Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, I always knew I wanted to have a creative career. From before I can accurately recall, my sentiments leaned toward becoming a writer, filmmaker, or anything in the arts that would allow me to express myself. My...

Some people, I thought, will never know how pleasant it is to be distant in a clean rain, the driving rain of a summer storm. It's not like you'd expect, nothing like you'd expect. James Welch, Winter in the Blood In the...

Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked the United States on Tuesday to free five British residents from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay _ a policy reversal that was welcomed by the Bush administration.The United States has been working to reduce the detainee population...

There are few laughs in Winter in the Blood … even though the narrator shares characteristics of a trickster, joker, and fool…. [The] narrator is a mediator and thus an ambiguous and equivocal character. The polar terms he attempts to mediate or reconcile are the fundamental ones of life and death, past and present, winter and summer, Indian and white cultures, the nature of men and women, sex and love, self and others. But unlike the tricksters of his Indian heritage, Welch's narrator ...

Winter in the Blood is in no way a protest novel. Not only is it far more complex, it really is neither bitter nor angry. In fact, although it is powerful and moving in places, it is primarily comic. Once one abandons the idea that all Indian novels must be angry, it is not surprising to find that Winter in the Blood has a strong comic undercurrent. The comic novel is becoming the dominant genre in fiction today…. And Welch, although he is isolated geographically in Montana, is a writer who is well a...

The writing [in Winter in the Blood] is constantly fending off easy attitudes and conclusions with a flat, brooding precision. The reader keeps wanting to be able to make something of it all, to be clear how these people are Indians, how being an Indian makes a difference. Welch himself is a Montanan, Blackfoot and Gros Ventre, and in Winter in the Blood one may find out what it is like to be an Indian, this Indian, but just what that means is never once offered us for summary or conclusion. It is an unnerv...