James Welch is one of several important Native American writers to emerge during the 1970s, and the two novels he published in that decade, Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979), are still his best-known works. Each deals with the deadening alienation of small-town Montana for its young Native American protagonist. The novels have contemporary settings, and their bleak realism has been much admired and analysed by Native Americanists. Welch's next novel, Fools Crow (1986), is something of a departure because it is set in the nineteenth century, although the narrative remains linear and realist in character. This, in combination with the novel's relatively positive tone, could entail that it is less radically critical of the circumstances of Native American life than its predecessors. In fact I would argue that this is not the case, and this article considers how Welch maintains a contemporary critical edge while writing a novel set firmly in the past.

Given the range and sophistication of historiographic techniques available to those who write about the past, it is perfectly possible, even convincing, to see the realist historical novel as a reactionary and redundant genre. For example, Peter Nicholls describes

Both of these strands of interpretative mastery, the interrogating scrutiny of errors and crimes and reinhabitation as a form of recovered connection, are elements of the relationship with the past forged by the novel Fools Crow. Despite this, however, the novel's temporal strategies are not solely modernist in Nicholls's terms, and here I want to explore the means by which Welch maintains the appearance of a straightforward retelling of the past whilst also conducting with it a more dialogic, collaborative engagement.

Welch has discussed his motives in producing historical texts, fictional and nonfictional, and his comments emphasize the importance he attaches to recognizing multiple perspectives, especially among Native Americans, as well as the ironic difficulty of recapturing the ordinary texture of nineteenth-century Native American lives when this is simultaneously the most representative and the least represented thing about them.Footnote ² The importance of redressing the balance of representation is clear to Welch:

The massacre on the Marias features as the climax of the plot of Fools Crow. Welch also discusses it in the first chapter of his book Killing Custer, from which these comments are drawn. A comparison of this massacre with that of Little Bighorn and of their relative prominence in American historical discourse suggests that the understanding to be gained by knowing about the massacre on the Marias River is unwelcome in that discourse. It is in the context of this exclusion that the potentially naive aspiration to recover historical voices morphs into the more urgent and contestatory attempt to reverse historical silencing and confront the reasons for such resistance to understanding Native American experience in American culture.

In order to discuss why the exploration of past experience can generate such strong resistance, I want to rehearse some of the ideas found in one of the most influential discussions of the way in which culture relates to the past, Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”Footnote ⁴ Benjamin's account of ways of telling the past is founded on distinguishing ways of conceptualizing the present: if “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably,”Footnote ⁵ then our understanding and even retrieval of the past is dependent on our understanding of the present. This is both an explanation of the historical silencing to which I have referred, where it is construed as contributing to the construction of the hegemonic in the present, and something much more radical. Benjamin models the potential loss of images of the past as a threat to the present. A culture so careless as to fail to harvest fully the images of its past is irretrievably diminished, he implies. This threat of curtailed, diminished culture is most acute and dangerous to those who have yet to assure themselves of cultural space in the present, those who remain marginalized and dispossessed by hegemonic narratives. By relating past and present in this way, Benjamin is able to reveal the contemporary political stakes at issue in debates over representations of the past.

Another aspect of the politicized project of writing history in opposition to dominant narratives is what Benjamin identifies as the radical contiguity between past and present. He writes that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”Footnote ⁶ Exposing this truth is, for Benjamin, a pedagogic process of enabling the recognition of this emergency through understanding its presence then and now, by enabling people to make connections between past and current threats to their cultural and physical survival. It is also a political act of motivation, because “both [the] hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice [of the working class] are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”Footnote ⁷ Michel Foucault supported this view, arguing that “since memory is actually a very important factor in the struggle (really, in fact, struggles developing a kind of conscious moving forward of history), if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles.”Footnote ⁸

As well as motivating political action and political understanding, both Benjamin and Foucault imply that such history acts on the past as well. Benjamin writes that “only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”Footnote ⁹ It is this sense of what is at stake in historical writing (and that the past itself is at stake) that adequately describes the political urgency and insistence of recounting past events and explains the degree of resistance encountered by counterhegemonic historical narratives.

Benjamin works this sense of urgency and insistence into his reconceptualizing of the present, advocating at once the urgent continuity of past and present and also a sense of the profound discontinuity of history's relation to the present, which is the discontinuity in and of the present that the relation of history can reveal. This discontinuous present is encapsulated in the name of “the now.” Benjamin argues that “time filled by the presence of the now” is opposed to the “homogeneous empty time” which is made the site of history by historicism.Footnote ¹⁰ In opposition to such historicism,

This sense of experiencing with the past is, I would argue, one of the primary reasons for Welch's writing Fools Crow. The reading experience of identifying with characters and therefore experiencing with them the past they inhabit is a potentially radicalizing one. In addition to this process of experiencing with the characters of the novel, Welch also makes use of our present position and knowledge to shock the reader out of this identification, by referring to what is, for the characters, an unknowable future to which readers have privileged access by virtue of their situation in the now which is not the past. Here it is the discontinuity of identification that is potentially radicalizing, as Benjamin describes:

It is the re-cognition of a specific moment in Blackfeet history, and the figuring of its tensions so as to arrest the homogeneous narrative of American history, that Welch seeks in Fools Crow.

The encroaching white American presence on the space of the Blackfeet is apparent from the beginning of the novel. It commences not in some pristine past beyond the reach of the United States, but from the start is set in a world in which the acquisition of American commodities is equated with increasing power. The economy of the Blackfeet is already saturated, both materially and imaginatively, with signs of the invading presence. These tensions are apparent linguistically too, as Welch introduces the language he will use to construct the world inhabited by the Pikuni (the southern branch of the Blackfeet). This choice of language is fundamental to the project of reconstruction undertaken in Fools Crow. William Bevis describes this language as “a standard, slightly formal English (approximating Indian formalism),” and says that Welch uses “Indian names and Indian concepts.”Footnote ¹³ I wonder how far this is the case, but certainly Welch uses ways of naming that are utilized as a marker of Indianness. The proper names of the characters are recognizably “Indian,” in the sense that they conform to patterns of naming familiar from accounts of American history, and this pattern of naming (where a purportedly literal English translation is used) is extended to other objects, and sometimes also to concepts.

The language choice Welch makes is part of his construction of the thought processes of individual characters, and of the culture to which they belong. Although Bevis states that “there is no diction that can simultaneously be easy, yet shock us with difference,”Footnote ¹⁴ I would argue this is exactly what Welch achieves. The use of the apparently “Indian” names rarely entails any ambiguity in terms of denotative meaning, and yet the connotations of these choices are shocking. They make readily apparent both which object or concept is being referred to, and that it is being understood in a very particular and unfamiliar way. The quality of unfamiliarity spreads from the naming of things to the implied way that they are understood, and this is important because it emphasizes the difference and distance of this culture from the reader. This distance may be cultural, national or ethnic as well, but it is certainly temporal.

In addition to this use of defamiliarized language to separate reader and character, it is also used to unite them, because the presence of white traders is changing the pattern of things for the Pikuni and this is made apparent in their need to adapt linguistically to new articles such as “skinned-tree houses,” “many-shots guns” and “white man's water.”Footnote ¹⁵ Subtly, the defamiliarization the contemporary reader experiences on being introduced to this Pikuni world is made parallel with the awkward changes taking place in that world for the Pikuni. Readers encounter not only a world unfamiliar to them, but also a world that is becoming unfamiliar for its inhabitants.

The presence of white traders is a sign of the presence of their goods, and at this stage in the novel this is the most significant aspect of their appearance. When a raiding party arrives at the Crow camp they intend to attack, they read these signs to decode the situation they face:

The figure of the Indian scout, renowned from depictions in film and fiction, is here deployed by Welch to read the landscape of white encroachment. Eagle Ribs at first thinks he sees old snow, and this emphasizes the novelty of the white presence by enacting the attempt to make what is seen fit in with ordinary expectations, before the scout is forced to admit the new presence into his interpretation of the scene. What this new presence means at this stage is still ambiguous: the traders are not perceived as enemies, or even as potential witnesses of the planned attack; Eagle Ribs thinks purely in terms of the possessions they will have passed on to the Crows. Possession of the white men's goods is clearly a mixed blessing in terms of preparedness for attack because while their weapons are lethal, the Crows' readiness to use them will be impaired.

This vision of the impact of the white men on another Indian group prepares the way in the novel for the increasing influence that they have on the Lone Eaters, the Pikuni band to which Fools Crow, the central character, belongs. This increasing influence generates a great deal of the wider conflict in the novel, as the people try to decide how best to respond to the changing situation. Although Roberta Orlandini argues that “respect for the Pikuni traditions is a measure of the characters' worth” in the novel, traditionalism is never presented as the automatic source of appropriate answers.Footnote ¹⁷ The characters respect tradition in many different ways, and this is one of the main examples of Welch's emphasis on diversity and variety in the lives and opinions of his Blackfeet subjects.

It is also the case that even Owl Child and Fast Horse, both of whom are seen to bring trouble with their raids on white settlers and to have moved far from traditional ways, are not so clearly condemned as Orlandini implies. When Owl Child visits the Lone Eaters' camp he is given a speech that has its own clarity of analysis:

Although the central characters of the novel reject the solutions offered by Owl Child, his ability to understand and analyse the situation of the Pikunis is clear. Welch makes extensive use of this technique, where predictions of the future that are recognizably accurate are put into the mouths of his characters.Footnote ¹⁹ Principally, this causes the shock of a forced recognition of our position in the now, which Benjamin finds so potentially radicalizing, but it also allows Welch to endow a variety of points of view with genuine insight, and therefore avoid endorsing only one relation to either tradition or the whites. Rather than using the hindsight of history to impose the idea that there was a correct choice available to the Pikunis, which should have been taken, Welch uses it to emphasize the degree to which all choices were compromised.

The breakdown of dialogue between whites and Native Americans, which carries with it the inevitable beginning of war between the two groups, is one of the major movements within the novel. The increasing impossibility of preventing white demands, along with the impossibility of fulfilling them, which leads to war and massacre, is a significant trajectory in Fools Crow. It is not the only arc traced in the course of the novel, however, and the journey of the hero himself is in a very different direction. Fools Crow's growth – from the youth who desires white material possessions for the Pikuni, for the material gain that they may bring, towards a sense of self-sufficiency – is a growth that tends in an opposite direction to that of white encroachment. Where the soldiers impinge ever more forcefully on the life of the Lone Eaters, Fools Crow becomes more involved in the imaginative life of the band, and it is this involvement that enables him emotionally to withstand the attacks the whites represent and enact on the Blackfeet way of life.

It is not in the traditional situation of gaining war honours that Fools Crow's transition to emotional self-sufficiency is seen to take place, but in his relation to traditional myths and stories. The episode in which Fools Crow's relation to traditional myths is most thoroughly worked through is in his encounter with Feather Woman. Nora Barry has discussed this episode along with the story's connections with other Blackfeet myths, but I want to add some further considerations to her account in order to emphasize the temporal work taking place in the text.Footnote ²⁰ Fools Crow's encounter with Feather Woman is a revisiting of a story he knows, but the content of the myth is changed by his encounter. He states this baldly to Feather Woman herself when he says, “But you died – you died in mourning!”Footnote ²¹ Fools Crow discovers, however, that Feather Woman's fate is not as it has been understood in the story he knows. As she explains,

Fools Crow is being shown Feather Woman living with the mourning she has been assigned to endure, and this is one aspect of the importance of her example for him. It is also significant, as Barry points out, that the encounter with Feather Woman is explicitly associated with white possessions: “Fools Crow dreams his vision in a Napikwan dwelling, he sleeps on a bed, eats beef from plates and drinks from a glass.”Footnote ²³ These surroundings again show changes in the mythic world that derive from and reflect the changing world of the people the myths sustain. There is a subtle point being made here: Welch is undoing the association of myths with a timeless, archaic past, and bringing them into dialogue with a particular moment in time. He is demonstrating the potential to remould and remake myths so that they speak to the needs of a people at moments in their history (Fools Crow is about to confront the aftermath of the massacre on the Marias) that seem to make myths, or any other offered help, irrelevant. Yet by relating the myth to Fools Crow's time, he is also seeking to rehabilitate it for his own, thus extending its temporal spread even as he disrupts its mythic timelessness.

Another element of Feather Woman's importance for Fools Crow is that meeting her undoes the certainties of the categories that her story had seemed to teach him:

Feather Woman may be reviled, but when Fools Crow leaves, he hugs her. He has come to an understanding that the Pikuni are being punished, and that Feather Woman has undergone and is undergoing this with and for them. Recovering this mythic figure is important for him because he sees that the people will have to endure a great deal, and that her example can therefore help them. As Barry argues, Welch “extends the myths by associating the sorrow and cruelty of Feather Woman's fate with the similar fate of the Blackfeet, he is reworking the tradition toward a mythic complex encompassing past, present, and future.”Footnote ²⁵ Fools Crow's ability to go forward despite the events around him and those he knows are yet to come is drawn from his encounter with her. David Moore also utilizes this idea when he argues that the meeting has simultaneously evoked “the reductive, linear, and fatal history of colonization and the complex, circular, and vital history of cultural survival,” and that from this stems the “irony and poignancy of the ending of the novel.”Footnote ²⁶

Such inscription of varying models of time weaves a complex tapestry at this point in the book, for in addition Welch shows in his hero's visceral encounter with the myth the ways in which story and the past can be worked through and re-encountered. To invoke the concept of working-through is, of course, to use the language of psychoanalysis, and this is where I return to the ideas of Nicholls's essay on Beloved. As Nicholls insists,

The reworking of the Feather Woman myth can be seen as just such a restructuring in and of temporality. In Feather Woman, Fools Crow encounters the past of his people, and his entry into her story and the changes in the story, as well as his understanding of it that result, are fundamental to the meaning of the novel itself. It is helpful here to clarify what is meant by the concept of “working-through”:

The conjunction of remembering and repetition with the modification offered by interpretative work seems to me a useful one in unpicking the layers of temporal meaning in Fools Crow. The novel is a retold story of the past that both modifies that past and offers the pattern of its modifications as an opportunity to move forward in the present. If Fools Crow has an encounter with his community's past and a working-through of his relation to that past in his entry into the myth of Feather Woman, then Fools Crow the novel also stages such an encounter. Not only is Feather Woman's story made a survival myth for Fools Crow, but he is himself “establish[ed] as a survival hero of the present and future.”Footnote ²⁹ Fools Crow works through the past of/with Feather Woman as the reader works through the past of/with Fools Crow. Welch's novel brings the reader into a relation with a past that is central to contemporary experience.

The encounter with Feather Woman is significant too because of its restatement of the importance of stories and narrative history. Fools Crow worries for the children that are yet to come into the bleak Pikuni future he has seen, and Feather Woman replies, “Much will be lost to them … But they will know the way it was. The stories will be handed down.”Footnote ³⁰ Barry comments on this passage that “Welch's novel is both an assertion and a fulfilment of this prophecy,” and also argues that throughout the novel “Welch honors and celebrates those individuals who, against historical and cultural forces, preserved and passed on to their children the myths and rituals that make a person Blackfeet.”Footnote ³¹ Welch offers a prescription for the future health and endurance of Native American groups in the combination of cultural and biological reproduction and continuity. Yet this prescription is easier to offer than to achieve, and Welch's novel is too engaged with the historical reality of Blackfeet lives not to recognize this. This narrative recognition is accomplished by ensuring that the novel's final restatement of faith in cultural and physical survival as ends in themselves is preceded by an episode in which their limitations are painfully clear. Fools Crow is confronted by the survivors of the massacre on the Marias and when he can only say to them that “we must think of our children” it is palpably inadequate. The passage ends with the statement that “they had no children.”Footnote ³²

This meeting does not end the novel, however, and Fools Crow himself does have a child. The novel ends with the scene of the surviving Lone Eaters welcoming Thunder Chief at the end of winter, and Fools Crow takes part with his wife, Red Paint, and their new child, Butterfly. This moment is not a denial of all that has gone before, but an assertion of continuity in the face even of such events. Fools Crow feels happiness, but it is “a peculiar kind of happiness – a happiness that sleeps with sadness.”Footnote ³³ His encounter with Feather Woman enables him in his identification with her, even as it is that encounter that means that Fools Crow has seen not only the smallpox and the massacre that the people are enduring, but also the absence of buffalo, starvation on reservations and the isolation of Blackfeet children in white schools that are all yet to come. Despite this, and “even though he was, like Feather Woman, burdened with the knowledge of his people, their lives and the lives of their children, he knew they would survive, for they were the chosen ones.”Footnote ³⁴ The survival of children and of the stories that can sustain them in the face of attempts to annihilate their culture are the location of the emotional investment of the story, but because Welch has faced the ways in which this faith can be undone in the figures of the childless massacre-survivors, the novel has earned its assertion of belief in the face of other horrors that are yet to occur as well.

To understand how this is earned, I want, in conclusion, to draw upon Homi Bhabha's notion of a “projective past.” He introduces this as “retroactivity, a form of cultural reinscription that moves back to the future … a form of future anterior.”Footnote ³⁵ Bhabha draws attention to the dual relation to the past of an oppressed group, which contrasts “the historical obscenity of ‘what might have been’, into the projective past, the empowering vision of ‘what could have been’.”Footnote ³⁶ This sense of the obscenity in the past, along with the potential empowerment available from fully engaging with, or imagining, the past is strong in Fools Crow. I have drawn attention to the empowerment located in the telling of stories, and in past figures, both mythic and historical. The obscenity of the past is also empowering as it inspires the politics of the present. Bhabha, drawing on Benjamin's ideas, expresses the value of witness found in the projective past, and it is this that summarizes the achievement of Welch's novel: