SOURCE: Charles, Jim. “‘A World Full of Bones and Wind’: Teaching Works by James Welch.” English Journal 93, no. 4 (March 2004): 64-9.

James Welch presented the NCTE [National Council For Teacher Education] Fund Lecture at the annual convention in Baltimore in 2001. I was in the audience and agree that he, indeed, deserved recognition as “an annual speaker who brings [NCTE members] a fresh perspective about the learning of language and literature in a cultural context different from their own” (NCTE). Welch read from his nonfiction work, Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians, and his latest novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a historical novel set in the north-central plains of the United States and in Marseilles, France. He also answered questions from the audience. While this was not my first introduction to James Welch, it was the last time I would hear him speak. He died in August 2003.

Considering Welch's speech and the importance of his work, I wondered what teachers in the audience thought about the advisability of teaching Welch's work to high school students. Some contend that his work is too depressing to teach to high school students. Some teachers tell me they do not know enough about Welch to teach his works. I believe that several of Welch's works can be taught successfully to high school students, and I further believe that they should be.

On the flight home from Baltimore, I read over my notes. Two of Welch's statements stood out. He said: “Happy characters are not interesting. Readers prefer characters with problems, problems that are resolved or go unresolved. The psychological depth of such characters creates interest for the reader.” He also said, “There are good Indians and bad Indians; there are good and bad white people.” These statements unlocked some of the mystery I feel when reading Welch. He prefers to place characters in problematic situations so he can develop them psychologically. How they resolve or fail to resolve their problems contributes to their complexity (and to the action of a story), creating more interesting characters and resulting in a more involved reader. Ultimately, Welch humanizes American Indians, depicting them realistically as people who live complex lives in communities peopled by the good, bad, ugly, beautiful, tragic, and comic.

Following his session, I decided to share something of the art and complexity of Welch's work with readers of English Journal through explication of one of his most frequently anthologized poems and discussion of two novels, highlighting focal points for readers' responses and major considerations for teaching James Welch to students in English language arts classes.

POEMS

Welch, like many American Indian college students in the 1960s who were encouraged by teachers (he by Richard Hugo) to write about their experiences, began by writing poetry. Riding the Earthboy 40, his first, published, book-length work, is a collection of poems that critic Jascha Kessler described as “clear, laconic … project[ing] a depth in experience of landscape, people, and history that conveys a rich complexity” (qtd. in McFarland, Understanding [Understanding James Welch] 29). Alan Velie noted that the poems were characterized by “bitter humor and caustic wit” (79). Others have called the poems surreal and minimalistic. Like his prose, Welch's poems are not romantic and sentimental, not from what acclaimed American Indian writer Sherman Alexie calls “the corn pollen and eagle feather school of poetry” (qtd. in McFarland, Understanding 31). They address issues confronted by Americans today, particularly American Indians. After his first editor asked him, “Why are you so obsessed with bones and wind?” Welch realized,

I was writing about a country I knew deep down, without thinking about making choices, or selecting the right metaphor. I was writing about a world I was born into, a world full of bones and wind—the world of my ancestors. And thirty years later, in one way or another, I am still writing about that world.

(“Introduction,” par. 6)

Reading Welch's work, students can see the truth of the contention that good writing begins with what the writer knows best, his or her felt experience.

My personal introduction to Welch's work was as a ninth-grade English teacher when I taught “The Man from Washington,” which was in a state-adopted literature anthology. The poem articulates the speaker's worldview, “one that acknowledges the impact of whites' broken promises on the American Indians' world” (Cline, et al. 242). The language is powerful and compact.

“THE MAN FROM WASHINGTON”

The end came easy for most of us.
Packed away in our crude beginnings
in some far corner of a flat world,
we didn't expect much more
than firewood and buffalo robes
to keep us warm. The man came down,
a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,
and spoke to us. He promised
that life would go on as usual,
that treaties would be signed, and everyone—
man, woman and child—would be inoculated
against a world in which we had no part,
a world of money, promise and disease.

(Riding [Riding the Earthboy 40] 35)

References to buffalo robes engender thoughts of traditional Plains Indian life. And students seize upon that image. But references to buffalo robes and to inoculation also suggest the smallpox-tainted blankets that were distributed to and ravaged several American Indian tribes. The poem contains the hyperbolized language of treaties, the language of small-minded politicians, promising to all Indians that their every need will forever be met (as one treaty put it, “as long as the grass grows and water flows”) and unwilling to acknowledge their ineffectiveness in meeting the needs of American Indian people.

Welch packs 300 years of shifting United States policy into thirteen lines. The poem provides background for understanding the experiences described by Welch and other American Indian writers. The tribal affiliation and regional geography of particular American Indian poems, stories, or novels may differ, but the foundation of broken promises, condescending paternalism, and contradictory federal policy is a constant. This background helps explain the tension within Welch's characters and the motivations for their actions.

An effective technique for teaching Welch's poems is to have students list in chart form arresting images, associate with each of those images a first (or most readily apparent) response, associate a second (perhaps less obvious, alternative, or even opposite) response, and then interpret Welch's use of the image/word on the basis of the two responses. This list of images/words, associated responses, and interpretations forms the basis of rich discussions that unlock the complexity of Welch's poetic images and meaning. …

.....

CONSIDERATIONS FOR TEACHERS

James Welch's work provides a forum for teachers and students to overcome stereotypes and misinformation about American Indians. This alone is sufficient reason for teaching Welch's poetry and novels in high school English classes. However, there are other compelling reasons—teaching his work provides models of good writing, reinforces universal literary themes, and helps bring people together.

In Fools Crow, a work populated only by “traditional” American Indian characters (warriors mounted on horseback patrolling the plains for buffalo or intruding whites), Welch turns stereotypes inside out, showing that the true viciousness of stereotypes of American Indians is not their superficial external portrayal (Indians wearing feathers, for example) but rather their dehumanization of a people (denying American Indian humor and spirituality, for example). Teachers can pair Fools Crow with a contemporary work such as the film Smoke Signals, which illustrates the persistence of stereotypes into the present, thematically connecting two works that, on the surface, seem to share little other than their protagonists' racial background. Readers and viewers consider the similar circumstances faced by American Indian characters in dramatically different times. Both works deconstruct stereotypes of American Indians as humorless brutes (and noble savages) by showing them as people as much concerned with family, friendship, and love as with territory, hunting, and gathering.

James Welch's work exposes students to American Indian literary art and to a unique voice, the voice of bones and wind. Students experience culturally-specific material—elements of Blackfeet culture and reactions of American Indians to non-Indian cultures. Teaching James Welch exposes students to the vast expanse of the northern plains, to the country of the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, Crow and Cheyenne. Teachers can use Welch's work as a springboard for students' introspective writing on aspects of their landscapes—the geographies and people that inform and shape their experiences. Understanding experience this way is what good writers do, and students need to emulate good writers. Urban or rural, coastal or mountain, African American or Italian American, all students can connect to local and regional experience. The task, however, is to write about experience in a way that inspires readers to feel what the writer feels, to respond, in some way, to the writer's experience. Describing the experience of watching the Pittsburgh Pirates play baseball in PNC Park or describing one's participation in a march to protest the presence of the confederate flag over a state capital—experiences distant from those on a rural Montana reservation—are imbued with new relevance after reading Welch. Welch's Indians are not exotic; they are real—as exhilarating as a home run hit out of the stadium and into the Allegheny River, as real as the stench of a racist's breath. Each of these is a meaningful experience that can be shared with and vicariously experienced by readers. Students may ask, “If a horse breaking wind can be made memorable by a good writer, what can't be?” Fair question. Our challenge is to help students understand what James Welch understood well—there is validity in their experience and it can be the stuff of good writing.

And, perhaps most importantly, Welch's readers consider universal themes of identity, family, love, and overcoming distance within and between us. Welch takes his place among the great writers, each of whom develops unforgettable characters and scenes and does so in ways that enrich readers' experience, give them pause, or move them to action.

Finally, teaching James Welch, as with teaching most modern American novelists, forces us to address the depressing themes of life in the modern era—hopelessness, depression, materialism, and alienation, as well as some horrid motifs—alcoholism and abusive relationships. Our students must deal with these same feelings and issues in their lives or the lives of friends or loved ones. Through Welch, readers learn the futility of wallowing in hopelessness. Readers, like the characters in Welch's novels and poems, must consider the redemptive act of overcoming the seemingly insurmountable distances between peoples—distances of race, culture, and worldview. Today, for our students, there is no more timely consideration, no more urgent undertaking.

Works Cited

Cline, Jay, et al. New Voices 2. Lexington: Ginn, 1978.

McFarland, Ron. Understanding James Welch. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000.

The NCTE Fund. Urbana: NCTE, n.d.

Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1982.

Welch, James. Fools Crow. New York: Viking, 1986.

———. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

———. “Introduction.” Native American Literature: A Catalog. Ken Lopez Bookseller. 1997. 6 Oct. 2003 <http://www.lopezbooks.com/articles/welch.html=.

———(with Paul Stekler). Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. New York: Norton, 1994.

———. Riding the Earthboy 40. New York: Harper, 1971.