Winter in the Blood by James Welch

First published: 1974

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: Northern Montana

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a young Blackfeet man struggling to put the deaths of his father and brother behind him
• Teresa, the narrator’s mother, a practical, hardened woman, a survivor
• The old woman, Teresa’s mother, one of the few remaining links to the narrator’s ancestry
• Yellow Calf, a blind elder, either mystical or insane
• First Raise, the narrator’s father, who, like his son, was a wanderer
• Mose, the narrator’s brother

The Novel

Winter in the Blood intertwines the narrator’s tale of passage from a boy to a man with the mysterious story of his grandmother’s role in the Blackfeet tribe’s tragic past. The book consists of four sections of varied lengths and a brief epilogue.

Winter in the Blood begins as the narrator returns home from a drunken escapade to find that Agnes, the woman with whom he has been living, is gone and has stolen his gun and electric razor. Attempting to forget about the woman and his things, the narrator helps his mother and Lame Bull with the ranch chores. Lame Bull marries Teresa, making him an owner of the ranch, a role into which he throws himself with relish.

Teresa’s marriage triggers the narrator’s memory of his father and brother’s deaths. He talks with Teresa about First Raise and is disturbed by the fact that she remembers their life together much differently than he does. Teresa further uproots her son by telling him that there is no work for him on the ranch now that Lame Bull is in charge. When Agnes is spotted in Malta, the narrator decides to go after her. As his thoughts return to Agnes, he makes the reader aware of his grandmother’s reasons for hating the young woman. Once the youngest wife of a Blackfeet chief, the grandmother hates Crees for what she believes to be their treachery. Crees had scouted for the cavalry, the Long Knives, who chased the Blackfeet from their home at the base of the mountains. The narrator repeats his grandmother’s story of a winter of starvation and the death of her husband. She was cast out by the tribe in mourning for their chief. The narrator believes his grandmother when she says that the women of the tribe envied her beauty. He also believes the rumor that a half-breed drifter with whom his grandmother settled down wasn’t his real grandfather.

The narrator temporarily sets aside his grandmother’s story and catches a ride to Dodson, a nearby town with a bus stop. The narrator travels on to Malta, where he is quickly caught up in a series of bewildering events. He helps Agnes’s brother roll a drunken white, meets an Easterner running from a mysterious past, and falls into bed with a barmaid.

Back home briefly at the beginning of part 2, the narrator visits Yellow Calf and is drawn to the blind old man who claims to understand the calls of animals. On the road again, checking out a report of Agnes in Havre, the narrator runs into the Easterner, who is running from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and agrees to drive him across the Canadian border. Before the two can set out, the narrator’s companion is apprehended, and the narrator is punched in a bar by Agnes’s brother. Tired “of town, of walking home hung over, beaten up, or both,” he hitches a ride back to the ranch in part 3. His grandmother has died. The narrator and Lame Bull dig the woman’s grave. He is reminded of hacking First Raise’s grave out of the frozen earth and remembers the time he and his brother ran their father’s cattle, the day Mose was struck on the highway and killed.

In part 4, the narrator returns to Yellow Calf’s shack. Yellow Calf knows the truth about the narrator’s grandmother. The Blackfeet thought that the woman, the newest member of the tribe, had brought them “bad medicine,” that she had been responsible for their devastation. The narrator wonders how his grandmother avoided starvation in the abandoned tepees on the edge of camp. Yellow Calf does not say so, but the narrator is convinced that the old man hunted to feed his grandmother, kept her alive, and had a child with her. Yellow Calf is his real grandfather.

On the way home from Yellow Calf’s shack, the narrator discovers a cow stuck up to her chest in mud. It is the same wild-eyed animal that started the panic of his father’s cattle on the day that Mose was killed trying to stop the herd from running across the highway. Roping the cow to his saddle horn, the narrator mounts his horse, Bird, and attempts to pull the beast out of the muck. When Bird loses his footing and falls, throwing the narrator to his back, the cow slips down the bank of the slough in which she had been stuck. Lying unable to move, listening to the two animals’ final cries, the narrator experiences a feeling of pleasant calm as he is soaked by a summer rain.

The old woman’s lonely burial is related in the epilogue. Teresa moans as Lame Bull utters a vague memorial. The book concludes with the image of the narrator throwing his grandmother’s tobacco pouch into her grave.

The Characters

The narrator seems hopeless. The reader must decide whether it is bad luck or bad judgment that plagues him. A recurring symbol of his frustration is his belief that the river has no fish in it, a conviction he holds in spite of the many locals and tourists who insist that they catch fish in the river all the time.

That the narrator continues both to fish and to believe that the river is barren is a paradox that perfectly combines the senses of perseverance and of doom that characterize him. The combination is useful, however, in the pursuit of his grandmother’s tragic story. For uncovering the act of kindness Yellow Calf had performed, the narrator is rewarded with the truth about his heritage.

Teresa is both a caring and a callous mother. She killed Amos, the duck who won the family’s heart by surviving a grisly accident, but served him for a special Christmas dinner. She reinforces the notion that even sources of nurturing, such as the land and one’s precious memories, can be brutal. Her marriage contributes to a feeling evoked throughout the book that the glory of the past can never be fully recovered. In place of the dramatic and powerful First Raise, Teresa has the unremarkable Lame Bull. The union of Teresa and Lame Bull, however, shows the narrator that personal tragedy can be overcome, that life goes on.

The old woman, like her grandson, is never called by name. This shared emptiness links the narrator and his grandmother. The old woman’s incessant rocking is echoed by the narrator’s wanderings to and from town and back and forth between the past and the present. Instead of contributing to the erosion of the narrator’s identity, the old woman’s death enriches her grandson’s understanding of family history. His grief takes the form of curiosity strong enough to uncover a truth that restores his pride. The tobacco pouch in the narrator’s hands as he stands over his grandmother’s grave is a sign of the increased compassion for and understanding of the old woman.

Yellow Calf draws from the narrator an optimism, a faith, that the young man rarely exhibits. The narrator is skeptical concerning the elder man’s professed ability to understand the calls of wild animals, but he is tender in Yellow Calf’s presence. When the narrator understands that the old man is his grandfather, he speaks with more pride than at any other time in the novel, and he is never more at ease with the memory of his father than when recalling that First Raise had brought him to Yellow Calf as a boy. Yellow Calf’s goodness partially redeems the narrator’s own sense of worth.

First Raise and Mose represent a time when the narrator felt less alone in the world. His memories of a breakfast cooked by First Raise and a trail ride with Mose are richly detailed, suggesting the reverence with which the narrator preserves them. First Raise and Mose also illustrate the difficult relationship to whites that has influenced the narrator’s coming of age. First Raise played the clown for white people in the bars in Dodson; Mose and the narrator grew up idolizing the white cowboy in Western films. Through these associations, the book reminds the reader that the politics of race are at work.

Critical Context

In Winter in the Blood, James Welch introduces the themes and techniques he would continue to develop in later works. The novel begins the project of establishing through literary means the identity of the Native American. Welch was born in Browning, Montana, a small town that serves as the headquarters of the Blackfeet reservation. He attended high schools on both the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana. He is the author of a book of poems, Riding the Earthboy Forty (1971), that evokes life on the reservation, and he was at one time a professor of Indian studies at the University of Washington; his efforts toward cultural preservation have thus been varied and significant. The themes and techniques of his first novel reflect this concern. The narrator is able to understand that his true pursuit is not of his appetites but his heritage. His boyhood heroes had been the white cowboy actors who rode and roped on the big screen. This ironic confession demonstrates the scarcity in Western arts of representations of Native Americans, a lack that Welch himself seeks to fill.

The first-person narrative of self-discovery and the elaborate time sequence of the novel are techniques that illuminate the theme of cultural reconstruction. The plot switches between three time frames: the present, the narrator’s youth, and the youth of his grandmother. As the narrator reexamines his own past, he realizes that the history of his people is a forgotten but nevertheless important part of his consciousness. Welch’s later works The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Fools Crow (1986), and The Indian Lawyer (1990) are perhaps more ambitious in scope, but the impetus for these works is located in the pathos, comedy, and celebration that has attracted the attention of scores of critics to Winter in the Blood.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Meg. “ Buried in Fine White Ash’: Violence and the Reimagination of Ceremonial Bodies in Winter in the Blood and Bearheart.” The American Indian Quarterly 21 (Spring, 1997): 265-298. Armstrong explores the themes of power, transformation, and identity in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart. She argues that the texts must be read with the understanding of ceremony and the body in order to wholly appreciate American Indian literature.

Ballard, Charles G. “The Theme of the Helping Hand in Winter in the Blood.” MELUS 17 (Spring, 1991): 63-74. Ballard discusses Welch’s combination of Blackfeet Indian mythic imagery with Western literary techniques in Welch’s novel. The image of the helping hand emerges as the wanderer learns from the people he meets during his journey and also from the Indian wisdom of his grandparents.

Davis, Jack L. “Restoration of Indian Identity in Winter in the Blood.” In James Welch, edited by Ron McFarland. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1986. Davis sets Welch’s tale of a rediscovered Native American identity against the historical backdrop of “the military conquest of American Indians.” The critic argues that, as a work of imagination, the novel challenges and expands the historical and anthropological assumptions by which the Native American condition is generally understood.

Eisenstein, Paul. “Finding Lost Generations: Recovering Omitted History in Winter in the Blood.” MELUS 19 (Fall, 1994): 3-18. Eisenstein explores the similarity in style between Welch’s novel and Ernest Hemingway’s works, particularly In Our Time. He focuses on the literary strategies of omission that both authors have in common: while Hemingway omitted for revision, Welch uses omission as a literary device.

Gish, Robert. “Mystery and Mock Intrigue in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood.” In James Welch, edited by Ron McFarland. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1986. Gish is concerned with the technical achievements of the novel. He articulates the relationship between content and form, focusing on the combined presence of tragedy and comedy.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne. “Alienation and the Female Principle in Winter in the Blood.” In James Welch, edited by Ron McFarland. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1986. Ruoff examines all aspects of femininity in the novel, even the relationship between the wild-eyed cow and her calf. She supplements her discussion with fascinating research into Cree, Gros Ventres, and Blackfeet tribal customs.

Sands, Kathleen M. “Alienation and Broken Narrative in Winter in the Blood.” American Indian Quarterly 4 (May, 1978): 97-105. Sands is a prominent critic of Welch and other Native American writers. She discusses the relationship between theme and structure in the novel, arguing that the concept of alienation is underscored by the narrator’s attempt to locate himself within the novel’s several time frames.