by James Welch

Of mixed Blackfeet and Gros Ventre ancestry, James Welch was born in 1940 in Browning, Montana, the tribal headquarters of the Blackfeet Indian Nation. Educated at the University of Minnesota, Northern Montana College, and the University of Montana, Welch published his first novel, Winter in the Blood, to critical acclaim in 1974. Like Winter in the Blood (and like his 1971 book of poems Riding the Earthboy 40), several of Welch’s subsequent novels focused on problems of achieving cultural identity for Blackfeet living in modern Montana (e.g., The Death of Jim Loney [1979] and The Indian Lawyer [1990]). His most recent novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), leaves the Blackfeet and Montana to follow a Lakota Sioux main character named Charging Elk, who witnesses the Battle of Little Bighorn as a child and subsequently travels to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show; the novel is...