Word Medicine: Storytelling and Magic Realism in James Welch's "Fools Crow"

Abstract

CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE is puzzlingly redundant, a redundancy that is more significant than recurring stock scenes and characters first suggests. Echoes of D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936, University of New Mexico, 1978) are heard in N. Scott Momaday's House Made ofDawn (Harper & Row, 1968, 1977); and shades of these two tellings are found in more recent Indian fictions like Leslie Silko's Ceremony (1977, Penguin, 1986) and James Welch's Winter in the Blood (1974, Penguin, 1986) and The Death ofJim Loney (Harper & Row, 1979, 1981). Along with John G. Neihardt's rendering of Black Elk's autobiography, Black Elk Speaks (1932) and other Native American oral and written tellings, McNickle's and Momaday's works seem more prototypic, more authentic, with each passing year. It is, moreover, the poetry of like Ray Anthony Young Bear, Simon J. Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, Joy Harjo, Wendy Rose, William Oandasan, Geary Hobson, and, again, James Welch-especially as found in Riding the Earthboy Forty (Harper & Row, 1971, 1975)-that brings into greater focus the impetus and end of this noticeable repetition of seemingly antiheroic, alienated, and benumbed protagonists, singers and speakers, at odds with their pasts and the times and places in which they find themselves. It is the simultaneous impetus of atavism and modernism-the need, as Young Bear phrases it, be there, standing beside our grandfathers, being ourselves and, in meeting that need, thus to bring meaning to the present twentieth-century predicament.