Placing the Ancestors

Postmodernism, "Realism", and American Indian Identity in James Welch's Winter in the Blood

Bibliographic Data

ID4754553
AuthorsSean Teuton (corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume25
Issue4
Pages626-650
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Indian Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0095-182X • E-ISSN: 1534-1828
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/aiq.2001.0042
OpenAlexW2094582937
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited23

Yet I had felt it then, that feeling of event. Perhaps it was the distance, those three new miles, that I felt, or perhaps I had felt something of that other distance; but the event of distance was as vivid to me as the cold canvas of First Raise's coat against my cheek. He must have known then what I had just discovered. Although he told me nothing of it up to the day he died, he had taken me that snowy day to see my grandfather. The narrator, Winter in the Blood All through Winter in the Blood,a novel by Blackfeet and Gros Ventre writer James Welch, the narrator searches for a way to put to rest his nagging sense of "distance"—a distance from himself, from his Blackfeet culture, from his homelands. At thirty-two, the narrator closes this distance and comes home, personally, culturally, and geographically. Among American Indians, the decolonization of communities as well as of individuals often involves a process of recovery, a conscious act of reclaiming knowledge of a tribal self, knowledge that has been distorted by centuries of European and American oppression. Like other colonized people, the Blackfeet narrator organizes his cultural recovery through the principles of identity and experience. Already identifying as the son of First Raise, he "discovers" through "that feeling of event" an experience that allows him also to identify as the grandson of Yellow Calf. 1 His experiences of living close to his tribal people and lands—as well as the experiences of oppression that erode tribalism—inform his knowledge of himself as a Native person. At the same time, the depth of his self-understanding as an American Indian helps the narrator to sustain his relationship to his people and lands and to understand the workings of colonialism. This narrative thus not only illustrates the maintenance of culture but also describes a procedure of political growth. New knowledge about colonial relations of power develops [End Page 626] one's own relationship to a community and history as well as to a dominating culture. In this novel, political awakening and the recovery of Blackfeet selfhood are intertwined, each informing the other. By reinterpreting more accurately a distant yet somehow familiar event, Welch's unnamed narrator of Winter in the Bloodrecovers knowledge of his Blackfeet culture and lands. Because the real world preservation of indigenous cultures and the defense of homelands similarly depend on this process of decolonization, Native studies cannot do without a convincing explanation of the recovery of American Indian cultural identity. Before turning to Welch's fine novel, I would like to foreground a crucial theoretical concern facing Native studies today. Of the many issues American Indian intellectuals debate, the concept of identity draws considerable critical attention in Native studies because many scholars understand that, for American Indian peoples to build an anticolonial movement, we must have a clear understanding of the modern tribal self. As early as 1984, Taeno intellectual José Barreiro recognized the importance of identity in the process of Native cultural renewal when he declared that there appears to be surfacing an agreement among informed observers of American Indian education that a strong identity—that is, the fullest possible knowledge of one's own language, culture, cosmology and history—is a necessary prerequisite for any successful venture into the non-Indian world. 2 American Indian scholars theorize cultural identity not only to benefit Native people but also to edify other people who have been insisting on defining and naming tribal peoples for centuries. With Native nations today under siege, I feel that our work on identity should confront more than the problem of an individual being accepted by her or his tribal community. In the present piece, I take up the question of American Indian identity for this one reason: what people think of identity

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