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Fools Crow is a remarkable novel centring on the cultural clash between the Pikuni Blackfeet Native Americans and the more powerful and advanced American settlers.
I found the detailed description of the vanished life style of the tribe very interesting. I would tend to agree with the introduction by Thomas Mcguane when he makes the point that “Tribalism is now accepted as a societal model best left to history. . . .” But he also states that “. . . it helps to see what is lost when cultures evolve and our relationships to one another are blurred.” And James Welch very movingly does let us see the losses that come with the destruction of a way of life that allows a people to live in a more profound relationship with Nature than we seem unable to emulate.
At the centre of the novel is Fools Crow. He is originally called White Man’s Dog and is thought to be unlucky. He begins by trying to attain manhood on a raiding party with Yellow Kidney—another well-drawn character. He kills a young member of the Crows to prevent the theft of horses being discovered and the incident is admired by the tribe. His father gives him a battle club owned by Fools Crow’s grandfather as a reward for his action. Yet, Fools Crow is uneasy about the incident. He gets his name later by killing the Crow chief but here too the incident leaves a certain sense of shame when he becomes drunk and magnifies the exploit.
Fools Crow has shamanistic experiences in which he communicates with the nature spirits which he perceives as a raven and a wolverine. This lead him eventually to follow the path of his spiritual father, Mik-api the healer of the tribe. Indeed, it is as a visionary that Fools Crow has his final great spiritual experience which prepares him for the revelation that the Pikuni way of life is doomed.
The terrible vision of Fools Crow is the culmination of the great central cry of the novel dramatised in a conversation between his father, Rides-at-the-door and another chief, Three Bears. Rides-at-the-door points out the terrible choice their culture faces:
“We will lose our grandchildren, Three Bears. They will be wiped out or they will turn into Napikwans. Already some of our children attend their school at the agency. Our men wear trousers and the women prefer the trade-cloth to skins. We wear their blankets, cook in their kettles, and kill the blackhorns with their bullets. Soon our young women will marry them. . . .
And the reply he gets from Three Bears offers no consolation.
“I am an old man and I see things I do not like. . . I see the signs all around me. Many of you young men go off on their own. They do not listen to their chiefs. They drink the white man’s water and kill each other. Some of the our young women already stand around the forts, waiting to fornicate with the seizers for a drink of this water. They become ugly before their time, and then they are turned out like old cows to forage for themselves. . . We live many sleeps from these places of ruin. But the day will come when our people will decide that they would rather consort with the Napikwans than live in the ways our long-ago fathers thought appropriate. But I, Three Bears, will not see this day. I will die first.”
All this is borne out by the way the Chiefs are put in a Catch 22 situation by General Sully who demands impossibilities from the tribes before giving promised food, medicine and supplies desperately needed as well as making ambiguous threats of retaliation. The result is a terrible plague of smallpox which decimates one tribe and a massacre which destroys another.
The novel does have a muted consolatory tone at the end. I‘m not sure that this is completely effective—though it does show a special kind of heroism in the tribe and in Fools Crow who will lead them into an uncertain future,
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