"Crying for Pity" in Winter in the Blood

Abstract

In view of the highly structured religious mysticism which is one of the most distinguishing features of Gros Ventre culture, it is surprising that more dialogue has not developed concerning the mystical structure which implicitly underlies James Welch's Winter in the Blood. Welch, after all, is Gros Ventre and Piegan (Blackfeet) by Indian heritage, and he lived for some time with his grandparents on the Fort Belknap Reservation, where the Gros Ventres are now located. Fort Belknap is the principal reservation setting of the novel, and most of the Indian characters in the novel are Gros Ventres. Thus, we would expect it to be highly influenced by the nature of Gros Ventre culture and worldview or philosophic outlook. The present-day Gros Ventre tribe is the northernmost band of the extensive Arapaho Nation, and Gros Ventre culture is much more closely aligned with the Arapaho than with the Blackfeet Nation, with which it was typically linked in the nineteenth century. Two aspects of Gros Ventre/Arapaho culture, in particular, seem to provide a significant basis for understanding the structure and many of the scenes of Welch's novel. First, the cultural and religious life of the Gros Ventres is pervaded by a mysticism which makes dreams and visionary insight far more highly important to the individual's well-being than day-by-day empirical experience or economic, social wellbeing. Second, deriving from their considerable commitment to mysticism, the Gros Ventres traditionally were strongly committed to the ritual attainment of spiritual insight through dreams or visions and, quite important to our purpose of analyzing Winter in the Blood, these visionary insights were sought by means of elaborately structured ceremonial and cultural patterns. One of the best examples of the highly structured nature of Gros Ventres/ Arapaho culture is their system of age-graded societies2-a system also very relevant to our discussion of Winter in the Blood. The age-graded societies were made up of practically every member of the tribe and constituted a series covering the entire period from youth to old age.3 Although these societies have been remarked on and discussed in many sources,4 only the Arapaho author, Tom Shakespeare,5 provides the information which allows us to appreciate their very formal structure.