The Indian Lawyer by James Welch

First published: 1990

Type of plot: Suspense

Time of work: 1989

Locale: Western Montana

Principal Characters:

• Sylvester Yellow Calf, the “Indian lawyer,” once a star athlete on the reservation, now a city attorney
• Jack Harwood, an intelligent but desperate inmate whose parole Sylvester denies
• Patti Ann Harwood, Jack’s wife, an innocent and loving woman caught in her husband’s schemes
• Lena Old Horn, Sylvester’s high-school guidance counselor, who inspires him to succeed

The Novel

Set in the cell blocks of a state prison and the back rooms of state politics, The Indian Lawyer depicts one man’s effort to survive the penal system and another’s search for the best way to represent the interests of Native Americans and others whom the political system neglects. The novel contains sixteen chapters that move freely between the main characters’ points of view. The plot progresses chronologically, but it is interrupted by reminiscences that take characters back to such pivotal moments in their pasts as Sylvester’s basketball championships and Jack’s courtship of Patti Ann.

The book begins with Jack Harwood’s parole hearing. Jack is serving a long sentence for armed robbery and is beginning to crack under the pressure of incarceration. Sylvester is a board member, and Jack is drawn to him because he is a Blackfeet. Jack has had problems with the Indian inmates who rule the violent prison. Insufficiently repentant and a onetime escapee, Jack is denied release. That afternoon, visiting with Patti Ann, Jack asks his wife to dig up information on Sylvester.

Back in Helena after the parole hearings, Sylvester, with his girlfriend Shelley, attends a party at Buster Harrington’s mansion. Buster, the founder of a law firm that is ready to make Sylvester a partner if he will agree to run for Congress, has arranged for a meeting with Fabares, a Democratic Party official. Sylvester is encouraged by his discussion with Fabares and tells Shelley that he is seriously considering becoming a candidate.

Patti Ann contacts Sylvester at his office. She is lonely from the years without Jack and has been traumatized by a series of miscarriages and a hysterectomy, but her vitality is restored in Sylvester’s presence. She manages to interest him in her phony story of a contested will, and Sylvester promises to investigate the situation. Jack phones Patti Ann and instructs her to see Sylvester socially, to intensify her relationship with the lawyer. Awakened by Sylvester, but fantasizing about adopting a child and rearing a family with a freed Jack, Patti Ann agrees.

When a meeting with Sylvester in a restaurant bar leads to her bedroom, Patti Ann knows she should feel guilty, but she does not. She is revived by their intimacy, but Sylvester is bothered. He does not know why he would risk shaking up his life at such an important juncture or why he is letting his relationship with Shelley deteriorate. He drives to Browning, to the Blackfeet reservation where he grew up. He visits Lena Old Horn, hoping that she will encourage his political ambitions. Somewhat reluctantly, Lena tells Sylvester, her former student, that she has faith in him.

Strengthened by his trip home, Sylvester returns to Helena and tells Buster that he will run. As the campaign begins to take shape, Jack Harwood’s plans also unfold. Although Jack wanted Patti Ann to sleep with Sylvester, the fact that she did enrages him. His plot is no longer merely for the purpose of escape. When he thinks of his tormentors in the prison, Jack realizes that he seeks revenge against Sylvester in particular and against Indians in general. After receiving sinister phone calls, Patti Ann knows that Jack’s contacts on the outside are working to blackmail Sylvester into granting Jack’s freedom. The affair with Patti Ann is a breach of legal ethics, a political disaster. When Jack’s contacts, Woody Peters and Robert Fitzgerald, decide to cut Jack out of the plan and make Sylvester pay for their silence, Sylvester’s political ambitions, his entire career, and Patti Ann’s safety are threatened.

Patti Ann and Sylvester are able to run Peters and Fitzgerald off, but Sylvester is afraid the former convicts will make trouble for him down the road. He decides not to run for Congress and risk a future humiliation. Buster and Shelley tell Sylvester that his chance will come again, and Buster quickly withdraws Sylvester’s candidacy. Shelley walks out after hearing of Sylvester’s affair. Sylvester helps Patti Ann by arranging a safe way for Jack to serve out his sentence and work toward parole. Buster tells Sylvester to take time off and travel to Europe. Instead, he goes to a Sioux reservation in North Dakota, where he helps the tribe with a water-rights dispute. Sylvester remains immersed in his work for the Sioux until he is called back to Browning for his grandfather’s funeral. The novel ends as Lena Old Horn watches Sylvester play basketball in a spring snowstorm. Lena knows that, playing all by himself, Sylvester is challenging the only person who ever stood in his way.

The Characters

Sylvester is the central focus of The Indian Lawyer. The other characters in the novel exist primarily as foils; they illuminate aspects of Sylvester through their interaction with him.

Sylvester is a man of both physical and intellectual prowess who is accustomed to achieving his goals. From the basketball court to the courtroom, Sylvester’s victories have been of heroic proportion. He is never sure whether he competes for his own glory or for the sake of the tribe and race he always represents but from which his success has made him feel detached. This distance between Sylvester and his people creates a sense of loneliness that is the hero’s tragic flaw. Giving way to the temptations of Patti Ann is a mistake that costs Sylvester his biggest game, the congressional election. His defeat strengthens him, however, and the novel suggests that the Indian lawyer has regained his sense of cultural mission by joining the Sioux’s legal battle.

Jack Harwood is not a typical convict. He is more intelligent and compassionate than his fellow inmates. His fascination with the concepts of crime and punishment, not a truly criminal nature, seems to have led him to prison. Subject to the harshness of incarceration, Jack gradually loses his strength and assuredness until he is reduced to the role of a cornered animal. Flashbacks to better times, to the days when he was able to protect himself from prison predators—or, better still, to his happiness with Patti Ann—contrast with the vulnerable, desperate state of mind in which Jack now finds himself. Through this comparison, the novel depicts how easy it is for an individual to fall from grace, a descent Sylvester narrowly escapes.

Patti Ann illustrates the process by which an individual reawakens to the world. A small-town girl before her first marriage, Patti Ann is quickly overwhelmed by the pressures of adulthood. After twice miscarrying and being abandoned by her husband, Patti Ann is rescued by Jack’s love. When Jack is sent to prison, Patti Ann slips into limbo, waiting for the happiness she remembers to return. Her affair with Sylvester tests Patti Ann’s innocence, but she endures, helping Sylvester to bluff his way out of the blackmail plot and committing herself to wait for her husband’s expected release. The novel hints that Patti Ann will be able to reclaim her former happiness with Jack.

Significantly, it is through the wearied perspective of Lena Old Horn that Sylvester is last shown. Lena knows that she will always be a Crow in Blackfeet country, a member of a strange tribe. Like Lena, Sylvester will always be an outsider, an Indian in the courtroom and a lawyer in Indian country. Lena’s inability to conquer the loneliness of the outsider suggests to the reader that Sylvester’s battle with alienation is far from over.

Critical Context

James Welch grew up in Montana. He attended reservation schools and has taught English literature and Indian studies at the University of Washington. Many of Welch’s life experiences are reflected in The Indian Lawyer; he sat for years on the Montana State Board of Pardons, and the portrait of Sylvester Yellow Calf, a Native American man who achieves what other members of his tribe have not been able to, is particularly poignant in relation to the author’s life.

In his third novel, Fools Crow (1986), Welch continued to explore themes of success and responsibility. The hero of that moving historical novel asks, “what good is your own power when the people are suffering. . . . ?” In The Indian Lawyer, Welch gives Sylvester the insight to arrive at, and begin answering, the same difficult question. The importance of the character of the Indian lawyer, the new warrior, to the body of Welch’s work is clear from Sylvester’s name. “Yellow Calf” is the name of the protagonist’s revered grandfather, a redemptive figure in Welch’s first novel, Winter in the Blood (1974). A moving passage in Fools Crow describes a yellow calf that embodies all the beliefs cherished by a dying warrior who wants to take the animal’s name for his grandson. By bestowing the name on the hero of The Indian Lawyer, Welch creates a symbol of the ancient beliefs in an empowering modern form.

Bibliography

Hoagland, Edward. “Getting off the Reservation.” Review of The Indian Lawyer, by James Welch. The New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1990, p. 7. Hoagland is one of the few critics who finds the novel to be as accomplished as Welch’s previous works. He praises the novel’s construction and character development. Particular attention is paid to the uplifting aspects of the book’s conclusion.

Larson, Sidner J. “The Outsider in James Welch’s The Indian Lawyer.” American Indian Quarterly 18 (Fall, 1994): 495-506. Larson’s study of The Indian Lawyer examines the transformation from insider to outsider within the context of the Blackfeet Indian tribe. Analysis of the main characters highlights the tension between these two opposing groups and is enhanced by the comments and observations of literary experts.

McFarland, Ron. “ The End’ in James Welch’s Novels.” American Indian Quarterly 17 (Summer, 1993). Explores the significance and implications of four Welch novels, including The Indian Lawyer.

Saul, Darin. “Intercultural Identity in James Welch’s Fool’s Crow and The Indian Lawyer.” American Indian Quarterly 19 (Fall, 1995). Saul’s instructive essay examines the cultural similarities and differences between Welch’s Fool’s Crow and The Indian Lawyer. He focuses on the nineteenth century cultural upheaval when the Blackfeet lost much of their population to sickness and white attacks. He then looks at the struggles of Sylvester Yellow Calf in The Indian Lawyer and concludes that individual autonomy and hope for the future are possible for Native Americans.

Seals, David. “Blackfeet Barrister.” The Nation 251 (November 26, 1990): 648. Seals, himself a Native American author, places Welch’s novel within the context of other recent works of Native American fiction, sometimes finding fault with the book’s sophisticated construction. Seals wonders if the novel’s discussion of assimilation is provocative enough, suggesting that there are many Native Americans in law firms. He goes on to assess literature’s capacity to reflect a culture’s value system.