It is a challenge for a writer if their setting is in historical time not to allow their own contemporary context to intrude, even if lightly. Can you genuinely depict another world? The best example of success that I would point to is Margaret Yourcenar's remarkable 'Memoirs of Hadrian'. That moment when the Emperor refers obliquely to Christians as a minor irritant across the surface of his attention to be quickly forgotten is a compelling example of the world as then inhabited with no hint, because no awareness, of what is to come.
Welch's novel falls into the same category of world-building. In this case, we are with a sub-group of the Blackfeet in Montana in 1870. From its very first sentence, we are in their world, as the main protagonist, White Man's Dog, who will become Fools Crow, sits, restless, on the cusp of Cold Maker bringing winter.
What unfolds is the story of his growth into manhood as a warrior, apprentice medicine man, husband, and father amongst his community - a community that lives within a world that speaks, that is inhabited by persons, some of whom are human. A world where signs come, require interpretation, and whose interpretation can be adequate or not according to the circumstance. It is a world that requires reading but which can also be over-interpreted, sometimes a thing is simply a thing, not pointing to something other. It is a world too of great variety - some, many follow the paths laid out by the ancestors, others, a few, reject these paths and strike out on their own - not least in how to react to the encroaching others, the colonizing whites.
Welch's achievement is to wholly immerse you in this world without any wish to 'explain' it. Raven speaks - is it imagined, dreamt, fantasized? - no simply Raven speaks and what is spoken is part of the real world in which its inhabitants dwell. Even the descriptions of 'known objects' make no concession to our reckoning - black horns are buffalo, white horns are cattle - but this is never 'said' simply shown.
It is a world too that is meant to be seen as simply real - true, embodied and, of course, threatened. Running through the whole book is the presence of the Napikwans (a naming of the colonizing whites that is, if I am not mistaken, never explained) and the seizers (the soldiers who enforce their claims). This is a world that is on the verge of a collapse - and the understanding of that collapse from within the community - what is the 'fault' that generates it will be the subject of Fools Crows' vision. A vision as beautifully realized as the opening chapters of Genesis and one that equally carries a promise of hope as well as a burden of sorrow.
When my copy arrived dressed in Penguin Classic black (for a book first published in 1986), I was tempted to think that it was a mite premature but as I read I became convinced that it was only too right.
It works as a celebration of a way of life, as the lifeway of a particular person within a community, and as testimony. The testimony is to a people living rightly (not perfectly, the flaws are there to see) in a particular place - that particular place is not only natural - in the plains, foothills, mountains of what we now know as Montana - but cosmological where you locate yourself within a story that embraces every dimension including sun, moon, stars whose persons touch the earth, speak, enter dreams, weave the very dimensions of your, my reality.
You step away from the book convicted of what was so thoughtlessly destroyed and confident of what truly remains if you allow yourself the right kind of imaginative attention.
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