Multiple Perspectivism in James Welch's Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney

Multiple Perspectivism in James Welch's Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney Sidner Larson (bio) During the years 1974–79, when Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney were written, James Welch had already long since left the Hi-Line of Montana to settle in Missoula. I, on the other hand, was still there, existing as a kind of combination of the nameless narrator and Jim Loney. Like the narrator, I had a strong sense that "there was not enough for me" at the ranch and had begun to make forays outside the Fort Belknap Indian Community. Those forays were also markedly unsatisfying to me, and I kept returning home, only to face the impossibility of making a living amid acute awareness of the expectations of society that I do so, by whatever means necessary. Thoroughly brainwashed by such expectations, and fearful of becoming a "failure" at doing so, as I had been conditioned to do, I worked practically day and night, trying to get through school, working in the bar business as both employee and proprietor, and trying to raise a family. By 1979 I was dangerously close to the situation and fate of Jim Loney, and I took a course of action modeled to a certain degree upon the choices of my cousin Jim Welch. I removed myself from the love/hate relationship that I had developed with Montana, going so far as southern Oregon, and returned to the world of education. Although I was able to interrupt the potentially destructive cycles of my own life, I have to admit that it was significantly luck that enabled me to do so. Things happened so fast, and the life tools that I had at the time versus their inapplicability to the modern world were so dramatically dissonant, that I realize now I was truly flying by the seat of my pants. I did know enough, however, to run far and fast and devote some time to reflection on certain things, a kind of expression of the phrase "SLOW ME DOWN LORD" from The Death of Jim Loney. [End Page 513] In addition, although I had not yet read Loney when I exiled myself from Montana in 1979, I had read Winter in the Blood during my first foray outside Montana, when Jack Marken invited me to begin graduate studies at South Dakota State University in 1974. Winter, and its reflection of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, including some of the problematic aspects of that community, allowed me to begin a process of self-reflection that very likely saved my life. It is equally interesting and helpful to me to think about the books and that community at this point in my life and, as I gain greater insight, to pass on what I think might be of help to others. There is also a profound sense of gratitude for Winter, Loney, and my relationship with Jim himself, who, in his own distinctive way, helped me to begin to understand my own life, as well as some of the reasons why it was necessary to do so. In my own book, Captured in the Middle (2000), I have argued that contemporary criticism of American Indian written forms is stalled, a situation that I see as essentially unchanged in 2007. I use the term written forms because "literature" does not accurately describe the work of Native writers who tend to move freely among various disciplines as they conduct written examination and articulation of their postapocalypse situation. Much existing criticism of these written forms is similar to the activities of the social sciences and their tendency to reiterate older "stones and bones" issues. For example, continued overemphasis on American Indian use of Western European literary tropes, connections between James Welch and T. S. Eliot, or tired social sciences theories about American Indian dysfunctions are more variations on the stereotype of the Vanishing Native than pragmatic discussion of real-life issues such as enforced poverty. Avoidance of the contemporary realities of American Indians in favor of esoteric academic exercises is similar to the ways in which Western Europeans have steadfastly refused to acknowledge social, environmental, and

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