. As early as 1982 Alan
R. Velie had included Welch among his Four American Indian Literary Masters (the others were N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald
Vizenor) on the basis of the fine mix of unsentimental realism, dark humor,
and powerful writing in Welch’s first two novels. To these Welch would add
the deeply imagined re-creation of the life of a nineteenth-century Pikuni
warrior (Fools Crow), followed by an account of a successful contemporary
Indian Lawyer.¹ His last novel was The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a book that
confirmed his status as one of the major Native novelists of the past forty years.
Fools Crow can serve as a useful reference point for contextualizing Welch’s
The Heartsong of Charging Elk, the subject of this book. Fools Crow concludes
with its Blackfeet protagonist living out the last days of traditional life just
before his people would succumb to white domination after the Marias Massacre
of 1870. Heartsong opens with its Lakota protagonist figuring out how to live
his life just after his Oglala people (a band of the Lakota Sioux) surrendered
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to the whites in 1877. Heartsong poses the question: what options might be
available to a traditionally raised Indian person in the reservation period? The
answer, for Charging Elk, involves hitherto unimagined possibilities for what
might be called an indigenous cosmopolitanism.
Welch said in several interviews that he first got the idea for the novel
after meeting in Marseilles a man named Pierre Falaise, who said he had a
Lakota grandmother.² Initially suspicious of the man’s story, Welch in time
came to believe it and find it intriguing. In his acknowledgments section at
the conclusion of Heartsong, he thanks M. Falaise for giving him “the germ
of the story,” for “Xeroxing newspaper articles about the Wild West shows
of 1889 and 1905,” and for providing him with “the official French program
of the show and Featherman’s death certificate” (440). His books have all
appeared in French, and his work is much admired in France. Welch’s widow,
Lois, provides a number of fascinating details in her account of this period,
published here for the first time. Figures 2 and 7 show portions of the Wild
West programs for France in 1889 (when the fictional Charging Elk first traveled with Buffalo Bill) and 1905 (when he last visited the Wild West), and
the frontispiece and other illustrations likewise provide for a richer and fuller
understanding of James Welch’s wonderful final novel.
The character Charging Elk, born in 1866, is a young Lakota of the Oglala
band, like Crazy Horse and Black Elk. After the surrender of Crazy Horse at
Fort Robinson in May 1877, Charging Elk spends a year at the reservation
school and then leaves.³ He rides away to an area called the Stronghold, later
to be the site of the last Lakota Ghost Dance in the fall of 1890, and—after
the massacre of Big Foot’s Minneconjou band at Wounded Knee on December
29, 1890—a site of resistance on the part of Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne
people. It is also the site of two powerful dreams Charging Elk has in the
novel, dreams that put all these things together. At the Stronghold, along with
his kola (age-mate) Strikes Plenty and some others, Charging Elk attempts
to continue living in the traditional ways of his people.4 As this becomes
increasingly difficult, he and Strikes Plenty decide to join Buffalo Bill Cody’s
Wild West (Cody never called it a Wild West show) as the company prepares
to tour Europe in 1889. Strikes Plenty is not selected because he does not
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look “Indian” enough! Although reluctant to leave his friend, Charging Elk
joins, following in the footsteps of such illustrious Lakota leaders as Sitting
Bull and Black Elk.5
After being thrown from his horse during a performance and seriously
injured, Charging Elk finds himself in a hospital in Marseille. It is a matter
of historical record that two of Buffalo Bill’s Indians, Featherman and Chief
Hawick (Swift Hawk) were left behind in the 1880s at Conception Hospital
in Marseille, where both of them died. In the novel Featherman does indeed
die at the hospital; Charging Elk, standing in for Swift Hawk, as it were, does
not die but runs off—only to have the French authorities later confuse him
with the dead Featherman.
Having left the hospital with few clothes and no money, Charging Elk
is soon arrested by the French police for vagabondage or vagrancy. He is
released to the supervision of René Soulas, a charitably minded fishmonger,
who offers to provide Charging Elk with employment and a home, much to
the apprehension of Mme Soulas. Welch writes powerfully about the mutual
acculturation of both Charging Elk and the Soulas family, who do not speak
each other’s language yet who manage to achieve for one another a strong
measure of respect and affection.
In the summer of 1893, when he is twenty-seven years old, Charging Elk
moves into his own apartment in the district called Le Panier near the Old
Port—then, as now, an immigrant quarter of Marseille.6 Employed in a soap
factory, Charging Elk regularly sets aside a portion of his salary in the hope
of saving enough money to return home to the Dakotas. Before long, however, Charging Elk begins to frequent a brothel in the ironically named Rue
Sainte, where he develops an attachment to a young prostitute named Marie
Colet. Charging Elk’s visits to the brothel also attract the attention of Armand
Breteuil, a successful chef, who has earlier encountered Charging Elk during
his employment with René Soulas. Breteuil, a homosexual, coerces Marie
into drugging Charging Elk so that Breteuil may attempt oral sex upon him.
Charging Elk half-awakens to find “a mouth . . . sliding up and down on the
smooth shaft of his cock” (276)—a mouth that he at first thinks is Marie’s.
Recognizing that it is Breteuil’s, Charging Elk, horrified, manages to retrieve
Introduction
xi
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a knife from the pocket of the trousers he has shed. He stabs Breteuil and
then cuts his throat. (See Craig Womack’s essay, this volume, for a detailed
consideration.)
Charging Elk is tried for murder, but the mitigating circumstances of his act
lead to a prison term rather than execution. He is sent to the grim fortress of
La Tombe, in the south of France, where he is incarcerated for a full ten years.
It is during his incarceration that he learns to garden and also to appreciate
the beauty of the French countryside. Welch’s writing here is particularly fine.
Charging Elk is released from prison when the French suddenly comprehend
that he is not in fact an American citizen but, rather, a citizen of the Lakota
Nation. Recognizing Lakota sovereignty to a greater degree than the American
government does, the French reclassify Charging Elk as a political prisoner,
proceeding then to pardon him.
Once more Charging Elk finds himself in the home of kindly French people,
this time the family of the orchardist Vincent Gazier, consisting of Vincent,
his ailing wife, and their daughter, Nathalie. Welch describes the movement
between Charging Elk and the young Nathalie Gazier from wariness to greater
and greater comfort with each other, and finally to love in a deep and tender
manner, perhaps the most intimate and passionate writing he had ever done.
The couple marry, Charging Elk acquiring French citizenship in the process
(403), and move back to Marseille. Nathalie is a country girl who finds the
city difficult, although in time, the narrator tells us, she came to feel that
“this strange, sweaty city was home” (414). Charging Elk, too, at the novel’s
conclusion, will accept France as “home.”
In November 1905 Charging Elk learns that the Buffalo Bill Wild West is
to perform in Marseille. He attends alone, finding much of the show familiar
although now, sixteen years later than when last he participated, there are
new things as well (see the 1905 program, fig. 7). After the show he wanders
among the Lakota lodges set up outside the performance space, entering one
occupied by the family of Andrew Little Ring. Charging Elk learns from these
people that although his father has died of influenza, his mother is still living
at the Pine Ridge Agency. He also learns, apparently for the first time, of the
Ghost Dance among his people and of the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek
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at the end of December 1890. As Charging Elk explains, he had seen these
things in two powerful dreams he had had, although he had not understood
the meaning of those dreams until now. At the time it had seemed to him “as
though the Lakota people had vanished from the earth” (435), so that even if
he could somehow manage to return to the Dakotas, there would be nothing
for him there. Now he learns that the Lakota people have not vanished and,
indeed, that his mother would be very pleased to have him return.
When Charging Elk turns to leave the lodge, a young man named Joseph
asks where he is going. Charging Elk answers “Home” (435), meaning back to
his pregnant French wife, Nathalie, and the child she soon will bear. Thus Welch
does not have Charging Elk return to his original home, concluding the novel in a
manner that runs counter to the centripetal pattern of “homing in” that William
Bevis had described as typical for Native American fiction up to the late 1980s.7
A fair number of critics—Lupton, Cook-Lynn, Christie—have been unhappy
with the ending, for all that others have offered more nuanced commentary,
including for example Donahue, Haselstein, and Bak in their essays reprinted
in this book. While it is true that Charging Elk will remain in France, it is also
true, as Joseph affirms to him, that he is “Lakota, wherever [he] might go. You
are one of us always” (436); what I would call an indigenous cosmopolitan.8
•
This volume begins with Welch’s own words: we reprint sections of interviews
in which he discussed the novel that would become The Heartsong of Charging
Elk while it was still in its early stages and shortly after its publication. Welch
published the opening chapter of the first draft of his prospective novel in 1995
under the title, “From Marseilles Grace (a novel in progress).”9 (He initially used
the American spelling of the city’s name, dropping the “s” by the end of the first
draft and so adopting the French spelling.) We had thought to reprint that here,
but Lois Welch, the holder of copyright, did not wish us to do so. Instead, she
offered us for publication the second to last chapter of the novel’s first draft,
chapter 18, which appears in print here for the first time. The chapter is preceded
by an editor’s note that further describes Marseilles Grace and the untitled chapter 18. Near the end of his life Welch said on more than one occasion that he
Introduction
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was planning a sequel to Heartsong. His descriptions of that sequel suggest he
intended to use much of the material from his first draft. Indeed, Professor Jace
Weaver (pers. comm., May 10, 2013) confirmed to me that Welch did in fact tell
him that was very much his intention for the sequel he did not live to write. The
complete first draft can be found in boxes 9 and 10 of the James Welch papers
in Yale University’s Beinecke Library, call number ycal .mss 248.¹0
Welch’s own words, spoken and written, are followed by the words of those
who knew him. First is Lois Welch’s rich account of what went into the making
of the first draft of the novel that would become The Heartsong of Charging
Elk. Her account is followed by John Purdy’s recollections of hearing Welch
read from Marseilles Grace.
The bulk of this volume consists of critical essays on Heartsong. We reprint
three previously published essays on the book, one by a younger American
scholar, James Donahue, and two by senior European critics, Ulla Haselstein
and Hans Bak. Donahue’s “‘A World Away from his People’: James Welch’s
The Heartsong of Charging Elk and the Indian Historical Novel” works with a
genre posited by Alan Velie, that of the “Indian Historical Novel.” The slightly
revised version of Donahue’s published essay reprinted here interrogates and
amplifies Velie’s definition of the genre, showing how Welch’s novel dramatizes new possibilities for sustaining cultural identity in spite of Charging
Elk’s physical separation from his tribe and his immersion in French culture.
Haselstein’s “Ghost Dance Literature: Spectrality in James Welch’s The
Heartsong of Charging Elk” employs some of Gerald Vizenor’s concepts—
absence, presence, survivance—as useful for the consideration of Charging
Elk’s self-definition and self-determination, leading, as she writes, to what
Vizenor might call visionary sovereignty. Bak’s “Tribal or Transnational?
Memory, History, and Identity in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk”
shows in part what happens to “tribal memory” when it crosses the Atlantic
and confronts the “new cultural ambience of the ‘Old World.’” He considers
how the American national narrative of Native “vanishment” enacted by the
performances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West obfuscates and seeks to erase the
historical experience of suffering and dispossession that is embedded in the
personal and tribal memory of Charging Elk.
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Next come six original essays prepared especially for this volume by some
of the leading critics of Native American literature working today. Amanda
Cobb-Greetham’s “The Unexpected Indian” references Philip Deloria’s important
monograph Indians in Unexpected Places (2004) to consider some of the ways
in which Indians have been understood by non-Indians as either “expected”
or “anomalous.”¹¹ Cobb-Greetham provides historical context for the Wild
West show as a product of modernity in which Indianness is performed, and
is consumed by cultural tourists, as a mechanism seeking to define American
Indians as apart from modernity, yet also as a context providing important
means for them to engage as agents of modernity.
Kathryn Shanley notes in “‘Looking for the Way Back’: Displacement,
Diaspora, and Desire” that while many of the novels of the “Native American
Renaissance” dating from the late 1960s were concerned with the possibilities
of recovering the old ways, novels of the first decade of the twenty-first century
are concerned less with “going back” than with imagining future possibilities
for new tribal sovereignties and identities. Even were Charging Elk somehow
to return to the Dakotas, it is clear that he would not find the old ways in
place but, rather, the new ways of a shifting colonialism. Shanley argues that
the novel’s principal theme—one often found in Welch’s prose—concerns the
“right to be Indian” in a “new global tribalism.”
I offer next a study of “Issues of Identity” in the novel, emphasizing the fact
that at its conclusion, youthful Lakotas participating in Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West in 1905 in Marseille state clearly that although Charging Elk is “different,” he is “still one of us” and will “always be Lakota wherever he goes.” I
make the case, in opposition to a fair amount of earlier criticism, that neither
the fictional Charging Elk nor his generation of historical Lakota persons,
including those who achieved more nearly cosmopolitan identities, can be
said to have succumbed to alienation, despair, and a loss of Lakota identity.
Craig Womack’s “The Fatal Blow Job” has at its center Charging Elk’s
“brutal and sensational murder of the gay restaurateur, Armand Breteuil.”
Womack speculates as to why Welch chose the particular circumstances he
did for Charging Elk’s crime, describing a homophobic undercurrent that runs
throughout the novel. He also notes the degree to which the novel is indebted
Introduction
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to such apparently disparate models as the nineteenth-century French romantic
and historical novel as well as two “Lakota collaborative” autobiographies.
My “History, Language, and Culture” examines the history presented in
the novel, both Lakota history and a little French history from roughly the
1870s to 1905, when the novel concludes. I look closely at the meanings of
several important Lakota words Welch uses, along with a few French words,
words that accurately or sometimes not quite accurately convey the cultural
categories of the Lakotas and, to some extent, the French. The inaccuracies,
it seems to me, do not affect the novel as a novel, that is, esthetically. Other
readers may feel differently.
The volume closes with James Ruppert’s “Native Presence and Survivance,” which, like Ulla Haselstein’s essay, invokes several of the conceptual
categories posited by Gerald Vizenor. Ruppert foregrounds the contradictions,
counter-memories, and repressed histories in the novel and finds that Welch
has produced not only a Native American historical novel, an indigenous
bildungsroman, but also a powerful allegory of “postindian” identity.
Notes
1. Pikuni, Piegan, and Blackfeet peoples are all speakers of the Blackfeet language. The
name by which they are historically referenced depends upon their geographical
location and the time of any given reference.
2. See Welch’s interview with Kathryn Shanley, his brief interview with Cindy
Heidemann, and in particular his interview with Owen Perkins just before he
had completed the novel. Parts of all three interviews are reprinted in this volume,
following the introduction.
3. Charging Elk’s name is probably a composite of the names of two historical Native
people who had participated in the Wild West. The first is the renowned Black
Elk, whom Charging Elk meets briefly in Paris in 1889, shortly before Black Elk’s
return to the United States. The second is “the Lakota chief, Charging Thunder,
who stayed behind Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1903 to marry a local girl” in England. (Flint, Transatlantic Indian, xv).
4. The novel occasionally uses literal translations from the Lakota rather than idiomatic
English, such as “white man’s healing house” for hospital (7), and also Lakota words,
as when Charging Elk drinks “pejuta sapa, black medicine” for coffee (10), here
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
both a literal translation and a Lakota language term. Welch had used Blackfeet
words and literal translations from the Indian language prominently in Fools Crow.
In Heartsong he also uses French words on occasion, although to a lesser extent.
See my essay “History, Language, and Culture,” this volume.
The Wild West’s first great Indian attraction was Tatonka Yotanka, Sitting Bull,
who joined the show in New York in June 1885, accompanying it to Montreal
before finishing the season at St. Louis on October 11 of that year. It was then that
Sitting Bull announced his desire to go home.
A postcard of the Old Port around the turn of the twentieth century as well as
postcards and other illustrations of some of the places mentioned in the novel can
be found at the website http://vieuxmarseille.free.fr/ (old Marseille). The resolution
of these images was insufficient for reproduction in this volume.
Bevis had shrewdly noted that while any number of classic American novels—from
Moby Dick to Huckleberry Finn and on to novels by Hemingway, Faulkner, and
others—were “centrifugal” in pattern, sending their male protagonists out to sea
or “the territories,” far from home, the Native novels published up until the time
he wrote tended more nearly to be “centripetal,” documenting their protagonists’
attempts to come home.
All the essays that follow reproduce in some measure the rough summary of the
novel given here, which creates a certain redundancy for anyone reading this volume
from beginning to end. But as each essay author needs to cite differing particulars
of the story, retaining their summaries seemed the wisest course.
For any wishing to examine this text, the publication was in Weber Studies and is
among the works cited.
Welch’s papers occupy fifty-four boxes, including many disks, in the Beinecke
Library. I am not aware of anything having been published on these papers and
their relation to Welch’s published work. Here is a treasure trove of material for
any interested student.
Note that like the reprinted essays, most of the new essays include Welch’s full title
in their own titles; for this discussion I have reduced their titles to avoid repetition.
Works Cited
Bevis, William. “Native American Novels: Homing In.” Recovering the Word, ed. Brian
Swann and Arnold Krupat, 580–620. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told
through John G. Neihardt. 1932. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.
Introduction
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Deloria, Philip. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
DeMallie, Raymond, ed. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G.
Neihardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Donahue, James. “‘A World Away from His People’: James Welch’s The Heartsong of
Charging Elk and the Indian Historical Novel.” SAIL : Studies in American Indian
Literatures 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 54–82, reprinted this volume.
Flint, Kate. The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009.
Haselstein, Ulla. “Ghost Dance Literature: Spectrality in James Welch’s The Heartsong
of Charging Elk.” In The Pathos of Authenticity: American Passions of the Real, ed.
Ulla Haselstein, Andrew Gross, and Maryann Snyder-Körber, 179–98. American
Studies series. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010, reprinted this volume.
Heidemann, Cindy. “Author Interview: James Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk.”
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2001 book award honoree, accessed May
9, 2002. http://www.pnba.org.
Perkins, Owen. “Interview with James Welch.” High Plains Literary Review 17, no. 1–3
(2002): 163–87.
Shanley, Kathryn W. “Paradoxa Interview with James Welch.” In Native American
Literatures: Boundaries and Sovereignties, ed. Kathryn W. Shanley. Special issue,
Paradoxa 15 (2001): 15–37.
Welch, James. Fools Crow. New York: Penguin, 1986.
—. “From Marseilles Grace (a novel in progress).” Weber Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall
1995): 6–14, archived online at http://weberstudies.weber.edu.
—. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
—.The Indian Lawyer. New York: Norton, 1990.
Welch, James, with Paul Stekler. Killing Custer. New York: Norton, 1994.
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KATHRYN W. SHANLEY
INTERVIEW
This interview was originally published in Native American Literature: Boundaries
and Sovereignties, special issue, Paradoxa 15 (2001): 15–37. Excerpts are taken from
pp. 24–25 and 29–33.
KS: One way of looking at the trajectory of your work, at least as far as themes
are concerned, is to watch you coming to terms with the force of history—both
written history and the oral history of Native peoples. Killing Custer, in fact,
represents a sort of culmination of historical inquiry about what happened in
the mid-nineteenth century to Plains Indian people. Would you comment on
how history and historically based events figure in your development as a writer?
JW: Well, let’s see. I got to go back and say that after Winter in the Blood
and The Death of Jim Loney and my book of poems, my editor said, “You
have written about these guys, they’re in their 30’s, they’re at loose ends, and
both books,” he said, “were very downers.” And he said, “You’ve got to write
about something different.” And I said I had been thinking about the historical Blackfeet. A novel about them. He said, “Great. That’s great. Why don’t
you do that?” And so that’s how that book kind of came about. I had been
thinking about it, really, but not too seriously that soon. And so when I wrote
it I felt that it just really opened my eyes to where these people came from.
These contemporary people that I was writing about. Where did they come
from? What was the difference between that old tribal, traditional culture and
where are they now? So it really was kind of an eye opener for me. And it
made me think that, you know, the history really is every bit as interesting as
contemporary life. Because to me, back then, I thought that you had to write
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about contemporary life if you were to depict the Indian accurately. And so,
when I started writing about the traditional life I realized that, boy, this really
feeds into where they are, what they lost, and what kind of life was so natural
to them. And then they lost it and this is what happened. And so, yeah, I’ve
become interested in Indian history with Killing Custer and now with, um,
uh, I can’t remember the name of my new one (Heartsong of Charging Elk).
But, at any rate, you know they are all historical. And I love to write about
historical situations. It just makes them more plausible by today’s society
standards. You know what I mean? The Lakota people were really trying hard
to live. You know, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the Hunkpapas, and Oglalas.
They weren’t making trouble. In fact, they were avoiding trouble. They wanted
never to see a white man as long as they lived. They just wanted to go out into
the hunting areas of Montana and so on. But, of course, the soldiers came for
them and, in a way, people seemed to put the shoe on the other foot. That
the soldiers were after them because they were such troublemakers and, you
know, just raising hell and killing people and everything. They weren’t. So in
a way, when you write about history like that you can almost correct perceptions about Indians from long ago.
KS: Well, that’s worth doing.
JW: I think it is.
KS: You have spoken elsewhere about your use of real names, how they
carry power, and I understand some Indian people do not like seeing their
names used in fiction. Have you taken any flack for using the names of living American Indian families? Have your thoughts changed about this over
the years?
JW: Um, I took flack once for one of the characters in Fools Crow which
is a family name. And I understood that the family didn’t like my fictional
depiction of their ancestor. That was Yellow Kidney, you know, who fornicates
with the girl dying of small pox. And they catch him and cut off his fingers
and so on. They didn’t like that depiction of one of their ancestors, and I
can’t blame them. I guess that was insensitive. If I had it to do over again I
would create a totally fictional name for that character. But I’ve found that
most Indian people are kind of thrilled by having their names in my books.
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Earthboy, you know, writing Earthboy I had a young woman come up and say
I’m an Earthboy, (laughter), and I’ve had people from Browning mention their
songs and so their names were in my book. And so, I think they’re kind of
innocent and naïve enough to be kind of pleased that their names were being
used. Maybe they think it’s a history book instead of a novel. But I find that
very touching and I really haven’t had any flack except in that one instance.
KS: What about Lame Bull in Winter in the Blood?
JW: Well, um, I had no flack, as far as I know. There was a guy who used
to work for my Dad named Charlie Lame Bull and he was quite a character.
And, uh, he and I used to do a lot of fence building and stuff like that. He
had the Indian humor that we talked about earlier. And, so, when I thought
about it, I thought the name was terrific. And, you know, I just used it.
KS: Lame Bull was the first person among Gros Ventre people to sign the
treaty and to welcome the whites. That didn’t figure into your choosing the
name?
JW: No. No.
KS: Because the character does actually kind of seem like he wants to
adopt white ways.
JW: Yeah, he wants to get ahead. You know, he wants to be a successful
rancher and so on. Yeah, um, and Charlie Lame Bull had a little spread of
his own and he would have liked to have acquired some more cattle and, uh,
and gotten ahead. You know, I think it’s natural that Indian people would,
just like any other rancher up in that country, want to get a little more land,
a little more hay land, a few more cattle and buy a new pickup. Stuff like that.
KS: Sure.
JW: So, Charlie Lame Bull actually was just this guy that I liked a lot so
I used his name.
KS: Looking back on your own writing, can you identify pieces or whole
works that you most enjoyed writing and re-reading? And there’s a more delicate
question related to this, and you certainly don’t have to answer it—is there
anything you have written that you would take back if you could? You just
mentioned changing Yellow Kidney’s name. Is there anything else you would
take back? And what have you liked about what you have done?
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JW: Well, again, I’ve tried to write about something different in each
book, themselves. Because having a job, making good money, and going to it
every day, really builds a sense of self-worth. And, consequently, I think you
wouldn’t need to feel you had to retreat into alcohol or drugs or wife beating
or whatever. I think that if by magic suddenly some big industries located
on every reservation in America, a lot of the problems would go away. Not
only the economic problems but a lot of social problems would be no more
prevalent than in the rest of society, at least.
KS: Will you ever go back to writing about reservation life?
JW: Yeah, I would. I’ve got another novel that I’m writing now. I’ve got a
draft written and I’m sort of going to revise it intensively. It’s set in France.
But, yeah, I would hope, really, to set one on the reservation again. But I
guess it would depend a lot upon if I had a different enough take on the
material. Because I wouldn’t want to go back and rewrite Winter in the Blood
or The Death of Jim Loney again. I would like to have a whole, fresh look at
the reservation. And the reservation is changing, too, you know, from those
days ’til now. I mean, the Tribal Colleges on all the reservations out here in
the West are just a great thing. So, I mean, that’s a huge step in conquering
a lot of problems Indians have. I mean, they’re being trained. They’re being
educated. They can get better jobs. So, I mean, that’s happening and that wasn’t
happening back then, back in the ’60s and early ’70s. So, the reservation is
changing and if I could find a way to write about the changes in and on the
reservation, I would certainly like to do it.
KS: Do you think that the revival of religious practice would enter in then?
JW: Yeah, I think so. On the revival of the language, you know, I don’t
know how that’s gonna turn out yet. But at least people on reservations are
trying to teach the kids, like Daryl Kipp and Dorothy Still Smoking up at
Browning with their Immersion Schools. Getting those kids at a very early
age—when they walk onto those school grounds they can no longer speak
English. They have to speak Blackfeet. So, this is happening on reservations.
But I read an essay by this guy who wrote that a learned language doesn’t carry
the cultural weight of the language that comes naturally. But I think that Indian
people are combining learning the language with the language as the carrier
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of tradition, of culture. So, I mean, it’s not like they’re just teaching Blackfeet
(the language), for instance, up at Browning, but they’re teaching the whole
culture that the language represents. So I really hope this guy is wrong. And,
you know, the language is going to go, among some Indian people for sure,
like in California tribes. Because they’re so small and they’re so surrounded
by the dominant culture, but I think that in Montana and the Dakotas and,
of course, obviously in the Southwest, there’s a good chance that the language
will be retained and the culture will be retained as a result.
KS: Louis Owens, Choctaw writer and literary critic, describes what you
attempt in Fools Crow as “the nearly impossible feat of conveying a feeling
of one language through another while simultaneously avoiding the clichéd
formal pidgin of Hollywood Indians.” Students in my classes again and again
have been moved and persuaded by the language of the novel, so I would say
that you have succeeded at that “nearly impossible feat.” Can you talk about
the process of thinking that you had to engage in to create the special language
of the novel? The importance of knowing the native language of a culture
takes on special meaning in your latest novel, Heartsong of Charging Elk. Do
you see this novel as an extension of Fools Crow in regard to language? And
can you describe your own process of acquiring enough knowledge of French
and Lakota to write the book?
JW: I’m not so sure it’s an extension of Fools Crow. I think it’s kind of a
counter to Fools Crow because Fools Crow was within his own culture and
everybody around him was of that culture. And so the language was just
like any language. Everybody spoke it. But in Heartsong this guy is in an
absolutely foreign culture and he can’t speak. He can’t communicate because
nobody in France can speak Lakota. He can’t speak French or English, and
so, in a way it’s just the opposite of Fools Crow in terms of language. He can’t
communicate. Eventually—the book covers 16 years—he learns rudimentary
French. And then, by the end of the period he can talk fairly well. Although
he has kind of an Indian accent, you know, so the French people have a hard
time understanding him. But he can understand them and if they try hard,
they can understand him. So it’s kind of an evolving from no language at all
to being able to communicate in a difficult way. Lois knows French and I
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worked very closely with my French translator. They’re really good about it.
If I have questions, I can fax them and they can fax back the answers about
certain phrases in French. Like I might know the proper French phrase but
then there’s the more vernacular phrase that would be used in French. So, you
know, between Lois and those people I’ve gotten a lot of help with French.
The Lakota, um, I have a Lakota dictionary up there in my study. And I’ve
talked to Lakota people and I have learned some phrases and so on. So basically the Lakota is in there to give the guy, Charging Elk, a kind of reality
because he looks at this one guy, who he ends up killing in the novel, who is a
siyoko, which is a witch, a bad spirit. And something happens in the book and
Charging Elk ends up killing him. He doesn’t feel bad about it at all because
he rid the world of a bad spirit. I just used both the French and the Lakota
to try to give the sense of reality, the sense of place, so that the reader doesn’t
think that it’s just a story, because it’s about culture, too. And language is a
part of the culture.
KS: So it wasn’t really the language that interested you in this novel as
much as the situation of the character?
JW: Yeah, right. You know, in a sense, I kind of used language as a sort of
a logistic . . . so that the reader would always be aware of these two other cultures. If an American reader just read it without, say, these particular references
to Lakota culture and French culture, including language, they might think
they were just reading a story, and I wanted it to be more than a story. More
about the old trite phrase of “clashing cultures.” But that’s pretty much true.
KS: The novel also has a sense of the mystery of Indian Lawyer. First,
there’s the question of what’s going to happen to Charging Elk. And then
his entanglements with the law, his love affairs, his desiring of women who
are not Lakota. So there’s that mystery with a small “m.” But then there also
seems to be Mystery in the larger sense. Are you interested in writing a novel
in the mystery genre?
JW: No. No. In Indian Lawyer I kind of used a lot of elements of mystery.
But, you know, in the end, it wasn’t really a mystery. There was no suspenseful
kind of thing leading to something surprising, no act of violence or whatever.
I always feel like I write about normal life and to write in the mystery genre
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never seems, to me, to be real life. It’s all fantasy and sort of . . . maybe it’s just
escapist literature, basically. So, in this book, if there is any mystery it’s because,
you know, I want the reader to kind of follow him, to follow his adventures
and think, “What’s going to happen to him?” Right from the start when he
wakes up in the hospital bed in Marseilles. All the way to the end, it’s him
learning to survive and he has ups and downs. Sometimes he’s up when he
thinks the young prostitute’s in love with him and he’s thinking about asking
her to come live with him. This is a great joy to him. Then, of course, just
when things start looking up—Bam!—you know, something else happens.
And then he gets to another point where things are starting to look good and
then something else happens. And it’s kind of discouraging to him that just
when it looks like he’s going to pull out of things, something happens. So,
I guess, if there’s any mystery, it’s just what’s going to happen next to him.
KS: How did you get the idea for your latest novel, Heartsong of Charging
Elk? And can you talk about how it changed from conception to execution
as others responded to readings of it as a work in progress?
JW: Okay, the first part . . . , I was on a book signing tour in France when
Fools Crow came out. Of course, you always start in Paris and then there’s the
book festival which is the largest of France on the Brittany Coast in a little
walled city called St. Mâlo. We went there next. Then we started touring
various cities around France. One of the places was Marseilles. I was signing
books up in this stifling mezzanine of the bookstore and it was really hot. It
was in late May and really hot. So I was anxious to get out of there. Business
wasn’t all that good, but this guy kept hanging around. He was kind of a
tall, thin guy and he had blue jeans and a kind of cowboy type shirt that had
embroidery on it and the blue jeans were bell-bottoms, and his boots had a
kind of buckle on the side, and he wore a vest. So he looked like he was trying
to be dressed like a cowboy. French style. And he just kept hanging around.
Not saying a word. We went to an outdoor café to have something cold to
drink. And actually it was amazing. About 12 people sort of materialized and
they were all writers. You know, just kind of the writing scene in Marseilles.
I was there with Lois and my editor. He speaks really good English. But this
guy was sitting on the other side of Francis. They were talking away and I was
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listening to people talk over here and, finally, Francis says that this guy says
he’s part Lakota and that his grandmother came over with Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West Show in 1905. She was a Lakota woman and fell in with a Frenchman
and stayed. And so he was the grandson of that union. And Francis says, “I
don’t believe him. I think he’s a wannabe.” So we kind of dismissed him. Lois
and I came back to Missoula. And that summer, when I was out mowing the
lawn, I was thinking of this—when you’re riding a lawn tractor you think
of a lot of stuff—and I thought about that guy and what he said. I thought,
wow, that’s pretty incredible, you know, whether you believe it or not. It’s sort
of an interesting idea. So then it just kind of evolved and I started to think
about an Indian from the Wild West Show who got sick in Marseilles and
had to stay and the show moved on. So that was it.
KS: And so you transformed the person into a man who was easier to get . . .
JW: Yeah. Yeah.
KS: It’s easier as a man.
JW: Mm-hmm. And I allowed him to be a young performer who had
lived the old way before going to France instead of living at the agency with
all the other Indians. He and a group of people had been at the Stronghold
which later became famous as the Ghost Dance site. But they were kind of
renegades. They didn’t want to come in and be bossed around by the white
people. So he lived that way from his childhood. He and his friend ran away
from school. They were 12 years old and in the second grade, or something.
And, so that’s the way he lived, by his wits, by hunting and stealing things from
the miners in the Black Hills. So when he went to France he was really just
a babe in the woods. Most of the other young men had been at the agencies
for a number of years by then and could speak English. But he hadn’t been,
and he couldn’t. So that’s why I chose him. I wanted him to be just totally in
a foreign culture with absolutely no idea of what was going on.
KS: The Missoulian ran an article in the spring about the French people
conferring upon you an aristocrat’s title, “Sire Welch,” and quoted you as saying that the French like your “stuff,” meaning books. Would you talk a little
about how it is a European audience has grown over the years for your work?
Do you think they read your work differently than Americans do?
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JW: Well, most of my experience is in France and Italy. I seem to go to
those two countries quite a lot and for various reasons. So I talked to a lot of
people and, you know, they really do like my work. The French, especially,
are very interested in Indians. Even contemporary Indians. I mean when
I’ve been there, there have been petitions, you know, almost constant petitions to free Leonard Peltier. They know all about aim . They are really quite
knowledgeable. They’re not really too knowledgeable about historical Indians,
though. They kind of live in the present. I think my books help them to kind
of understand historical Indians and sort of weigh the two. Like how the character in Winter in the Blood has evolved from those traditional people of the
nineteenth century in Fools Crow. So, I think, in a way, they kind of get the
whole package of Indian culture—all aspects—at least the Blackfeet. I don’t
know about all Indian cultures but, so yeah, it’s been that way. And then I’ve
been to Holland and to Sweden and England, places like that. Germany. I’ve
had people say they enjoyed my work a lot. But I haven’t traveled in those
countries very much.
KS: Does it affect the way you write to know that they are your audience, too?
JW: In a sense, this last book, Heartsong of Charging Elk, I think it is pretty
understandable that a French audience might have influenced my writing of it
because I kept thinking, “What would they think? They know their culture. Is
this right? Could this happen?” So, in a way, I kind of had a French audience
in mind. But, on the other hand, when you’re writing historical stuff, even,
you know, something just at the turn of the last century, a hundred years ago,
you become almost the expert, in a way. Not many people can really gainsay
what you are writing about as long as you work hard to make it as accurate as
possible. And I’ve never had anybody say, “No, that’s not right,” or whatever.
So most people I think, say, ok this is fiction so they kind of give you the
benefit of the doubt, even if they did have some doubt.
KS: The details in Heartsong struck me. Certain things like corkscrews, like
the ones we know today, or rolled cigarettes—when did they actually become
a commodity that the average person used? Did you research details like that?
JW: Yeah, I did. I sure didn’t want anything to be anachronistic, so little things
like that stiletto knife was there then, and then larger issues like electricity. At
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one point I had this family, this Soulas family listening to a gramophone-type
thing after dinner in the evening. Then I got to thinking, “Wait a minute.” So
I went and looked in this encyclopedia and it was invented a few years later
than I had it, so I took it out. So I tried to be as accurate as I could in those
kinds of things. The telephone was just becoming a thing and it was very tinny
and during the daytime it was hard to talk without static and stuff like that.
Things like that, I think, helped give the book a kind of particularity. I hope
that readers will kind of react like you did about some of these little things
and say, “Well, I wonder when custom cigarettes came into being?” So I hope
it kind of elicits that curiosity.
KS: It certainly has marvelous detail. I really enjoyed it. Heartsong is dedicated to your wife who is one of your biggest fans. I remember once after you
read the passage from Fools Crow at Cornell, Lois had tears in her eyes and
she explained how moved she is by hearing you read your work. Would you
care to talk about how Lois has influenced your life and work?
JW: Well, she certainly has influenced my life a lot. We’ve been married
32 years now and I’ve just always admired her incredibly for her career, the
things she’s done, and the battles she’s had to fight. You know, this English
Department has really been a male chauvinist department for many, many
years. Sometimes she was the only woman. Sometimes she was one of two
women. And so she just had to battle, you know, for everything. Other than
that we just had great fun and she reads my work and she’s not my best
critic. Because if she finds things wrong, she’ll tell me, but I think, overall,
she’s gonna like it. And I need somebody to say, “No, you can’t do that,” or
“This is really boring,” or whatever. But she is my first reader and she’s really
valuable in many, many ways. It’s just that I have to realize that she’s going
to like my work. And also I have to realize that I’m gonna become defensive
when she criticizes a passage that I really like and says it doesn’t make sense
or something, then I will try to explain the passage and so on. But she either
wins or we compromise or whatever. So we’ve had a good life together and
she’s really been valuable to me in my writing. I mean, she speaks French very
well and in this last book, and in all the times we’ve been to France she’s been
a terrific go-between. I kind of hide behind her skirts while she communicates.
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KS: When you began writing, there were so few Indians writing and being
published—N. Scott Momaday and Duane Niatrum, for example, are the
only two that come to mind.
JW: Leslie Silko just a little while later.
KS: Yes, and Leslie Silko and Simon Ortiz. American Indian writing has
exploded since then as has American Indian literary criticism; it’s so hard to
keep up. Who do you read these days, and what do you think of the contemporary Indian writing scene?
JW: Well, I think it is evolving and certainly in a very good way. People are
finding other things to write about. I remember that House Made of Dawn and
Ceremony both dealt with men coming back to the reservation and would they
be accepted back. Would they like to be back? And what forces are at work?
You know, for instance, as Leslie says, there have to be ceremonies to cleanse
you of that outside world so that you can become back with your own people
again in your own culture. So, that was kind of a theme about Indians coming
home. “Can you come home again?” Others were Indians going out into the
world and what kind of experience did they have? How did they react? I think
now people are—well, Sherman Alexie, for instance, has introduced a great
element of humor and irreverence into Indian writing. I like that. I think it
was time for that to come along and he does a good job of it. He’s a really
good writer. But it’s interesting to me that even with the young people a lot
of themes are still things like fitting in, you know? Who’s an Indian? Who’s
not an Indian? If you go out into that outside world, you remain an Indian.
How do people accept you back? It’s interesting that the notion seems to be
such a strong feeling amongst Indian people still. So maybe the culture in the
last 25 or 30 years still has those concerns. Reservation Indians versus urban
Indians and that kind of thing. Those are still big concerns. In The Surrounded,
D’Arcy McNickle’s novel, Archilde comes home from the big city and just
has a hell of a time up here on the Flathead reservation. So these themes are
still going. It’s interesting to me.
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